Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to series four of the Life of Letters, a podcast exploring the art history and future of calligraphy, handwriting and all things letter related.
I'm your host, Laura Edrilyn, a London based calligrapher with a curious mind on a journey to connect with artists, historians, experts and letter lovers around the world. This season is once again kindly supported by Speedball Art, who continue to help celebrate the tools and traditions that keep the written word alive. Don't forget, if you want to find out more about the guest, the podcast or me, check out the show notes.
Let's dive into the episode.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: In today's episode, I'm delighted to be.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: Speaking with Dr. George Gazeez.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Is that how you say it?
[00:00:49] Speaker C: Yeah, it's fine. That's actually the correct pronunciation. Nobody gets it right. Yes.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: First time associate professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. George, firstly, a huge welcome to the Life of Letters podcast. I am so excited to be talking to you today.
[00:01:07] Speaker C: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: So you teach Greek literature and philosophy at Durham University, but today I kind of wanted to pick your brains about a very specific, very niche area which you know a lot about, which is ancient inscriptions. Perhaps it's not that niche, but I think it's a, it's an area that for the life of letters and our listeners and the, the audience here, we're, we're kind of want to explore a little bit more about the history of letters. And this is an ideal place to start. But before we begin, can you give us an insight into where your interest in this area of study came from?
[00:01:47] Speaker C: Yeah, sure.
Now, it goes way back, of course, and I should say I'm originally from Greece, so that means growing up, going into any public library, there was no way you were not going to run into a copy of something from ancient Greece.
Now, of course you wouldn't pick it up, but it was there.
And I remember this whole madness with Greek literature started for me. I think I was about 12 and I was not a very popular kid. So I found myself in the library of my school and I picked up this very heavy red volume that was Homer's Iliad.
Now, the particularity about it was that it had the Greek text on one side, the ancient Greek and the translation on the other. I remember reading through it and thinking, there is no way what I'm reading in translation, that what I'm reading in translation is written in the ancient script. There is no way people 3000 years ago could have written that. I do not believe it.
So it all Started from this belief, I was sure that whoever was translating this was inventing the story because it was too elaborate, it was too beautiful.
And eventually I came to realize that actually it's the other way around.
The original is much, much more elaborate and much, much more interesting. And for me, growing up in the. In the 80s and in the 90s, thinking that some people 3,000 years ago had the capacity of writing something like that, that resonates with me, not only in terms of content, of course, but particularly in terms of aesthetics.
That was astonishing. So after that, I was hopelessly addicted, and I still am. So there you go.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Wow, that's a brilliant story. And I love the fact that you're. You were already hugely curious about diving into it. So it wasn't just a book you read. It was, okay, here's a book. But there's more to it than this. I need to find out how it was written. And. Yeah, that's. That's great. So can you tell us a bit more about how then ancient inscriptions are studied? Like, where does this play into the work that you do?
I mean, there's so many questions, isn't there? But just maybe, in a nutshell, introduce us to the world of ancient inscriptions?
[00:04:08] Speaker C: Yeah, well, as you said, there is a lot to it. And it's about defining what we mean by an inscription. I mean, the word itself is pretty clear, right? It's when you inscribe something upon a material that can't be inscribed. I mean, I think we could leave it here and say that we have defined the whole concept.
But then we start thinking about purpose, we start thinking about material, we start thinking about the reasons behind inscribing anything with anything else.
And the further back we go in time, we see that inscriptions, as we conceptualize them now, which is like a big piece of marble, perhaps, or stone, inscribed with a row of letters are not the commonest thing. It's something that comes into play later with the development of writing, the development of social norms that require writing, and so on and so forth.
In the very beginning, the reason you would describe anything upon anything else would be pretty much the same reason you pick up a notepad today.
Like, if you think of your daily life and how many times you would get a pen and paper to write something, I can say safely, I would bet that 90% of the time, you're probably doing a supermarket list or something of the kind, or you're writing a time that you don't want to forget. Or. So it's a mnemonic device it's what you want.
You want to look at something that you know your, your mind is not going to be able to maintain that particular information for long.
And that's precisely how inscriptions or writing, if you will, begins as a way to remember things.
And not supermarket lists, but something similar, mostly for trade. I need to know how many things I'm sending to you, how many things I'm getting back, what these things are, and I need to keep a record of that so we can see that all around the world. It's a fascinating phenomenon because traditionally we say that writing begins in mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC and it does with what we call cuneiform. And we can explore this further down the line if you will.
But we also know that it independently arises in very diverse and distant cultures.
For instance, Egypt develops their own system of writing for the same purposes.
The Mesoamericans do the same, a very different point in time. But when they need it, they invent it from scratch. So there is no contact. It's not a one off invention. Every culture at some point needs it. And of course the Chinese again make mid second millennium bc they already have a riding system that helps them facilitate trade.
So if you think about it, it's the consequence of people coming together, forming communities, communities growing, having the need to contact other communities, usually for trade purposes.
And eventually this comes to play.
Now when you move down the line, of course, and writing becomes much more common, the concept of inscription acquires a completely different meaning.
And depending on the culture, this happens earlier or later. Mesopotamia already from the mid third millennium, you have public inscriptions, you have things that a government or a king sets up for the public to see and contemplate. They either glorify themselves or they make a law.
The very well known Hammurabi laws that you might have heard of.
So there is a lot of that going on.
There is a caveat of course, because that means that you expect your public to be able to read, which is most of the times is not the case.
And it takes a very long time for that to be the case. I mean, a good example is classical Greece, particularly Athens will have a lot of evidence. But throughout classical Greece, where you have a lot of public inscriptions and reading and writing is much more disseminated than was before. So people can have access to these documents.
People can't go to the agora and see the new law that is being proposed or has been approved and so on and so forth.
So it's all about communicating something by removing the need of either Memory or direct contact with the person you want to communicate.
And I think we can stop there for now because if we let me keep going, I will talk for a long time. Probably say nonsense also. So I stopped here.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: No, that's great. And. And it's firing all sorts of questions, one that I kind of want to dig into. So you mentioned there's obviously this sort of slight disconnect between the people who are writing the inscriptions and those who aren't able to read them.
Is there, Were there practices, Were there kind of ways to bridge that gap? I mean, education systems, I presume, were around, but not in the way that we see it today. You know, what probably wasn't accessible to everybody.
How were people understanding? I'm thinking of like even signage. I mean, I know there'll be pictorial ways of communication, but were they meeting together and somebody explaining what it says? Or how would people have evolved into understanding those inscriptions?
[00:09:32] Speaker C: I think this is a question that relates directly to the complexity of the writing system you're using.
And you can think about it in today's terms as Westerners, if I present you with a text that is written even in such language as Finnish, which is very complex, you would still feel familiar with it and maybe you will feel confident enough to be able to learn it, learn the language in order to understand it, than if I present you with a text written in Mandarin, where the whole syllabographic ideographic function of the text makes it feel like something you probably won't be able to crack without a lot of study. So it becomes a matter of effort, put versus benefit gain.
If I'm going to put the effort that I need to be able to write in cuneiform, I need to have the benefits that come out of it. And the only benefits you can get, at least for quite a long period of time. Eventually, of course, it becomes much more common, is becoming a professional scribe. And we know that for these people, the concept of a professional scribe, and this goes for Egypt as well, of course, was a very important concept. Concept.
These were highly trained individuals and they were very valued. A good example of that is that when empires fall in the Middle and Near east and the new empire comes in. And a great example is the switch from the old Sumerian Akkadian Empire to the Hittite empire, where we're talking about two very different distinct groups of people. One of them belongs to a Semitic language group, and that's the Akkadian.
The Hittites belong to the Indo European language group, which is pretty much Our language group today as well.
I mean, mostly in Europe, when the Hittites take over, they need to maintain the writing system so the scribes become invaluable. You're not going to reinvent the system. You're going to use the same. And the trained individuals that you have will manage to adapt your language to that writing system.
So you see, they play an immense role. So you cannot expect, let's say, commoners to be able to train themselves to read that unless it becomes a much more common and diffuse thing than it is in the beginning.
