Tales of Neveryon (37 page)

‘So,’ said Raven, ‘once again tonight we are presented with a mysterious sign and no way to know whether it completes a pattern or destroys one.’ The laugh this time was something that only went on behind her closed lips. ‘They cannot fly very far. There is no ledge for her to perch on. And once she lands, in this swampy morass, she won’t be able to regain flight. Her wings will tear in the brambles and she will never fly again.’

But almost as if presenting the image of some ironic answer, the wings flapped against a sudden, high, unfelt breeze, and the beast, here shorn of all fables, rose and rose – for a while – under the night.

– New York
July ’78

(Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three)

by S. L. Kermit

When, in the spring of 1947, Muhammed the Wolf flung his stone into the cave near Ain Feshkla, breaking open the jar containing the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or, indeed, when, eighty years before, the Turkish archeologist Rassam and the Englishmen Layard and Smith shoveled through into the Temple Library at Nineveh, giving the world the Gilgamesh epic, both provided steps in a clarification that had been progressing apace even among the discoveries made as Schliemann’s workers sunk their pickaxes at Hissàrlik.

The fragment known as the Culhar’ (or sometimes the Kolhar
ē
) Text – and more recently as the Missolonghi Codex (from the Greek town where the volumes, now on store in the basement of the Istanbul Archeological Museum, were purchased in the nineteenth century, and which contain what is now considered to be one of the two oldest versions of the text known) – not only has a strange history, but a strangely disseminated history. The most recent stage of that dissemination has joined it with an abstruse mathematical theory and the creative mind of a fascinating young scholar.

The Culhar’ Text itself, a narrative fragment of approximately nine hundred words, has been known and noted in many languages for centuries, among them Sanskrit, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Proto-Latin. From time to time, claims of great antiquity have been made for it –
4,500
B.C
., or even 5,000
B.C
., which would put it practically inside the muzzy boundaries of the neolithic revolution. But such claims, at least until recently, have been dismissed by serious scholars as fanciful.

Still, the fact that versions of the text have been found in so many languages suggests that at one time it was considered a text of great importance in the ancient world. But the reasons why the text was considered so important have only recently come to light.

The only ancient people who did not, apparently, know of the Culhar’ fragment were, oddly, the Attic Greeks – though their ignorance of it no doubt goes a long way to explain the length of time it has taken for modern speculation to reach any productive level.

In 1896, four years after Haupt published the second of his two-volume edition of the then extant cuneiform tablets, by chance a scholar of ancient Persian, visiting Peter Jensen in Germany when the latter was engaged in his German translations which were to appear in 1900 and 1901, recognized one of the fragmentary tablets that had been clearly excluded from the Gilgamesh tale as a Babylonian version of the Culhar’, which till then had more or less generally been thought to have originated in ancient Persia many years later.

The establishment of the Culhar’ Text’s composition at a date notably before Homer was a highly significant discovery. Indeed, had the Nineveh tablets been found to contain, say, a Babylonian translation of one of the Homeric hymns, scholarly circles would no doubt have been thrown into a turmoil that would still be reflected today in every introduction to the Iliad or the Odyssey and every popularized account of modern archeological investigations. As it was, however, the notice taken of that discovery seems to have been restricted to mentions
only by three German orientalists. And two of those mentions were in footnotes. Still, at least one of the footnotes made the point that a question – which apparently had last vexed a whole monastery full of ninth-century Rumanian monks – had once again come to the fore: In just what language did the Culhar’ fragment originate?

Schliemann’s successor at Hissàrlik, Carl William Blegan, discovered a Greek version of the text in the fourth down of the nine cities built one a-top the other at the site of Troy. Did even older versions exist in level Vila, the level now believed to be the historical Ilium? If so, it was apparently not among the booty Agamemnon brought back to the Argolis.

We have mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls already: what was found in ’47, among the sewn-together parchments in their wrappings of linen and pitch among the jars and copper scrolls from the caves on the Dead Sea Shore, was one parchment fragment, clearly not among the major scrolls and not clearly related to the Essene protocols as were the interesting majority of the others, containing an ancient Hebrew text that seemed to be nothing less than a fragmentary vocabulary in which hieroglyphiclike markings were equated with ancient Hebrew words and phrases. It was initially assumed, by Khun, Baker and others, that this was a lexicon to facilitate the study of some lost Egyptian text. But either because of the political situation existing between Egypt and Israel, or because the Hebrew words were not part of the vocabulary associated with the Exodus, interest was more or less deferred in this particular parchment. (Edmund Wilson in his book on the Dead Sea Scrolls does not even mention its existence.) And the judgement that the language was actually Egyptian was, itself, disputed on so many counts that the
question finally vanished with the excitement over the contents of other texts from other jars, other sites.

At any rate, it was not until 1971 that a young American scholar, K. Leslie Steiner, who had been given an informal account of this parchment by a friend at the University of Tel Aviv, realized that most of the Hebrew words seemed to be translations of words that appeared in that at-one-time most ubiquitous of ancient texts: the Culhar’ fragment.

K. Leslie Steiner was born in Cuba in 1949. Her mother was a black American from Alabama; her father was an Austrian Jew. From 1951 on, Steiner grew up in Ann Arbor, where both her parents taught at the University of Michigan, and where Steiner now holds joint tenure in the German, Comparative Literature, and Mathematics departments.

