IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 266

In the spring of 1900 the British archaeologist Arthur Evans began digging at Knossos, in the centre of Crete, on a site that local people had long connected with the legendary King Minos. Inside a vast palace he uncovered hundreds of small clay tablets, many of them broken, covered with a script that nobody could read. The tablets had survived by accident.

They were records of the palace's stores, and they had been baked hard by the fire that destroyed the palace, so that what would normally have crumbled away lasted as pottery lasts. Evans called the writing Linear B, to distinguish it from an earlier and quite different script, also found on the island, which became known as Linear A.

Evans devoted the rest of his career to the script and published a lavish volume reproducing many of the tablets, but he never succeeded in reading them, and at his death in 1941 very little had been established. The difficulty was formidable. The tablets are not literature but lists: quantities of grain and oil, numbers of sheep, names of men and women, offerings to deities. Because they are short and repetitive, they offer almost no purchase to a code-breaker, and there was no bilingual inscription of the kind that allowed the Rosetta Stone to unlock Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In 1939 the picture changed. Carl Blegen, excavating the palace of Nestor at Pylos in the south-west of the Greek mainland, found a further archive of several hundred tablets in the same script, which proved that Linear B was not confined to Crete and gave scholars a second body of material. A young American, Emmett Bennett, then produced a careful catalogue of the Pylos signs, so that researchers could at last compare sequences reliably instead of relying on hand copies of uneven quality.

The most systematic attack on the problem was made by Alice Kober, a classicist at Brooklyn College in New York. Working largely alone, she recorded every group of signs on index cards and analysed them statistically, refusing to guess at sounds or meanings until the evidence forced a conclusion. Her patience was rewarded. She identified sets of words that shared a stem but differed in their endings, and from these she deduced that the language was inflected, that its words changed form according to their grammatical role, as Greek and Latin do. She never travelled to Crete, and she died in 1950, two years before the script was read.

The person who finished the work was not a professional scholar at all. Michael Ventris trained as an architect, but as a schoolboy he had heard Evans lecture and had been captivated by the puzzle; he had even published an article proposing, wrongly, that the language was related to Etruscan. He corresponded with Bennett and other scholars, and devised a technique of his own: a grid in which signs were arranged so that those thought to share a consonant stood in one column and those thought to share a vowel in one row. Every new guess about a value could be tested at once against all the others.

The decisive clue came not from grammar but from geography. Certain groups of signs appeared only on the tablets from Knossos and nowhere in the Pylos material. Ventris noticed that some of them matched the names of places on Crete, including Knossos itself and the port of Amnisos, and that others looked like towns of the west of the island. If those readings were right, they supplied the values of several vowels at once, and the grid began to fill. Ventris took his results to John Chadwick, a Cambridge classicist, who tested the readings against known Greek vocabulary and endings. The conclusion, announced in 1952, was startling: the tablets were written in Greek.

Announcement was one thing, acceptance another. Some scholars, especially those who had followed Evans in believing the script to be Minoan, resisted the conclusion, and a few went on doubting it for years. Support came from an unexpected direction when Blegen, digging at Pylos, unearthed a tablet listing vessels whose entries made sense under Ventris's values. In 1953 the two men set out their case at length in a learned journal, and in 1956 they published Documents in Mycenaean Greek, the first substantial collection of the texts in translation. In the same year Ventris, then thirty-four, was killed in a car accident.

Linear B proved a clumsy instrument. It has about eighty-seven signs, each standing for a syllable, together with picture signs for commodities, and its spelling is imprecise: r and l are not distinguished, nor are voiced and unvoiced consonants, and final consonants are usually omitted. A Greek word may therefore appear in a form that looks strange to anyone who knows classical Greek. The texts are overwhelmingly administrative, recording rations for workers, flocks, bronze and offerings, and they say almost nothing about the period's literature or its laws. They do, however, preserve the names of deities later worshipped in classical Greece, among them Poseidon.

