Some speculated that the tablets were written in Etruscan, a non-Indo-European language we've never been able to reconstruct others theorized that it was a Polynesian language. Over the next few decades, the decipherment of Linear B became a holy grail for professionals and amateurs alike, and it attracted innumerable theories.

The script, called Linear B, proved nearly impossible to decipher because no one even knew what language the Minoans spoke. What he uncovered was evidence of a flourishing civilization hundreds of years before the Greek classical age, including a collection of tablets in a completely unknown script. The modern story of Linear B goes like this: in the year 1900, archaeologist Arthur Evans excavated the site of a palace on the island of Crete which he considered to be the home of the legendary Cretan king Minos. Although both institutions are now co-ed (I have a degree from one and worked at the other), I wonder if Fox saw that there was something fitting about bringing Kober's story back to the place where she started, a place where talented and intelligent women were educated to lead exceptional lives, but lives that were inevitably circumscribed by their gender Fox's book is the first to give Kober credit for her work in unraveling the script Linear B, which was for half a decade one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of the academic world. The central figure of the book, classics professor Alice Kober, was a graduate of the high school and later a professor at the college when they were both women-only. Her deep intellect, her single-minded resolve, and her ferocious rationalism made it possible to recapture the vanished key to the script, the earliest Greek writing of all.Ī few years ago I saw Margalit Fox talk about her book The Riddle of the Labyrinth at Hunter College High School. What is beyond doubt is this: Without Kober's work, Linear B would never have been unraveled as soon as it was, if ever. She was clearly poised to make headway, if only she had been given time. But as Ventris's decipherment would show, her relative placement of every character was correct. She never published this larger grid, nor did she assign sound-values to any character on it. Among her papers in the archives of the University of Texas is an undated notebook in which she constructed a phonetic grid containing more than twenty Linear B characters-more than twice the number of her published grid. If her teaching load had not been so great, if her Guggenheim Fellowship had been renewed, if she had been hired at Penn after all, if Myres had not saddled her with a crushing secretarial load, if her champion John Franklin Daniel had lived-if she had lived-it is entirely possible that Alice Kober would have solved the riddle of Linear B.

Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox