“Ignore that device in the centre for the moment and concentrate on the symbols round the edge.” He highlighted each of the three bands in turn, from outer to inner. “Mycenaean Linear B. Minoan Linear A. The Phaistos symbols.”
Jack had already guessed as much, but the confirmation still made his heart pound with excitement.
“Gentlemen, we have our very own Rosetta stone.”
Over the next few minutes Dillen explained that the Mycenaeans who took over Crete following the eruption of Thera originally had no script of their own, and instead had borrowed Linear A symbols from Minoan seafarers who had traded with mainland Greece. Their script, Linear B, was brilliantly deciphered soon after the Second World War as an early version of Greek. But the language of the Minoans had remained a mystery until earlier that year, when the largest ever cache of Linear A tablets had been discovered at Knossos. By great good fortune several of the tablets proved to be bilingual with Linear B. Now the gold disc offered the extraordinary possibility of deciphering the symbols of the Phaistos discs as well.
“There are no Phaistos symbols from Knossos and there’s no bilingual text for them,” Dillen continued. “I’d assumed it would be a lost language, one quite distinct from Minoan or from Mycenaean Greek.”
The others listened without interruption as Dillen worked methodically through the Linear A and Linear B symbols on the gold disc, showing their consistency with other examples of writing from Bronze Age Crete. He had arranged all of the symbols in rows and columns to study the concordance.
“I began with the first of the Phaistos discs, the one found a hundred years ago,” Dillen said. “Like you I thought this one most likely to be intelligible.”
He tapped the keyboard and all thirty-one groups of symbols from the obverse appeared with the phonetic translation beneath them.
“Here it is, reading from the centre outward following the direction of the walking man and the face symbols, as logic would seem to dictate.”
Jack quickly scanned the lines. “I don’t recognize any Linear words or see any of the familiar combinations of syllables.”
“I’m afraid you’re right.” Dillen tapped the keys again and another thirty-one groupings appeared in the lower part of the screen. “Here it is back to front, spiralling from the edge to the centre. It’s the same story. Absolutely nothing.”
The screen went blank and there was a brief silence.
“And the second disc?” Jack asked.
Dillen’s expression gave little away, only the hint of a smile betraying his excitement. He tapped the keys and repeated the exercise.
“Here it is, spiralling outwards.”
Jack’s heart sank as he again saw nothing recognizable in the words. Then he began to see pairings that looked oddly familiar.
“There’s something here but it’s not quite right.”
Dillen allowed him a moment more to stare at the screen.
“Back to front,” he prompted.
Jack peered at the screen again and suddenly slammed his hand down on the table. “Of course!”
Dillen could contain himself no longer and smiled broadly as he tapped one final time and the sequence appeared in reverse order. There was a sharp intake of breath as Jack saw at once what they were looking at.
“Extraordinary,” he murmured. “That disc dates more than two thousand years before the Bronze Age even began. Yet it’s the language of Linear A, the language of Crete at the time of our shipwreck.” He could scarcely believe what he was saying. “It’s Minoan.”
At that moment the intercom crackled on Seaquest and broke the spell.
“Jack. Come on deck at once. There’s activity on Vultura.” There was no mistaking the urgency in Tom York’s tones.
Jack leapt to his feet without a word and bounded onto the bridge, Costas following close behind. Within seconds both men stood beside York and Howe, their gaze directed towards the distant glimmer of lights on the horizon.
In the sea ahead was a faint disturbance, a swirl of spray that quickly became recognizable as Seaquest’s Zodiac. Soon they could make out Katya at the wheel, her long hair flowing in the wind. Jack grasped the rail and momentarily shut his eyes, the anxieties of the last few hours suddenly replaced by a flood of relief. Thank God she was all right.
Costas looked at his friend with affection. He knew his friend too well, that Jack’s entire emotional being was fast becoming wrapped up in their quest.
As the boat drew alongside and the outboards powered down, the air was filled with a new sound, the muffled roar of distant diesels. Jack snatched up the night scope and trained it on the horizon. The grey shape of Vultura filled the image, its hull low and menacing. Suddenly a surge of white appeared at the stern, a billowing arc made brilliant by the phosphorescence stirred up by the engines. Slowly, lazily, like an awakening beast with nothing to fear, Vultura turned in a wide arc and roared off into the darkness, its wake lingering like a rocket’s exhaust long after the vessel had been swallowed up by the night.
Jack lowered the scope and looked at the figure who had just scrambled over the side. She smiled and gave a quick wave. Jack spoke under his breath, his words only audible to Costas beside him.
“Katya, you are an angel.”
CHAPTER 7
The helicopter swooped low over the coastal mountains of western Turkey, its rotor reverberating in the deep bays that indented the shoreline. To the east the rosy aura of dawn revealed the rugged contours of the Anatolian Plateau, and across the Aegean the ghostly forms of islands could just be seen through the morning mist.
Jack eased back on the Lynx’s control column and flipped on the autopilot. The helicopter would unerringly follow the course he had plotted into its navigation computer, bringing them to its programmed destination almost five hundred nautical miles north-east.
A familiar voice came over the intercom.
“Something I don’t understand about our gold disc,” Costas said. “I’m assuming it was made about 1600 BC, shortly before the shipwreck. Yet the only parallel for those symbols in the outer band dates four thousand years earlier, on the second Phaistos disc from Crete.”
Katya joined in. “It’s astonishing that the language of Bronze Age Crete was already spoken by the first Neolithic colonists on the island. Professor Dillen’s decipherment will revolutionize our picture of the origins of Greek civilization.”
Jack was still elated by Katya’s success in defusing the confrontation with Vultura the evening before. Their deliverance had been little short of a miracle and he knew it. She said she had shown Aslan pictures of the Roman wreck Jack had dived on the week before and convinced him that all they had found were pottery amphoras, that the wreck was not worthy of his attention and Seaquest was only there to test new mapping equipment.
Jack was convinced there was more to it than this, more than Katya was willing or able to say. He had grilled her but she had remained tight-lipped. He knew only too well the shady world of deal and counter-deal, mafia trade-offs and bribery in which citizens of the former Soviet Union were forced to operate. Katya could clearly hold her own in this world.