All of this changes if you start simplifying your writing system. And that's what the Greeks do, actually, the Phoenicians do it first, where they start realizing that maybe I can use individual characters to represent specific sounds, and I can combine them to give the sound of the word I want to express, rather than a complex concept in which I need to move from a pictogram, let's say something that represents the sun.
And understand that as a syllable for Sa, it gives you much more flexibility.
So the Alphabet comes in, it's much easier to write.
It's shorter. It allows for much more flexibility in combinations, and that makes it easier for people to start writing and start reading.
Hence why in ancient Greece, you have a level of literacy very low compared to today, but much higher compared to what you had before. So I think that's a way of seeing the tension between the people who produce these inscriptions and the people who are unable to. And in a sense, this is also part of the allure. Right. An inscription is almost a monument in itself, in many ways, and it is used as such for a very long time.
Actually, it is used as such even today. There are examples we can find around.
But that's maybe a topic for another day.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: So many rabbit holes.
I think this leads on quite nicely to my next question, where I kind of wanted to pick your brains about how letters are formed and also that journey of how they evolve. So you've already touched on the fact that there is a point in time where they've identified, they need to simplify the letters.
But are they also looking at the style of the letters? Like, is there a reason behind why they make the letters a certain way?
[00:14:12] Speaker C: Okay, good. Before I answer this, I need to ask for a big apology from my colleagues, because I'm going to oversimplify this in a way that I like to put it, and I understand that it's not the most accurate representation, but the way I see it is the best thing to do. To understand this is to look at children, like very young children. What do they do when you give them pen and paper?
Well, they draw.
So they make a circle, as I said before, for the sun. And somehow in their mind and in our mind, this is the sun. It's a very clear thing that's writing practically. Yes, it's a pictogram. We call these pictograms because they're practically pictures of something they represent something you can see immediately and identify on paper.
But of course, that has limits.
You can express so much just by putting pretty images, pretty pictures down on the paper.
So eventually you come with a need of trying to represent either ideas or sounds. So ideas give you the concept of ideograms very similar to the pictograms.
Now, the other point, the point about sound is what gives you what we would call a logograph, in a sense. So this sort of symbol that represents a particular sound, I made the example before that. If you have the image of the sun, then eventually you start realizing that perhaps this does not only mean the sun itself, it might mean the sound.
So I can use it in the word sake if I want to, and I will put that sign, and eventually that convention spreads. And I can do that with more things. I start creating some sort of a syllabic script where certain syllables come one after the other and they form a word. And as I also hinted at earlier, that is not a very flexible system. It requires a lot of symbols, and it also doesn't often represent the sound that you want to make as accurately as you could represented with the Alphabet. Now, moving on to the Alphabet. The Alphabet, as we said, does something different, takes individual sounds. So it says it recognizes that I have the sound A.
So I can represent a sound with one symbol that stays stable.
But I also have the sound ku, so I can do that as well. So I get a set of consonants and vowels.
Of course, I get much more vowels than I get much more consonants, excuse me, than I get vowels, because there's much bigger variation. You can only have five vocalic sounds, as it were, right? You cannot make any others unless you don't belong to that species.
Even in that case, I don't know how that would be possible. But I can only say A, E, O, O, n. There's nothing else you can do. You can vary, you can play, you can combine them. But the original sounds are this. So they figured that out not through study or going to a library, but just by noticing how they speak.
And eventually they start representing them with particular Symbols. Now, an interesting point is that even those symbols in the beginning seem to have some sort of pictorial value in them. And a very good example, and I think a very well known example is perhaps the most well known, is the. Is the letter beta.
Beta, what we call beta beta, which of course, in the early Semitic.
Excuse me, in the early Semitic scripts, stands for house. Yes. And it is.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: This is the letter B.
[00:17:59] Speaker C: Yes, the letter B. And it is representing a house.
That's what it is.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Like two rooms, kind of. Yeah. Squares.
[00:18:09] Speaker C: Like a duplex.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: Yeah, A big house. Yeah.
[00:18:14] Speaker C: But that's precisely how it starts. And eventually it simplifies itself not to the syllable be or bet, but to pretty much the consonantal sound of bu. And through that process, which is.
It's tricky how this happens, actually. It must have been slow for a while, and at some point it kicks in.
