He had often thought about asking the rather attractive French girl out and would have if it hadn’t been for her on-again, off-again sometime relationship with Dylan, whom Jason had never met. It appeared their relationship had turned serious. Not that he was ever likely to have persuaded her to go out with him even if she had been single. None of the other girls he’d asked out since beginning here at College had been interested enough to consider even a first date. At least the couple of girls he’d met through the online dating service he was on had at least gone on one date with him. Besides, he did not have enough time for a girlfriend. Really, he didn’t.

Chapter 5

Change in approach

Back at his desk, he quickly finished translating the other Linear B tablets, then spent a couple of hours checking his translation against the only extant published one of the lower group of tablets. He found a few differences between his translation and the published one, which wasn’t surprising given the vagaries of deciphering a three-thousand-year-old language. On re-checking the tablets, he decided that his interpretation of the text was correct in every case. There was nothing specific to base this on, but his conversations with Urasmian had given him a feel for Hellandios, which he thought was very similar to Mycenean. That ease of use and the understanding of what Urasmian was saying seemed to have carried over into reading the Mycenean tablets. He suspected that if he saw written Hellandios, it would also look like Mycenean. By the time he was finished, the afternoon was nearly over. He thought about heading home but then decided to have a coffee break and come back and look at the Linear A tablets before heading home for a late dinner.

Studying the Linear A tablets was strange after the Linear B ones, as they were so similar in appearance, although the Linear A ones were messier. He wondered if the letters had similar phonetics to the Mycenean ones and began sounding them out while comparing the two groups on the screen, two by two and two tablets deep, scrolling up and down. There was something about them, the sounds as he mouthed them, the shape of the text blocks. He paused and moved the images into a proper graphics program. He arranged the images of the tablets, so they were displayed side by side and by the shape of the text blocks, re-arranging the order and fiddling until he was happy. And he could almost make sense of them. Almost. Hmmm.

Then he noticed that Linear A Tablet four had a two-word block that seemed to match Linear B Tablet six. He re-arranged them again and compared these two. One cow was the Linear B two-word sentence. So, if that symbol was one and that was a cow, did those symbol combinations appear on any other Linear A tablets? And if the two tablets were recording the same information, what else could he decipher? While puzzling over the characters, he started running the spell Urasmian had used to travel home through his head. He had worked out that Keftu most likely referred to Crete, especially as it was similar to the Egyptian word for the island. With Keftios being both the name for the island’s people and the term for the language they spoke.