It tells us much about the society in general, of course, but I suddenly had an image: archeologists 3,500 years in the future come across a scrap of someone’s Wal-Mart receipt or shopping list, publish their finding in major scholarly journals, and then send it off to a museum where people will then marvel at the mysteries of Gatorade at $1.09 for a 12-oz bottle. It’s unclear other than to say that this was writing that reflected the everyday material pursuits of the Mycenaeans, and not something of any literary merit. Perhaps it was a checklist of who met their manufacturing quota. ![]() Maybe it was a time sheet or employee roster. The back lists names alongside numbers-probably a property list.” Fittingly, the markings on the front of the Iklaina tablet appear to form a verb that relates to manufacturing, the researchers say. “The Mycenaeans appear to have used Linear B to record only economic matters of interest to the ruling elite. Milk, eggs, paper towels, batteries.(Photo courtesy of Heritage Key) I understand the implications of finding this tablet, but my first reaction was to chuckle when I read this paragraph: The tablet was the oldest example of Linear B, a form of ancient Greek. But what about a real code? How far would I get before I admitted defeat? I’d been thinking about this for nearly two weeks, ever since I saw a National Geographic article describing the discovery of a tablet displaying the oldest readable writing in Europe. How would I do at code-breaking, though? I do like cryptograms and could solve them without undue effort. I’ve had beginning ESL students who could find more words in antidisestablishmentarianism than I could. Whenever I see one of these puzzles, I seem to forget that I do poorly at them, so I attack them eagerly, get frustrated after about three minutes, and then walk away, muttering about stupid word choices – who ever heard of incunabula anyway? Something about the way those puzzles are visually arranged just confuse me. I am a self-professed lover of words so I should love any and all word games, right? I am actually good at crossword puzzles and do enjoy them, but I am useless at anagrams and word jumbles. I like codes, but here’s a strange contradiction about me. One of us would say loudly, “And then he lost a testicle!” and we would all pretend that we were simply telling dirty jokes. That was when we started to use that phrase to alert each other to when the person we’d been complaining about was approaching the group. ![]() The third item is an example of the kinds of things that sleep-deprived graduate students come up with over an Indian buffet lunch after inadvertently embarrassing a waiter. The sequence above represents the Navajo words for needle, ant, victor and yucca, the first letters of which spell out the word ‘Navy.’ This is one of several brilliant tactics using the real Navajo language that made this ‘code’ impossible for the Japanese to crack. The second is Navajo, which was used in World War 2 for encrypted messages in the Navy. The first code is binary, the numerical code that is driving everything that we are doing on our computers right now. If you guessed that they are all codes, then you were correct! Huzzah! ![]()
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