Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  “Yeah, you’d expect anybody making an art object would do finer work. This looks messy.”

  “Get the light pipe, would you? Let’s look behind this thing.”

  He backed out of the narrow space, dragging the lamp. In the dimness Claire thought she saw a golden glimmering in the cone, reflecting specks. Impurities, perhaps. George muttered behind her, casting shadows that made the flecks ripple, wax and wane.

  Probably amber, she thought. Fine work, over 3500 years old. Her years of training had not erased the sense of wonder she felt at such thoughts.

  The cone was about as long as her hand, tapering smoothly to a rounded point. As she touched the rock, spreading her hand across it, a slight uneasiness came over her, a prickly feeling, and she withdrew.

  “Here,” George said, handing her the light pipe. She was his superior in the expedition. Though the archeologists usually made no great fuss about pecking order, now that the big names had cleared out Claire had right of first inspection. That had never happened before, and she felt a small quiver of anticipation. Thank God Kontos was back in Athens.

  She inserted the thin, flexible plastic tube in the right hand gap around the black limestone. The pipe carried a shaft of light down its core, illuminating a small patch at the tip. The image returned in a thin coaxial layer.

  George clicked off the tomb lamps. Claire slipped a helmet on, swung its goggles into place, and saw a faint rough surface. She poked the tube to the side. “Raw dirt and pebbles. Original hillside.”

  George squatted beside her and fed the tube forward. She maneuvered it gingerly, using a guiding rod with articulating joints.

  “It closes off about ten centimeters to the right. No, wait—there’s a little hole. Looks like water erosion.”

  “Can you get around behind this black limestone?”

  “Trying, Got to—damn!—work this around….”

  In the gloom the two crouched figures were ghostlike. Radiance escaping the light pipe cast huge shadows reeling up the curved walls to stretch and lose themselves in the inky blackness of the dome.

  “There. Poked it through. Now…if…I can turn…” Her clipped, precise voice echoed from the arched stone, giving it a ringing, almost metallic edge. “The rock ends. Can’t see any markings from this perspective. It’s flat on the back.”

  “Anything behind it?”

  “Open space.”

  “How big?”

  “I’m getting no reflection.”

  “Couple feet long, then, at least.”

  “Probably more water hollowing. Here, have a look.”

  When George had the helmet on he jockeyed the light pipe around and whistled to himself. “This is a pretty sizable block. Can’t see that it connects to anything else.”

  He studied it a moment longer and then pulled off the helmet. Claire returned his grin. “Decidedly odd, Watson,” she said.

  “It’s a good find, isn’t it?”

  “No Mycenaean tomb has a false wall like this. Or that amber ornament. A first. A real first.”

  CHAPTER

  Three

  The Greek laborers didn’t turn up the next day, though.

  This would have been a serious problem if it had happened in the middle of the excavation. With the expedition shutting down now, it became only a nuisance. No one had expected any more important finds, or else Director Hampton would have stayed on, getting one of the postdocs to fly back to Boston University and take over his lectures for a few weeks as the semester began.

  Claire had stayed principally to finish her own analysis of pottery found at the site. As the senior remaining American, she had to work with the Greeks to finish inventory, handle the shipping and seal up the tomb to prevent vandalism.

  She and George were the only staff left in camp qualified to work the dig. Originally, Kontos was to supervise this last phase, but since late June he had spent most of his time in Athens. His absence now left the Americans alone, except for a woman from the village who did the cooking and the camp man.

  Claire grudgingly admitted that George’s original framing in the tomb was probably structurally sound. Still, they reinforced his frame in the hole and studied the slab he had extracted from the tomb wall.

  It was unremarkable except for the concentric circle markings—the only design like it on the entire interior of the tomb. There were also chips around the edges and the mortar was partially gone. George proposed that these marks represented half-hearted efforts by looters to extract the slab. During the first thousand years after the burial the mortar should have been tough enough to discourage casual efforts.

  Mycenaean tombs were austere, a product of a people who had never known opulence. They echoed the Cretan fashion of a deep circular pit cut into the slope of a hillside. Modern archeologists termed them tholos tombs, from the ancient Greek word for round.

  The Mycenaeans made them by lining the pit with stone blocks, building to a high corbelled vault that projected above the hill. They differed from the Cretans by covering the vault with a mound, which in time blended into the hillside, making the tombs harder to find. During the high prosperous period of Mycenaean society, tombs could be discovered by looking for the long passage, dromos, which lanced inward. These may have been left open to the air because the tomb was used again for successive burials.

  The circles carved on the single block had provoked Claire to extract the slab in the first place, suspecting that it marked a recessed burial site. It had seemed an unpromising idea, because the Mycenaeans usually left everything out in plain sight. They had none of the cunning of the great Egyptian pyramid builders, who arranged blind approaches, deadfalls, fake chambers and other deceptions to mislead grave robbers. The Mycenaeans apparently expected that no one would ever despoil their tombs. This innocence Claire found rather endearing. These long dead people built with a tough simplicity, shaping and calculating their arched subterranean domes with an exactness that seldom yielded, even after 3500 years, to the decay of water seepage or earthquake.

