Paul Kemprecos
The Minoan Cipher
DEDICATION
In memory of my pal Wayne Valero, collector extraordinaire, writer and friend of writers, a natural-born editor, lover of adventure and all-round good guy, who left this world far too soon.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The internet has made a universe of information available at the touch of a keyboard, but it is in physical books that an author searches for nuggets to stir the imagination of the reader. The Santorini eruption used as a backdrop in the Prologue is exhaustively examined in “Fire in the Sea” by Walter L. Friedrich. Two books, “Minoans” and “The Knossos Labyrinth,” both by Rodney Castleden, provided fascinating insights into work of Sir Arthur Evans and the art, architecture and mysterious religion of the long-lost civilization he discovered. The remarkable accomplishments of the linguistic genius Michael Ventris are described in “The Man Who Deciphered Linear B” by Andrew Robinson and “The Decipherment of Linear B” by John Chadwick. Ventris actually died in an auto accident at the age of thirty-four. While the fanciful account of that tragic event in “The Minoan Cipher” is purely speculative, if any one could have translated Linear A, it would have been Michael Ventris.
PROLOGUE
PART I — CATACLYSM
The gods were angry. There could be no other explanation for the quaking ground and the fire that rained down from the heavens on the hapless inhabitants of Kalliste, a small volcanic island located one-hundred-twenty miles north of Crete.
The island’s high cliffs formed an open ring that enclosed a deep lagoon big enough for dozens of ships. The protective bay and the island’s strategic location on the trade routes attracted cargo vessels from all around the Mediterranean. The island had prospered. The fruits of those riches could be seen in the thriving settlements that lined the harbor. The islanders celebrated the bounty of the sea in their art and architecture. Graceful frescoes of dolphins and flying fish decorated the interior walls of the two- and three-story houses that lined the bay.
The riches came with a price. Kalliste was home to restless volcanoes, below and above the sea, which occasionally triggered earthquakes and blanketed the island with choking ash. The islanders had become used to what they saw as divine temper tantrums. After each disturbance, there would follow a flurry of sacrifices and ceremonies to soothe the gods. When things quieted down, the islanders swept the pumice dust from their thresholds and rebuilt the houses that had collapsed. Commerce was restored and life went on. But the impending calamity about to hit the island would be greater than anything in memory. The natural forces soon to be unleashed from deep in the earth were more powerful than even the gods could have imagined.
Kalliste’s fate had been preordained millions of years earlier. The island sat astride what geologists today call the South Aegean volcanic arc. The volcanic chain extends from Turkey to Greece, forming a line where the continents of Africa and Europe come together as they drift on a sea of molten rock known as magma. Where continents collide, cracks form in the earth’s crust and volcanoes are born. The massive magma chamber under Kalliste was like a gigantic pressure cooker. When the molten forces fractured the rock above, the blast that followed was one of the most violent natural explosions in recorded history.
A black plume churned more than twenty miles into the stratosphere, causing dramatic colors in the sky and climate changes around the world. Super-heated air flowed over the rim of the caldera with a fury hotter than a thousand blast furnaces. The turbulent cloud of ash and dust rolled horizontally across the sea at more than sixty miles an hour. The fiery shock wave pummeled ships standing in its way.
The increasingly violent tremors leading up to the eruption had made the island practically uninhabitable. Fleets of ships had carried most of the population to Crete. Many refugees settled in or around Knossos, the bustling town on the north coast that was the home port to the far-flung Minoan empire.
The day the world ended for Knossos had been filled with bountiful promise. Sweating longshoremen toiled on docks piled high with trade goods. Pedestrian traffic streamed past the boat sheds, construction yards, warehouses, cafés, taverns and brothels that served the needs of ships and the crews that manned them.
From the balconies of the houses built into the hill behind the harbor, wealthy merchants could look out on a forest of masts sprouting from scores of wide-beamed sailing galleys. Some ships were more than a hundred feet long. More vessels were anchored to the east and west of the port or clustered in the natural harbors and bays that indented the island’s one-hundred-sixty-mile-long coastline.
Ships sailing out of the island ports traveled to Africa, Asia and Europe, even beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic Ocean. The merchant fleet carried the staples of a thriving civilization: olives, wine, and fine crafted goods to trade for copper used in the manufacture of bronze. Knossos was at the peak of its wealth, power and affluence. But in an instant, all that was about to change.
Along the waterfront, eyes turned to the north at the rumble of distant thunder. Refugees who’d fled Kalliste recognized the sound of a volcanic eruption. Some heaved a sigh of relief at their escape from their doomed island. But their destiny was only delayed. The volcanic eruption created an earthquake that in turn spawned a tsunami. And Crete lay directly in the path of the deadly wave.
The tsunami raced across open water in the form of a heaving sea, but when it encountered land, the wave released its full destructive force. It clawed the water out of the harbor, exposing the muddy bottom, then reared up in a moving brown wall more than twenty-five-feet high. Millions of tons of roiling seawater inundated Knossos and branched out in death-dealing tributaries that carried bodies and debris miles from the harbor.
The watery destruction swept several miles inland and finally ebbed at the foot of the sprawling palace that was the heart of the Minoan empire. When the wave receded, a muddy curve of shoreline was all that remained of the great commercial port of Knossos. All was silent. The only sound was the whisper coming from the blizzard of gray pumice flakes falling softly from the sky.
PART II — THE LABYRINTH
The squat-bodied man sat on a rock at the top of the hill, the dark wide-set eyes in his bovine face fixed on the horizon in a tight squint. He was dressed simply in a blue kilt; his muscular chest was bare. A bandanna protected his shaven scalp from the intense rays of the mid-day sun. He had come to this place every morning for the past few days, ever since he’d awakened after a sleepless night with the feeling that something was wrong. He didn’t know what it was, but he had learned from his many years as a soldier to heed his instincts.
From his hard perch he had a good view of the harbor and the sea beyond. The nauseous stench of rotting corpses and dead fish still poisoned the air several weeks after the giant wave had wiped out the port, but the curtain of dust no longer blotted out the sun. Tides had thinned the gray blanket of pumice to reveal patches of violet-hued water.
The feeling of unease was stronger than ever when his chariot passed through the palace gates earlier that day. He traveled to his rock perch along the remnants of a paved road that was matted with seaweed and covered with ash. The morning was uneventful. Then, shortly after noon, a speck appeared on the horizon. The object moved closer until he could make out a striped red-and-white sail of the design favored by Mycenaean shipbuilders. It was exactly what he had dreaded. A scout ship from the mainland.