AIA CHICAGO 8B: Writing in the Bronze Age.
January 7, 2024
Tom Palaima “Chairs and Stools and their Status Implications in the Pylos Ta ‘Totenmahl’ Inventory”
INTRODUCTION:
Tom Palaima says he is someone who has been lucky to work literally for 50 years now on Linear B, for forty-nine years off and on on the Ta series alone.
For the first thirty-seven years, he worked at first under and quickly alongside a kind, supportive, honest, music-loving, accepting, quietly playful and truly gentle man, Emmett L. Bennett, Jr, recipient of the AIA gold medal in 2001, who passed away twelve years ago on December 15, 2011.
Emmett became a trusted friend to Tom and, eventually, in his last five years, with Alzheimer’s, a twelve-year-old boy who loved ice cream and music, two lifelong passions. The many times Tom arrived at Emmett’s final place of care in Madison, and his daughter Cynthia would ask Emmett “Who’s that?”, Emmett would answer, “He’s my friend.” That is, Tom says, the greatest honor of his life.
Tom reports that the process is well underway, as some of you know, of transferring from PASP at UT Austin the papers, research notes, photographs, manuscripts, and typescripts, and letters of Alice E. Kober, Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., Michael Ventris, William Brice, Elizabeth Barber and other related scholars (like John Franklin Daniel and Tom’s own extensive research papers) to their permanent home in the archives of the Department of Classics University of Cincinnati. There they will merge with the archives of Bennett’s revered mentor Carl Blegen.
He wants to thank publicly Garrett Bruner, PASP-INSTAP archivist at UT, Jeff Kramer, archivist at UC, Jack Davis, Kathleen Lynch, Daniel Markovich and the entire Classics program at UC for making sure that these valuable materials will be preserved and available for future scholars. He also thanks INSTAP and UT Austin for many, many years of support.
There is much work to do still with these archives—Brent Davis and Anthony Bronzo just this past year in the last eight months made a brilliant breakthrough in how the over 200,000 cigarette carton notecards relate to Kober’s Brooklyn College notebooks and how transferring the data analytically from one to the other led to her discovery of the sign groups appearing as triples, which we now know, as Ventris ascertained, are Cretan place names and their masculine and feminine adjectival forms. Using the PASP archives has produced, since Margalit Fox’s sensational book on Kober’s work, The Riddle of the Labyrinth (2013), the following:
Ciphers – An Opera (2023)
by Bernadine Corrigan
‘Ciphers’ tells the true story of two brilliant and complex people, Michael Ventris and Alice Kober, and their quest to decipher the ancient script known as Linear B. It is a story of clashing personalities, thwarted ambition, success and tragedy. The opera uses dramatic reconstruction, comedy and mythical fantasy to reveal the fascinating lives of two extraordinary people.’
Music by Greg Arrowsmith
Libretto by Bernadine Corrigan
Cast
Michael Ventris – Henry Ross (voice); Simon Stallard
Alice Kober – Katharine Taylor-Jones
Theseus – Benjamin Noble
Ariadne – Alice Johnston
Sir John Myres – Graeme Danby
Michael’s Mother – Camilla Jeppeson
Directed by – Elaine Tyler Hall
Director of Photography – Bjorn Ventris
Camera Operator – George Petais
Edited by – Bjorn Ventris
Sound Engineer – Anthony Galatis
Costume – Hannah Heaf
Producers – Bernadine Corrigan & Patrick Thompson
Deciphering the Silence: A Literary Journey to Alice E. Kober
By Regina Dürig
In the autumn of 2017, Regina Dürig visited PASP to complete her dissertation, Deciphering the Silence: A Literary Journey to Alice E. Kober. In it, she explored Kober’s life in creative ways, taking a literary journey with her in order to start ‘deciphering the silence’.
For the PASP website, she authored a piece about her visit to Austin, Texas, and her work at PASP.
More about Regina’s research and other works can be found at this interview with the Swiss Consulate of New York.
The Grid
by Eli Payne Mandel
The American edition of Eli Mandel’s brilliant tri-sequenced 92-page narrative poem, The Grid, has just appeared. It focuses for its first forty-seven pages on Kober’s life and work.
Released by the UK based press Carcanet in late 2023, The Grid was named The Telegraph’s Poetry Book of the month August 2023. From the publisher’s website, The Grid’s abstract reads:
“The Grid is about the end of worlds, ancient and modern. In three sequences of poems interspersed with Mandel’s own translations from classical texts, figures of obsession and loneliness try to decrypt what Maurice Blanchot called ‘the writing of the disaster’. Like a detective novel, the title sequence pieces together archival fragments into a lyric essay about Alice Kober, the half-forgotten scholar behind the decipherment of the ancient writing system called Linear B. Across different wartimes, Mandel adapts the typography and formatting of archived papers, their overlaps and errors and aporias, which compel readers to invest creatively in the very act of reading, learning new ways into language as they go.”
“I Pity the Poor Immigrant: Celebrating the Gradually Un-forgotten Life and Work of Alice Elizabeth Kober”
May 21/22, 2023 National Archaeology Week 2023 at Macquarie University, Australia
Tom Palaima delivered an opening Key-Note Lecture in connection with the exhibition Mysteries Revisited: From Ancient Codes to Comic Culture. The exhibition featured original research materials of Alice Kober from the PASP archives.