  Usually a beehive tomb failed at the peak of the dome, toppling in, leaving a hole which a passing shepherd would eventually notice. This was why most of the known tombs were picked clean long before modern archeology began.

  This tomb was typical, though it had yielded an unusually rich trove. A native of a nearby town, Salandi, had called the Department of Antiquities and Restoration with a report of a hole in a seaside hill ten kilometers outside town. He had heard about it in a cafe.

  Grave robbers had gotten there long before. Beehive tombs were used only for royalty, and their descendants knew it; few had survived intact. Here the thieves had broken open urns and boxes, scattering most of the contents. There was no gold left, no crystal vases, nothing readily profitable.

  Tourists remembered best such valuables as the famous gold mask of Agamemnon, mistakenly identified by Schliemann when he took it from the Grave Circle at the Mycenaean Palace. It was glorious, beautiful, and told much about the royal life of the times. Archeologists, though, are equally interested in artifacts which show ordinary life, and in these the site was a good find. The dutiful servants of the dead had included tools, sealstones, daggers, bronze shortswords, utensils, stoneware, mirrors, combs, sandals—everything the dead King would need to set up housekeeping in the afterlife.

  The King himself was a jumbled sprawl of bleached bones, probably cast aside when the robbers tore apart his decayed shroud for the attached jewels. The bones were divided equally between the laboratory teams at Athens and Boston University, where they awaited further study. There were several sets of bones found, all at the same level. This could mean the Mycenaeans used the tomb for several generations, or that several were buried at once, or even that shepherds died here after the cave-in.

  Small items—pottery, minor jewelry, amethyst beads—were found buried under the heaps of infallen rock and dirt. The looters had apparently not bothered to dig to get everything possible. Streaks of black soot
on the walls spoke of centuries of use as a shelter from storms, probably by shepherds. Weathering gradually widened the hole in the dome, letting in the slow gathering of dust. The plumes of soot started several feet above the original floor, mute evidence that the fires had been laid on the accumulated debris of centuries.

  As usual, Kontos had whisked the prettiest or most striking artifacts off to Athens. He had given the Boston University expedition little time to study the best items, and rebuffed attempts to see them during the cleaning and analysis in the Athens laboratories.

  Last year the Marxist Greek government had demanded that digs no longer be run as before, through the American School of Classical Studies. Kontos became co-director, with veto power. Friction with Kontos over that and other issues had made the camp tense from early summer on.

  “That’s why I want to get a good look at everything, fast,” Claire said to George the next day.

  “Just because of Kontos? I know he’s hard to take, but we’ve got something special here. Have to be careful, or—”

  “Or we’ll run out of time.”

  “Once Kontos sees this, he’ll for sure let us stay on the whole month.”

  Claire had not told George about being pawed in the pottery tent. Kontos had left smoldering, which did not bode well. “Our permit has been withdrawn, remember?”

  “Just a formality.”

  “Ha! We’ve got a week, period. Kontos will stick by the book, you can bet on that.”

  “You’re exaggerating. Okay, he didn’t get along with us. But he’s a real scientist, for Chrissakes—”

  “And a colonel in their hotshot new Interior Guard.”

  “So? The government’s handing out titles and ranks right and left. Comic relief politicians.”

  “Listen, I’m in charge here.” Claire stood up, scowling. She remembered that having your opponent seated, looking up at you, was a useful maneuver. A yellow glow diffused through the tent, highlighting the dust on the boxes of potsherds that surrounded them. “Let’s pull out the top and bottom slabs. Now.”

  George shrugged. Claire felt momentary elation, but kept it from flickering across her face.

  “It’ll be easier if we wait for the damned laborers to come back,” he said sourly.

  “If they come back. They’re hot for politics these days, not grunt labor.”

  “Anything in this morning’s paper?”

  “Same old rantings. Japan and Brazil have cut into the Greek shipping trade again. Athens is claiming an international financial conspiracy.” Claire dutifully kept track of international matters, but she had no strong leanings. The effort of keeping her professional life going was quite enough, thank you.

  “Any US news?”

  “That referendum in California went through—they’re going to divide it into two states.”

  “Crazy! And we think the Greeks are feisty.” George rolled his eyes.

  “You should’ve seen the look the store owner gave me when I went in to buy a paper.”

  “Hey, good-looking single woman in a small town, I’m not surprised.”

  She shook her head, exasperated, ignoring the compliment, as usual. “It wasn’t that kind of look. He was hostile.”

  “Huh. Still, I’d like some extra hands to brace up that wall, it’s—”

  “I’ll help you. Come on.”

  They removed the bottom block first. It was the least dangerous, since it clearly was not supporting any significant weight. They worked it back from the wall, exposing the foot of the black rock, and saw a single straight line carved at the base.

  “Funny,” George said. “Not much of a design.”

  “Maybe it’s just a marker. ‘This end down.’”

  “Could be. Not every mark has to mean much.” He crouched to study it. “There’s some light-colored dust caught in the pits of the chisel marks.”

  “Perhaps that’s old paint. Leave it for the chem analysis.”

  “Yeah. What next?”

  George plainly wanted responsibility to fall on her. Very well, then: “Let’s remove the top block.”

