The book is a fascinating insight into the race for decipherment of this alphabet that was labeled 'Linear B.' Hundreds upon hundreds of these Bronze Age Linear B tablets were discovered, dating to about 1450 B.C., nearly seven centuries.
Drawing on Kober's own papers - only made available recently - Margalit Fox provides the final piece of the enigma, and along the way reveals how you decipher a language when you know neither its grammar nor its alphabet as well as the stories behind other ancient languages, like the dancing-man Rongorongo of Easter Island. The drive to solve this particular mystery forms the backbone of Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth. But there was a third figure: Alice Kober, without whose painstaking work, recorded on pieces of paper clipped from hymn-sheets and magazines and stored in cigarette boxes in her Brooklyn loft, Linear B might still remain a mystery. Two men have dominated Linear B in popular history: Arthur Evans, the intrepid Victorian archaeologist who unearthed Linear B at Knossos and Michael Ventris, the dashing young amateur who produced a solution.
The decoding of Linear B is one of the world's greatest stories: from the discovery of a cache of ancient tablets recording a lost prehistoric language to the dramatic solution of the riddle nearly seventy years later, it exerts a mesmerising pull on the imagination.īut this captivating story is missing a crucial piece.
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