We have the first Phoenician alphabets that is stylized based on those principles and which is later inherited by the Greeks and stylized even further. And it takes quite some time for it to become formalized or canonized, if you will. There are variations within the Greek world, but eventually everybody understands what they're trying to say, but eventually becomes more canonized.
So, yeah, that's. That's how we get what we have.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: It's amazing, isn't it, that. That the evolution of the letters and how they've. They've. Where they've started and how they've evolved over all of these years with different influences, I presume, from lots of different cultures into what we in one part of the world know, but also where other parts of the world might. May still be using certain languages, certain scripts that are even, you know, even further back, kind of more preserved from traditional scripts and shapes.
One area that you have mentioned to me, which I hadn't really heard of, were a couple of, I want to say, scripts that maybe have been lost and forgotten. But could you tell us a bit more about it? I want to say linear A and linear B to kick things off and hand it over to you.
[00:20:08] Speaker C: Thank you. Yes. You're saying you're saying it correctly.
Goodness me, that's. Yeah, that. That takes us on a trip back in time.
So we should start with Sir Arsul Evans, of course, the. The great archaeologist who in the 1900s discovers the palace of Knossos in Crete and realizes that there is a whole civilization hidden under the ground that expands throughout Crete, but also very big parts of the Aegean and seems to have played a very important role at the time. He calls them The Minoans, influenced by the mythical king Minos of the old Greek stories about that Cretan king who was tyrannical and ruling the Aegean with force. You have the famous thalassocracy. Anyways, he names them after that, surprisingly enough.
He finds a lot of tablets that are inscribed with weird characters.
So he finds two different things. He finds a very pictographic script, which is what we call the Cretan hieroglyphs.
And they seem to be a row of images, practically God knows what they mean.
But he finds also a script that seems to be abstract enough to represent sounds, probably syllables. So he finds what looks like a syllabic script.
He doesn't find much, finds a good amount of tablets.
Eventually a second set of tablets, and I'm oversimplifying again, is discovered which contains something that looks like the same script, but it's later.
So just to put this into, into its dates, when we talk about the Minoan script, we're talking about probably sometime in the 18th century BC, starting point, ending point, sometime in the 1400s. After that, a new script takes over. Actually it's the same script, but clearly represents something else. We have much more text of that, and that's what we call linear B.
Nobody had any idea what these things are. And in order to understand how problematic this is, it's easy to do that today.
If I give you a cryptogram, a page of random characters, and I tell you, decipher it, if I tell you that behind it hides the language, the English language, you will have at least a chance of deciphering. You will be able to see similarities, repetitions. You would be able to get somewhere eventually. It's not as simple as I make it sound, but you will be able to get somewhere. Especially if you're very intelligent or part of the MI6, you will be able to do it.
But if I give you a script and I tell you it's all jumbled, you don't know what is behind it. But I also tell you we don't know. You don't know what language hides behind it. Plus it might be a language that doesn't exist. How do you decipher that?
So in order to decipher any prehistoric script, you need to have at least a basis from which to begin.
You need to have an idea or a suggestion as to what later historical language hides behind it, what documented language hides behind it. Otherwise you're fishing in the dark, practically. Actually, fishing in the dark is not that bad, now that I think about it. People do that all the time. But in any case, the point I'm trying to make is that unless you have an indication of where to go, you're not going to get anywhere. Now, the fascinating thing with these scripts is that around the time where Evans is doing his.
His whole discovery, as I said, that's 1900-1900-1901-1922. This young boy, this baby is born, called Michael Ventris, and he's a talented kid. By the age of eight. He speaks, I can't remember how many languages, definitely French, German, Swiss, German, English and Swedish, plus Polish, because his mother was Polish, so. And he's fluent. So you can clearly see that this is. Yeah, this is not your average baby, Right.
That boy, when he's 14, his school takes them to an expedition, an excursion, I should say, to Knossos, where Evans is.
He's very old by that stage. He's around 85, I want to say, but I'm not. I might get this wrong, but he's old.
And Evans takes them around the ruins, but most importantly, shows them the tablets. He says, look, these are scripts and we have no idea what they're undeciphered.
At which point there's only one question, and the question comes from Ventrice, who says, sorry, did I hear you correctly? Did you say they're undeciphered?
And since that point, that child decides that, you know, no matter what I do, I'm going to decipher this.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Hi there.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: Quick moment to say, if you love.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: All things lettering, I send out a.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Free monthly download to my mailing list. It's totally free. Just a little monthly treat from me to you.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: All the links are in today's show notes.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: Now, let's get back to the episode.
[00:25:47] Speaker C: So already from age 14, he starts sending letters to academics, including Evans. So imagine you're an academic, you're at your office, and suddenly you get this letter by this boy telling you, I had this idea about the script. What about that? And of course, most people just ignore him.
Evans doesn't. Also, some other people don't.
But he comes in and he tries to.
He's convinced he's going to solve that. Now, he would get nowhere if it weren't for the work that already had been done by this wonderful scholar, Alice Kober.
Alice Cobers. She died, I think, in the forties, but she had enough time to work on linear B and what she did, because with linear B, the difference with linear A is that you also have much more text.
So at least even if you don't know what language behind it. You can start looking for linguistic analogs. For example, we know that in our languages, we like to decline things.
So you should have.
If you have three characters being repeated, and then you have the same three characters plus a fourth one, you might start thinking, oh, maybe this is the third person, right? So maybe this is a verb and this is the S that we add at the end. Maybe, but it gives you something to work with.
Now, Covert does exactly that. It creates long lists with similar characters repeating and variations at the endings. And she realizes, my God, at least we know the group. This has to be Indo European, right?
She dies before she's able. She publishes a lot of influencer papers, particularly before her death, but she dies before she's able to actually crack it.
And that's when ventris is turning 18, right? We're around the same time. So, 1922, Ventris is born. Covert dies in the 40s.
In her 40s, Ventris turns 18. He decides he wants to be an architect. Weird, but okay. But he never gives up linear B. And at some point, he has a brilliant idea. While he's sitting there with his grids, he starts by saying, look, I think I cracked it at 18. I think the language behind this Etruscan, and here's how I'll prove it. He's wrong, completely wrong. But his method is correct, because he has started testing, and what he does is he thinks, look, if it's a script that is trying to communicate something, especially if it's straight, you will need to refer, definitely, you will need to refer to the places from where things come and the places to which things go.
And toponyms are notoriously stable. So a toponym, a place, place of a name, can survive dozens of different languages and linguistics and environments and can go all the way unchanged to even today. We have many examples, even in England, of that sort of thing.
So he thinks, well, look, this was found in Crete, and the tablets are from Knossos.
So Knossos is the name of the city.
There is also Amnisos, which is the port of the city. There must be a reference to one of these places. And if there is, it must be repeated. So I should find it in several tablets. And he starts by that theory, and he starts testing. He finds characters that are repeated in the same order, sometimes in the heading, sometimes elsewhere. And he starts testing, says, okay, what if it's Greek behind it? What if this is trying to say a mini siyo?
And he does that once, twice, three times, and he realizes Dumb.
That's it. So he finds, and this is the key to everything, by identifying the names, he finds the sound values of the characters of some of the characters. And once you have a part, then you can start working on deciphering the rest.
And he does it and he cracks it.
And once it is cracked, we realize that what's behind it is Greek. And if what's behind it is Greek, I should mention he doesn't crack it on his own. He also has the help of Chadwick, who is very famous for having worked during the Second World War with the teams that were trying to crack the German code. So he's a cryptographer. He knows how to do these things. So they work together and they crack the whole thing.
1952, we're done with it. We have a script, and it's Greek behind it. And suddenly you realize, how on earth is that possible? Because we know that Greek writing up until that point started in the 8th century BC 8th century. The script is from the 14th.
It is used from the 14th century, maybe a bit earlier, all the way down, let's say, if we push it to the 11th century, so 14th to 11th people are writing Greek in that weird script. And then writing disappears completely for three centuries and re emerges as alphabetic in the 8th century BC. So it becomes a detective mystery. Oh, my gosh, you have no idea what's going on.
There's a lot of theories, of course, as to what have happened, very prominent ones, because of course, the system that we have, the linear being the Mycenaean culture, as we call it, which are the, if you want, the Proto Greeks, it's not a very correct term, but okay.