  “How? The whole wall might give way.”

  She pursed her lips. “Frame around the cube. Then pull the top block out on a tackle and cradle rig.”

  George sighed. “If we’d wait until we got more help, it would for sure be safer.”

  “And later. Maybe too late. Let’s go.”

  When the top block came away, swinging easily in its web of ropes and chains, they both gasped.

  “That’s linear script!” George cried.

  “On stone.” Claire stared at the three freshly exposed lines of symbols. The letters were made by striking straight cuts into the stone. “No one has ever found any writing except on clay.”

  “Look at the chiseling. How it catches the light.”

  Claire ducked under the swaying block and brought the lamp closer. “More of the light-colored dust down in the pit of the grooves. Clay-based, perhaps. It still has a wet, shiny look.”

  She stepped back. With the top block gone the full size of the black limestone cube struck them. It was more than a meter high. A musty smell drifted out from the opening, carrying the reek of old, damp earth, open to the air for the first time in millennia. Claire wrinkled her nose. She would always associate that heavy, cloying scent with a grave she had helped open in Messenia. After two thousand years the body still had some stringy, dried fragments attached to the bones. Contact with the moist air brought forth a rank odor that drove her from the site, retching. Afterward she burned her clothes.

  Here it was not nearly so bad. The stench was simply organic matter in the soil, breathing out. There was no body wedged behind the blocks, she reminded herself. In a while the musty stench would drift away.

  “That—that script.”

  “Linear B. You know it, don’t you?”

  Claire frowned. “Yes, but…”

  No one had ever seen Linear B written on anything but clay tablets used for accounting. The Aegean Bronze Age had not advanced beyond the simple business-recording skills developed earlier by Syria and Mesopotamia. Scribes throughout the Peloponnesus kept track of transactions, probably for taxation, on unbaked clay slabs. There were lists of ladles, boiling pans, bathtubs, tables of inlaid ivory, ebony footstools, servants, arms, chariots, a myriad of details. Carefully stored on shelves in the archive room of palaces, they were accidentally fired to hardness by the arson that pulled down Mycenaean civilization. Phoenixlike, the tablets came forth from the flames to bring that lost world back to life.

  Claire remembered the tablets, the ragged way men had struck quick angular patterns to total up grain, cows, jugs of wine. To find such symbols used here, on stone, in a tomb, was remarkable. She should be thrilled. But something…

  “It’s not Linear B,” she exclaimed.

  George turned to her with disbelief. “What? I haven’t studied it much, but I can recognize some elements.”

  “Look again. There are similarities, but that could be from a difference in techniques, stone versus clay.”

  “But everybody around here used Linear B.”

  “True enough.” She touched fingers to her lips, thinking, and then noticed that she had caked them with dust. She shivered, spat, shook herself. “Uh!”

  “Yeah, kinda close in here, isn’t it?”

  “Take some photos, will you? I—I want to go look up a reference.”

  She hurried from the tomb, out along the dromos, seventy yards long. She breathed deeply, sucking in the sweetness of distant juniper. Along the path to camp there was the welcome sight of thick bushes like holly, but with swollen acorns sporting enormous cups. She reminded herself to look up the name of the plant sometime. For the moment, though, she had something else to find.

  Within ten minutes she had it. “Well, you were half right,” she called as she came striding back under the huge lintel and into the echoing chamber.

  George fired his flash for one more photo and
looked at her. “Which half?”

  “It’s linear, of course. But not B. It’s A.”

  He froze. “Can’t be.”

  “It is. I’ve matched eight symbols.” She held out a reference book. “Check them yourself.”

  “Can’t be.” He took the volume and held the transcribed pictures of clay tablets up to the light. She watched, faintly bemused, as his blond head swung back and forth from the book to the block’s letters. “Well…I see what you mean. But how did it get here?”

  Claire stepped under a hanging lamp and reached up to rub the chiseled marks. As her hand swept across them her arm shivered slightly, her nostrils caught the thick, musty scent, and she drew back.

  “Brought from Crete, perhaps,” she said softly. “Or, more likely, a Cretan laborer did the carving.” Linear A was a transcription of the Minoan language, or Eteocretan.

  “Just our luck. Linear B was deciphered back in the ’50s, right? How long until somebody’ll do the job for Linear A?”

  She shook her head, still gazing up at the enigmatic lines. They would have to get an analysis done on that clay or paint or whatever, she thought. “Probably never.”

  “There are new computer techniques, methods of—”

  “You need a referent. Something to make a correspondence with.” Claire dredged up the memories from lectures a decade old. How Alice Kober showed there were alterations in the syllabic endings of words in Linear B, proving that it was an inflected tongue. How a British architect cross-correlated vowels, and when fresh tablets turned up at Pylos, they confirmed his predictions. Linear B was Greek. The Greeks had taken over the Semitic syllabary, attached vowel sounds to those signs, and so invented consonant signs. Thus was born the first full alphabet, a true written language. Only, was it? Or did the Minoans do the trick first, with Linear A? No one knew. “We haven’t got any such information about Linear A. Nobody knows what Minoan sounded like.”