linear a and the seven-year reading

Alice Kober died in 1950. She did not decipher Linear B. She built the grid that let Ventris do it two years later. She worked from index cards cut from cigarette cartons during the war. 180,000 of them.

I mention Kober because the woman I want to write about worked in her shadow.

Emmett Bennett trained a generation of Aegean scholars at Wisconsin. One of them was a graduate student named Miriam Ellerbe. She defended in 1961. Her dissertation is on file at Memorial Library, call number PA3395.E44. I have not seen it. The abstract is online.

Ellerbe worked on Linear A tablet HT 88 from Hagia Triada. It is an administrative document. Fourteen lines. She used the Linear B phonetic values that Ventris had established, applied them to the Linear A signs with known Linear B correspondents, and produced a reading. The reading does not translate. The language is not Greek. It is not related to any known language.

You can pronounce Linear A. You cannot understand it.

Ellerbe spent seven years on HT 88. Her published paper on the tablet is short. Six pages in Kadmos, 1968. The paper is dry. It lists the phonetic values, gives her reading line by line, notes where signs are ambiguous.

There is one paragraph near the end that does not fit the rest of the paper. I am quoting it in full.

During the final year of this work I read the tablet aloud at intervals, initially as a check on the phonetic sequence and later without clear purpose. I record here, against my inclination, that repeated recitation produced a sensation of recognition for which I can offer no account. The syllables did not resolve into meaning. The experience was not one of comprehension. It was closer to the feeling of hearing a name one has not heard since childhood. I mention this only because I am aware that others engaged in similar work may have had similar experiences and declined to report them.

The paragraph has no footnote. It is not returned to. The rest of the paper is line-by-line phonetic analysis.

I ordered the Kadmos issue through interlibrary loan. The physical copy arrived last Tuesday. The paragraph is there. It is on page 141.

Ellerbe did not publish on Linear A again. She moved to comparative Semitics. She retired in 1993. She died in 2011. The Wisconsin department page has a memorial notice with three sentences.

HT 88 itself is a clay bar, 14.6 cm long, broken at the right end. The break took an unknown number of signs from lines 3 through 7. The break is old. The Italian excavation photographs from 1903 show it already broken.

The tablet has fourteen lines. Two groups of seven.

I read Ellerbe's reading aloud last night. I do not have the phonetic values memorized. I worked from the paper, syllable by syllable, one line at a time. The reading took about forty minutes.

I did not have the sensation she describes. I mention this because I want it on record that I did not.

I read it again this morning. Count them again is the phrase I keep writing in the margin of the printout. I do not know why I wrote it the first time.

The trisyllable in line 9 of Ellerbe's reading is ka-nu-ti. Not what I was expecting. Close enough to bother me.