Steiner’s mathematical work has mostly been done by an obscure spin-off of a branch of category theory called ‘naming, listing, and counting theory.’ By the time she was twenty-two, her work had established her as one of America’s three leading experts in the field. This was the work that she was shortly to bring to bear on the problem of this ancient text in such a novel and ingenious way. When she was twenty-four, Steiner published a book called
The Edge of Language
with Bowling Green University Press – not, as one might imagine from our account so far, a treatise on ancient scripts, but rather a study of linguistic patterns common to comic books, pornography,
contemporary poetry, and science fiction,
*
one of the decade’s more daunting volumes in the field of popular and cross-cultural studies. Steiner’s linguistic/archeological interests, nevertheless, have been a consuming amateur hobby – the tradition, apparently, with so many who have made the greatest contributions to the field, from Heinrich Schliemann himself to Michael Ventris, both of whom were basically brilliant amateurs.

Steiner’s recognition of the scroll as a lexicon meant to facilitate the study of the Culhar’ Text in some long-lost language would be notable enough. But Steiner also went on to establish that the language was
not
Egyptian, at least not any variety we possess. Eighteen months of followup seemed to suggest, from the appearance of the lost script, that, if anything, it was a variety of writing related to the cuneiform ideograms of the Mesopotamian and Indus Valley regions. Her subsequent efforts to locate exactly
which
form of cuneiform it might be (during which she herself distinguished three distinct forms among the numerous untranslatable tablets that still exist) will no doubt someday make another fascinating book. Suffice it to say, however, that in 1974, one Yavus Ahmed Bey, a 24-year-old research assistant in the Istanbul Archeological Museum, directed Steiner to a codex of untranslated (and presumably untranslatable) texts on store in the library archives.

The codex, a set of loose parchments and vella, had been purchased in Missolonghi in the late summer of 1824, a city and a year that readers of Romantic poetry will immediately associate with the death of Byron – though
from all accounts, the sale of the codex, some four months after the poet’s death in the war-ravaged town, had nothing to do with Byron
per se
. Indeed the 36-year-old poet, who, by the cruel April of his demise, had become obese, drunken, and drug besotted, has the dubious distinction of more than likely knowing nothing at all of the valuable collection of texts that shared the village with him in a basement storage chest a kilometer and a half up the road. The private collector who bought the codex immediately spirited it away to Ankara.

Shortly after World War I, the codex came to the Istanbul museum, where apparently it remained, all but unexamined by any save the odd research assistant. It took Steiner only an afternoon’s search through the contents of the codex to locate the short, five-page text, clearly in the same script as the parchment unearthed thirty years before by a Bedouin youth. Between the Ancient Hebrew lexicon and what is known of other translations of the Culhar’ fragment, it was comparatively simple to establish that here was, indeed, a parchment copy of still another version of the Culhar’, this time in an unknown cuneiform-style language. But the significant point here was a note, in yet
another
language, written at the end of this parchment; we must point out again that this codex was purchased in 1824 and all but ignored till 1974. But since the late 1950’s, practically any amateur concerned with ancient scripts would have recognized the script of the appended note: it was the ancient Greek syllabary writing from Crete, deciphered by the young engineer Michael Ventris in 1954, known as Linear-B.

The parchment itself, from the evidence of other markings, most probably dates from the third century
A.D
., but it is also most probably a copy made from a much older
source,
*
very possibly by someone who did not know the meaning of the letters put down. Indeed, it is the only fragment of Linear-B ever to be found outside of Crete. And it is a language that, as far as we know, no one has known how to read for something in the neighborhood of five to six thousand years. The Linear-B fragment, which was soon translated, reads:

Above these words are written the oldest writing known to wise men by a human hand. It is said that they were written in the language of the country called by our grandparents Transpoté.

Here, in this fragment, we most certainly have the explanation for why the Culhar’ was so widespread during ancient times and the nature of its importance: apparently, over a good deal of Europe and Asia Minor, the Culhar’ Text was once thought to be the origin of writing, or the archetrace.

Where Transpoté might be is a complete mystery still, though from internal evidence one would assume it was on a coast somewhere, of a body of water large enough to have islands more than a day’s sail from land. In Greek, ‘Transpoté’ would seem to be possibly a play on the words ‘across never.’ The Homeric meaning includes the possibility of ‘across when’ or ‘a distant once.’ There is also, of course, a more prosaic reading possible, that reads ‘pote-’ as some sort of apocopation of ‘potamos’ meaning river, so that the translation may simply be ‘across the river.’ Other translations possible are ‘far never’ and ‘far when’ – none of which, alas, helps us locate the actual country.

But if the Linear-B fragment is authentic, then it establishes with high probability the neolithic origins of the Culhar’ text – and probably the language transcribed in the Missolonghi Codex – since Linear-B was in use only in the very early stages of the history of the neolithic palaces at Cnossos, Phaistos, and Malliá.

But to explain the nature of Steiner’s major contribution, we must leave the Culhar’ fragment itself for a page or so and speak about the origins of writing; and about Steiner’s mathematical work.

The currently reigning archeological theory holds that writing as we know it began not as marks made on paper or skins, or even impressions made on soft clay with pointed sticks, but rather as a set of clay tokens in the shapes of spheres, half spheres, cones, tetrahedrons, and – at a later date – doublecones (or biconoids), as well as other shapes, some with holes or lines inscribed on them, some without. For some five thousand years at least (
c
. 7,000
B.C
. to
c
. 2,000
B.C
.) these tokens in various parts of the Middle East formed a system of account keeping, the various tokens representing animals, foods, jars: and the numbers of them corresponding to given amounts of these goods. The tokens have been found in numerous archeological sites from numerous periods. Until recently archeologists tended to assume they were beads, gaming pieces, children’s toys, or even religious objects. The consistency in the shapes from site to site, however, has only recently been noted. And it was practically at the same time as Steiner was making her discoveries in Istanbul that Denise
Schmandt-Besserat realized that a number of the cuneiform signs in the clay tablets associated with Uruk and Nineveh were simply two-dimensional representations of these three-dimensional shapes, complete with their added incisions, holes, and decorations.