The consequences were considerable. Greek-speaking administrators had evidently been running Knossos long before the classical age, which upset the older picture of a purely Minoan Crete, and the tablets showed that the mainland palaces and the island belonged to a single connected culture. The decipherment remains one of the great feats of twentieth-century scholarship, not least because it was achieved without a bilingual key. Linear A, the earlier script, has never been read, and the language it records is still unknown.

For most of recorded history, the commonest surface for writing in the Mediterranean world was not papyrus, parchment or paper but a shallow tray of wax. A rectangular board of wood, or sometimes of ivory, was hollowed out to leave a raised rim, and the hollow was filled with a layer of beeswax. The rim protected the soft surface from whatever the closed tablet touched. The writer used a stilus, a slender rod of bronze, iron or bone, pointed at one end and flattened at the other: the point cut into the wax, while the flat end smoothed the surface and wiped out what had been written.

The Romans called such a tablet a tabula cerata, and a small one meant to be held in the hand a pugillaris, from pugnus, a fist. Two boards were often joined by a cord passed through holes at one edge so that they opened and closed like a book, and three or more could be tied together to make a notebook of several leaves. The Latin word codex, from which the modern term for a bound book derives, originally meant a block of wood, and sets of tablets may lie behind the familiar book form.

Wax was used for almost everything that had to be written down and might later be altered or discarded. Schoolchildren practised letters on it, merchants kept accounts, soldiers wrote home, and lawyers drew up contracts and receipts. Because the surface could be smoothed and used again, a tablet was economical, and it was the natural medium for a first draft. Some legal instruments, however, were required to be written in wax and sealed by witnesses, so the ephemeral medium also carried documents of the highest importance.

The oldest surviving example comes from the sea. A trading ship that sank off the southern coast of what is now Turkey around 1300 BC, at Uluburun, carried a wooden writing board whose two hinged leaves still held traces of wax. The find shows that the technology was established in the eastern Mediterranean in the late Bronze Age, centuries before the Roman tablets that historians usually discuss.

Survival, though, is the exception. Wax melts and is eaten by insects, and wood rots, so the everyday writing of the ancient world has almost entirely vanished. What remains has come down to us by three routes. Some tablets were carbonised in the fires that destroyed the buildings where they were stored. Some lay in waterlogged or sealed ground where decay was halted. And in many cases the wax itself has long since gone, but the writer's stilus cut through it into the wood beneath, leaving lines that can still be read. The archive of a banker at Pompeii, more than a hundred and fifty tablets of receipts, survives in exactly this way: a faint script of scratches on bare wood.

Conditions of a different kind preserved the tablets found at Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern Britain. There, in waterlogged deposits, archaeologists have recovered hundreds of thin wooden leaves from the decades around AD 100. These are not wax tablets at all: they were written on in ink with a pen, and they include personal letters, duty rosters, requests for leave and an invitation to a birthday party. Their survival depended on the exclusion of air.

Wax tablets have also survived where the ground itself protected them. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more than twenty were discovered in Roman gold mines in Dacia, in what is now Romania, where they had lain undisturbed in a gallery. They date from the second century AD and record contracts between miners and contractors. They form one of the largest groups of Latin legal documents on wax to survive from the provinces, and they are valuable precisely because they are ordinary: they show how business was actually done rather than how it was described by lawyers in Rome.

The bias in this evidence is obvious and troubling. If most writing was done on a medium that disappears, the surviving texts cannot be treated as a sample of what was written. Papyrus survives in quantity only in the dry sand of Egypt; wooden tablets survive only where fire, water or sealing excluded the organisms that would otherwise have destroyed them. Historians who estimate levels of literacy from the surviving material are therefore on uncertain ground, and they disagree about how far the fragments can be generalised. A single archive may reflect one household, one decade or one exceptionally careful official.

Some of these questions have been approached by experiment. Scholars have made replica tablets, mixing wax with soot and writing with reconstructed stiluses, in order to see how quickly a scribe could work and how legible the result would be. The results suggest that writing in wax was rapid, and that mistakes could be corrected simply by smoothing the surface. The experiments show what was possible, not what was usual. They also reveal the limits of the medium: the wax marks easily, and a tablet holds far fewer words than a sheet of papyrus of the same size.