At some point, their system collapses. In the 11th century, everything goes under. All the big city centers, all the big palacial centers, as you say, come under, are destroyed by earthquake, fire, all of them, and nothing. They're not reinhabited, which is very weird.
And we enter what we call the Dark Ages. It's a very contested term, but the three next centuries see a very low population, Central Greece and the islands. The Greeks are trying to recover from something. And of course, this goes back to what we were saying about scripts earlier. With the fall of the palaces comes the fall of the scribes. And with the fall of the scribes, there's no writing.
No one can maintain the writing unless they are a scribe. And if there's no palace, there's no scribe.
So writing dies.
Any treemerges again, when the Alphabet is introduced. It's a fascinating story, at least for.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Me and for us. And for us.
[00:32:24] Speaker C: There have been many, many a party in which people are looking at me weirdly when messages excited, not in this party.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: You're in the right place here.
Wow. I.
It's like I can see a, you know, huge movie blockbuster playing out about this.
This is fascinating. So do.
Can you say that that sort of linear B has changed the understanding of when Greek writing began? I mean, that's a really simplified version of what you've just said, of course.
[00:33:01] Speaker C: Of course. Exactly. That's the perfect way of putting it.
[00:33:04] Speaker B: Okay. And then. And then there's this mystery in the middle of where. Where on earth it goes. But also, if all the scribes. I mean, I'm getting into, you know, detective mode now, but where all the scribes have gone, where, how then do they re. Emerge?
Somebody's got to have carried on the evolution of writing during that time, whether it sustained itself in, you know, any evidence or not. So.
[00:33:32] Speaker C: Well, according to.
According to the myth, there is this guy called Cadmus. He's a Phoenician, and he travels to Greece. He lands at the shore of Boeotia. It's the area aboard Attica, where Attica is Athens, by Ossea is Thebes. He lands there and he carries with him the letters from Phoenicia.
Now, this is a myth, of course, but if we try to pick our brains a little bit as to what it might be the echo of, and I think that's the common consensus now, is that alphabetic writing, of course it is transmitted. It is taken from one area to the other, but the reason becomes adapted to the Greek language.
And we have writing. I knew at some point in the 8th century is because probably one individual had the idea of sitting down and making it into Greek and eventually gets disseminated. And that's probably because you have something coming in. Yes, that's something that is simple enough. You need. You need an intellectual explosion for this to happen. At least that's what people have thought. There are many different models as to how this could have happened. Of course, it is impossible to know, because we don't. It is very bizarre. At some point in the 8th century, second half of the 8th century, we find writing. But how do we find it? And this is the important thing here. We don't find the catalog of goods that Athens is sending to Sparta. We don't find a mnemonic device. We don't find the records of a warehouse. We find a cup which is used for drinking wine with an inscription on it which is two lines in hexameter. It's poetry. The same meter that Homer uses.
And they say, this is the cup of golden Aphrodite. Whoever drinks from it will fall in love. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So people are writing poetry.
This is incredible. Suddenly the whole register has changed. When writing reemerges, it re. Emerges in a completely different register.
Within the Greek world, there's not one poetic word in linear B scripts. Nothing.
I mean, we all wish we could find some poem, but there's nothing.
There are no thoughts of anyone about anything.
8th century Alphabet is introduced.
People are putting their thoughts down in meter. But still.
[00:36:13] Speaker B: But it's a creative act, right? A sort of creative expressive practice rather than a functional written script.
[00:36:27] Speaker C: I guess it's those two things. This is a very poetic culture because why else would you have the need? But you could say the same for other cultures, and that doesn't happen. And second, the second thing that it says is that it's a very poetic culture that suddenly has the means of expressing itself because it doesn't have to draw these weird characters.
It can just say.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: And share it.
[00:36:52] Speaker C: And share it. Exactly.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: Because otherwise you wouldn't write it, I presume. Unless you wanted to remember the lovely poetic things that you're thinking.
