He unloaded his laptop from his backpack and started it up. While waiting for the computer to start up, he pulled a couple of other bits and pieces out of his bag while mentally getting himself back into academic mode, which was surprisingly hard after the previousweek’s tumult. His laptop was neither the fastest nor most capable of machines, being several years old and relatively cheap at that, so it took a few moments to load up. After waiting, with growing impatience, he was finally able to connect to the University’s net and pull up the files he needed to be able to continue his doctorate thesis on aspects of the Mycenean conquest of Crete.

It took him longer than usual to get himself back up to date on where he had been before the break, and then he made an astonishing discovery. He had been working through a collection of Linear B tablets found recently in Crete at Chania or Kydonia, as the locals and ancient Greeks called it. The find had consisted of the very faint remains of a typical Mycenean storage box which had held approximately thirty Linear B tablets. The more interesting discovery had been that underneath this box, the archaeologists had found a small cache of twenty other tablets, ten Linear B and ten Linear A.

The entire collection of tablets had been found in a fire-affected layer and were virtually intact as the collapse of the building they were in had formed a rubble barrier that had then been built over very soon after the original destruction and fire. The rapid rebuilding resulted in minimal disturbance until a modern building was to be built on the site, and a team of archaeologists was employed to comb the site before site works commenced. It was possible the lower collection of tablets pre-dated the later one by a considerable margin, or maybe not. The two types of tablets being found together meant that the tablets were almost certainly from the period when the Myceneans swept in and took over Crete, which was the period he was studying. Almost certainly. Hopefully!

He called up the images of the tablets and determined where he had reached in his decipherment of them. Other, more experienced scholars had produced translations already, but he had chosen to do his own translation and only then check it against the ‘experts’ version. Translations were always subject to the translator’s biases. There were numerous examples in the world of classical studies where this occurred. The Roman words for spear were often translated just as the word spear, but they all described different weapons with different uses, and it meant that the different troop types were used differently despite them all being armed with ‘spears’. Such nuances were important and could lead to a faulty understanding or a misinterpretation of the facts. When dealing with a poorly understood period, nuances were even more important.

 He had managed four of the tablets before the term break, so he called up the enlarged, hi-res version of the fifth and started translating. And found it much easier than before when it had taken him most of the day to struggle through one tablet, constantly referring to reference books to check his interpretation of this word or that. Then he did the next tablet, and translating that got even easier! It was like the more he read and looked up translations of words, the more he understood. The next one was even easier to translate, and before he knew it, he found he had translated four in no time at all. By the time he finished the fourth, he was essentially just reading them like he would if they had been written in German, which was the only foreign language he knew well. Wait, what? He could read Mycenean? What the, huh!