The wax tablet outlived the ancient world. It was used in monasteries and schools throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, and it left its mark on the language: tabula rasa, a smoothed tablet, gives us the modern phrase for a mind without impressions. What was once the most ordinary object in the ancient world is now known to us mainly through accidents of preservation.

Historians have two audiences, and a long argument about which of them matters more. On one side is the seminar, the journal and the monograph, where claims are tested by people who know the evidence; on the other is the reading public, which buys the books, fills the lecture halls and, in most countries, pays for the universities through taxation. The complaint that academic history has become unreadable is now a commonplace of newspapers, and it usually comes with the observation that the best-selling histories are written by journalists rather than professors.

The case for the specialist audience rests on the nature of historical knowledge. History is not a body of settled facts that can be summarised for the general reader; it is an argument about evidence. A claim about the causes of a famine is only as good as the documents behind it, and those are technical. To present the conclusion without the argument is to invite the reader to take the historian's word for it, which is exactly what a discipline is supposed to resist. On this view the proper audience of a historian is other historians, not because the public is unworthy but because the public cannot check the work.

This is a serious argument, but it is often used to defend writing that is merely bad. Obscurity is not the same as difficulty. Much academic prose is hard to read not because its ideas are subtle but because it has not been revised; the passive voice, the chain of qualifications, the paragraph that begins by summarising the previous one — these are habits, not necessities. The same historians, asked to explain their work to a first-year class, can usually do it in plain words without losing anything that matters.

There is also a question of payment. In Britain, and in much of Europe, historical research is funded largely from public money, and national assessments of research now require universities to describe how their work has benefited people outside academia. It is difficult to argue that the public should pay for knowledge and then be told that its understanding is not the historian's business. The argument does not require every historian to appear on television, but it does require that the results of publicly funded work be available in a form that an interested non-specialist can use.

Against this stands a third position, which might be called the market view. It holds that historians, like other writers, should give the public what it wants: narrative, personality, controversy and a lesson for the present. It is popular with publishers, and not entirely contemptible. But it mistakes a market for a standard. What the public wants is not the same as what the public needs, and a history shaped by the demand for novelty will drift away from the evidence.

A fourth position is more respectable but, I think, mistaken: the translation model. On this view, historians should do their research in the ordinary way and then render the finished product into simpler language for a wider audience. The difficulty is not that something is lost but that the model misunderstands how writing works. Explaining an argument to a non-specialist is not a coat of paint applied at the end; it is a test of the argument itself. Almost every historian who has tried it has found a weak joint in the reasoning, a step that depended on the reader already knowing the answer.

The public sphere matters, moreover, because it is not empty. If professional historians decline to address it, others will. Popular history that is careless with evidence, television programmes that present speculation as discovery, and political campaigns that invoke a golden age which never existed all shape how people understand the past, and they are not easily corrected afterwards. Historians who complain that the public is being misled, while writing only for one another, have surrendered the argument before it begins. Correcting a distortion is part of the work, not a distraction from it.

None of this means that every historian must write for a general reader. A great deal of essential work is unglamorous: scholarly editions, catalogues of manuscripts, excavation reports, the slow reconstruction of a tax system. Such work is the infrastructure on which every popular book depends, and it would be absurd to demand that it be recast for the bookshop. It is equally absurd, though, to treat it as the only respectable kind of history. The discipline needs both, and the balance has tilted too far in one direction.

The reasons for the tilt are not mysterious. Promotion and appointment in most universities are decided mainly on the basis of monographs and articles in specialist journals, and time spent writing for a wider audience is time not spent on them. Exhorting historians to write for the public while rewarding only the other kind of writing is a familiar sort of hypocrisy, and it will not be cured by exhortation.

The choice between the public and the profession is therefore a false one, and I would go further: it damages both. Writing for specialists without ever trying to explain the work to anyone else narrows the questions historians ask; writing for the market without the discipline of the seminar produces books that are entertaining and unreliable. The standard should be the same in either case: say what the evidence supports, and be honest about what it does not.