[00:37:00] Speaker C: Especially if we think about the context in which this is written. Because you have to imagine something like a symposium. Right. So we're sitting there all together in our couches and we're having our wine, having a good time. And I expect you to see the inscription on my cup. It's an inside joke, of course. And understand I don't just write it to pass the time. Yeah, I'm passing. I'm communicating a message. But this time the message is not three kilos of rice. Well, that was never a message. Sorry. Don't give me three kilos of grain going there. It's not that. It's like golden Aphrodite. Oh, my God.
It's a huge thing.
[00:37:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a huge thing.
[00:37:40] Speaker C: It's fascinating. Fascinating.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: That is really fascinating and shows a lot about the culture and. And I guess the sense of kind of community and social activity that would have been going on.
Potentially the context of conversations as well. So it's like us wearing logo T shirts or having something written on our clothes.
Yeah. Wow. One other question, sorry about this, is what are the inscriptions written on? Like, how were they discovered?
[00:38:10] Speaker C: Yes. I wouldn't say that it's pure luck, actually. The reason we have the tablets is tragic. It's precisely because the palaces Both are my non palaces.
And the Mycenaean palaces at different points in time were completely destroyed, and they were destroyed by fire. The original material on which these were written were tablets of clay, which is, of course perishable unless you bake it. And you don't bake it because you want to reuse it, you want to scrape it, especially if you're doing archives, and reuse it. Right.
You only bake it if you want to make it permanent. But there's no need to have permanent records of grain in most cases. I don't know, some people might want to do that, but I don't see any point.
So what happens is the palaces fall, they're looted, they're set ablaze, and that bakes the tablets.
And once clay is baked, it survives, it becomes like pottery.
So the death of these cultures is what gave birth to our understanding of prehistoric writings.
We would have nothing. And if you think about the implications of that, they're huge because we tend to classify civilizations and cultures in our own place in history based on what we call the historical times and the prehistoric times. And that when you use the word history, what you're talking about is pretty much recorded cultures, cultures that can record things about themselves. So cultures that can write before you have oral cultures, they're different things.
So if we didn't have any of these things, we would consider these cultures as completely oral. We would have no idea about what happens in terms of the development of language, where we stand in it. And suddenly we can push the limit all the way back to the 18th century precisely because of these disasters.
So we're very lucky about that.
[00:40:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. As you say, like from. From something ending quite tragically.
It's actually given us a real insight into the evolution of letters and inscriptions and all of these things that perhaps we wouldn't have known before. And that goes down to, you know, the incredible work of archaeologists and people finding these things and timing, I guess, you know, the boy that was born, the. The conversations that I had, people really pushing the boundaries and trying to work these things out and having the minds and the energy and the passion and the interest in. In exploring all of these things, which is, you know, full circle back to what you and your team do at the university and giving rise to lots of new generations of incredible minds deciphering all these things. So where are we now at this point with the studies of both of them?
[00:41:07] Speaker C: Yeah, it's tricky. I don't want to be offensive, but we have had several NAT cases over the years who claim to have cracked it. I can do that as well. I can invent language behind it.
But linguistically speaking, I don't think we're much closer than we used to be. The problem is we don't have enough text.
We have some text on which we can test. So how do you approach that? As I said before, you have to have a test language. You have to say, okay, maybe it's a Semitic language that hides behind it. Let's see what we have, and let's see if it fits, because we have a starting point. The starting point is that the symbols are very similar to linear B. So linear B adapts linear A. That means that if we know the sounds of linear B when the symbols are similar, probably the sounds were similar in linear A as well. But what was the bloody language? Because I might put the sounds there, but still, they don't make any sense in any language that I know.
And in order for it to make more sense, I need more text.
And at the moment, I don't have enough text.
So it's one of these sad cases where it seems to be not a matter of more power of human intellect needed, but rather more data needed to make it statistically possible that you can have a result that can be statistically credible, because you can have results. I mean, everybody can make up words. So.
[00:42:31] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's the credibility, isn't it? And I guess just thinking about the future of all of these areas of studies, and I know that it's quite complex, but is there a direction that you can see that you would want the university studies lectures, all these sorts of worlds. Where do you see the next phase? I'm guessing we're looking at kind of digital tools and resources and leaning on new ways to uncover materials, uncover this evidence and data and things.
