Investigating anomalies offers great challenges. One seeks to study what the consensus of scholarship or science asserts to be spurious or impossible. Any progress is dismissed if it contradicts established views. Very rarely can one make a living as a teacher or researcher while engaged primarily in pursuit of anomalies.

On all these grounds, anomalist researchers will be able to empathize with Steven Roger Fischer. He became fascinated by the challenge of two undeciphered scripts in unknown languages: the apparently hieroglyphic script of the Minoan Phaistos Disk and, on the other side of the world, the Rongorongo Script of Easter Island. The conventional wisdom says that decipherment is possible only of an unknown script recording a known language, or of an unknown language in a known script - that one can but shrug at an unknown script when the underlying language is not known. Nevertheless Fischer succeeded in both instances. His story is intellectually exciting, and written sufficiently well that lay people like myself can follow it with interest and pleasure.

In some respects, decipherment of the Phaistos Disk was a replay of Michael Ventris's decipherment of the Minoan Linear B syllabic script: Ventris too was an independent scholar, and his work too was strongly resisted until the very end because it broke a dogma — that the language in which Linear B was written could not be Greek. John Chadwick was one of the first established scholars to support Ventris, and described Ventris's exciting and ingenious work in a marvelous book, The Decipherment of Linear B. It is then ironic — though anomalists will find it eminently believable — that Chadwick in his turn resisted Fischer's developing insight that the Phaistos Disk too recorded Greek — albeit a very early, pre-Homeric Greek. Another cited example of established authorities holding back progress is that of Arthur Evans, whose misconceptions dominated Minoan-Mycenaean scholarship for half a century (p. 26). "For 40 years Evans hoarded his private Linear A and Linear B tablets, refusing others permission to reproduce or even study them" (p. 29).

It is a great pity that this book has some major flaws. (My advance proof had no index, though one is referred to in the Table of Contents.) In the body of the text, the reproduction of the glyphs on the Disk is barely readable, as though made with a dot-matrix printer of insufficient resolution. On pp. 197 and 199, the Figure legends should surely state X¹YXn, not X¹YZn. The text is an unfortunate melange of the intellectual story of the decipherment with a personal account of the doings of Fischer and his wife, much of the latter written rather like the "To our Friends" form letters that one gets from acquaintances once a year, embarrassingly personal and telling really more than one needs or wants to know. In a number of places, there is a bit too much of a self-praising slant; "a distinguished Swiss academic publishing house" agreed to publish one of Fischer's books, but a peek at the Bibliography reference reveals the publishing house to be Peter Lang, to whom academics often have to pay handsome subsidies to get their work published. The book also suffers from a lack of good copy-editing, for example to remove or moderate some purple, school-childish, prose: "The once-glorious capital of the Czars was then locked in the chaotic throes of the dying Soviet empire" (p. 179); as well as a number of extreme statements and superlatives: The Minoans (p. 10) are Europe's "greatest" mystery and the historian's "greatest" challenge? What about the Etruscans? Or the Basques? For that matter, how much more we would like to know about the Celts, whose name we take in vain without really knowing all that much about them. Then again, I wish it were true, but it just isn't, that "There's no secret so hidden that it cannot be found, no voice so mute that it cannot be heard." New Zealand is "our planet's last refuge" at page 8, but when the Fischers return to it they find (p. 205) "rejection of its British heritage, and virulent North American and Asian commercialization." Yet surely page 8 was written, or at least could have been revised, after that return?

The personal stuff predominates early in the book, and readers can rest assured that it is worth persisting to get to the intellectual story. One has to respect Fischer's drive and dedication, and admire the support his wife gave, for decades of living on the edge of poverty in order to accomplish an advance — a major advance — in humankind's knowledge. The account of the decipherments is riveting. I learned a lot from this book and wager that others can too. I hope in years to come to read even more about Fischer's work and life — but written, I hope, with the help of more professionally accomplished story-tellers or editors.

Henry H. Bauer
Professor of Chemistry & Science Studies
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0227

Table of Contents | JSE Home Page