[00:43:02] Speaker C: That's where we're heading. And I think that's. That's the right direction at this moment.
We have a lot going on.
Not. Digitalization has been a huge help in our field. It makes everything much more accessible. It increases the audience that can actually deal with the texts, can have ideas, students, young academics, pretty much every, every member of the public. And if you think about it, Ventris, who actually deciphers the whole thing, was a member of the public. So, you know, it's not a good idea to look down upon the ability of people, of coming into the. To the field and looking into things. But also the advances in AI have helped us immensely. Not so much. I mean, one could think in terms of computational power, which Is, of course, a big thing. But it's not just that. An excellent example, which is happening right now as we speak, is the Herculaneum papyri, that little town in the south of Italy that all the papyri have been incinerated and have been turned into a ball of material, a dark ball of material. So, of course, you have no chance of reading that, or you didn't, because now you can scan it, you can 3D scan it, AI can step in and it can actually read those things.
And we're finding magnificent things. Okay. We find a lot of Philodemus. I'm not going to tell you who. Who he is, but he's very annoying, so nobody cares. But we also, surprisingly, found bits of Euripides.
Lost place of Eurypides is incredible. I mean, not. Not the whole place, some lines. But still, it's something that keeps coming up. And of course, all these things need to be ignored, examined by academics, need to be published properly. And if they're digitalized. Think about it this way.
If I take. Which is a project that we have now in Durham, it's called defrag, so digital editions of fragmentary tragedy, if you wait for these few lines, let's say 100 lines that were discovered to come out in an edition, you have to wait for the printed book to come out. That can take years. And a revision of that book can take even more years.
Now, if I put your edition online as digital, and you can access it, everyone can access it. Then ideas, conversation, discussion, everything happens in real time and things can evolve.
[00:45:26] Speaker B: Hive mind.
[00:45:27] Speaker C: Yeah, precisely. Precisely. That's exactly the point.
And that's what we have been doing with pretty much everything else. So I don't see why classical studies or philology in general should be different.
So, yeah, there is a lot coming.
[00:45:41] Speaker B: In that's very exciting.
I have a final question for you, which is probably the least intellectual question you'll get today, but possibly one of the most challenging, which is what we're asking all of our guests this series is what is your favorite letter?
And I, I guess, for you, could be more than one Alphabet that you're looking at and why.
[00:46:07] Speaker C: Yeah, okay, that's. I'll go with what comes to my mind straight away.
I think I would say alpha.
And I would say alpha, because when I think about it, I. I see the letter in my mind as having a bright red color or sometimes a dark red color. I don't know if why that's relevant, but there's a bit of a synesthetic value to it.
And I would say alpha because it signifies a beginning, which is always good.
I like beginnings.
It also signifies excellence in our culture and it also is very useful when you want to buy batteries because we call them aaa.
It's a letter that I find very often I'm in need of to remember. So there you go.
[00:46:57] Speaker B: I love that. I love throwing this at you because what comes out are the best answers. I think that's brilliant and excellent reasons why, particularly just touching on the synesthetic side of it. We actually talked to a psychologist in the series just before this, so have a listen to that. Because it's all about the graphene color sinister form where we see letters as colours, which is what I do. So I would be not arguing against you, but just offer that an A is yellow in my mind. So I'm sorry, to be fair, you are in the common group. So there are more of the red a color seers than. Than my one. I'm. I'm out on my own, I think possibly, but. But I love that and it's. It's great to connect to more people who do see letters as colours as well. Let's wrap this up because there is so much more to find out about you and the team at Durham.
People can visit durham.ac.uk there's also Durham University on LinkedIn, on Instagram and you're up on the website as well, which is how I found you in the first place. So I'm so pleased that I was able to find somebody who has all of this information just sitting there ready for me to dig into. So thank you so much for joining me today and being part of the life of letters.
[00:48:22] Speaker C: Thank you very much. Been an immense pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:48:28] Speaker A: Thanks so much for listening. This series would not be possible without my producer, Heidi Cullip, and kindly supported by Speedball Art, champions of creativity, connection and craft.
If you've enjoyed the episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or share it with a fellow letter lover. Until next time, keep listening, keep creating and keep celebrating the life of letters.
