The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox

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. 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. She never published this larger grid, nor did she assign sound-values to any character on it. But as Ventris's decipherment would show, her relative placement of every character was correct. She was clearly poised to make headway, if only she had been given time.

What is beyond doubt is this: Without Kober's work, Linear B would never have been unraveled as soon as it was, if ever. 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.

A few years ago I saw Margalit Fox talk about her book The Riddle of the Labyrinth at Hunter College High School. 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. 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 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. 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 script, called Linear B, proved nearly impossible to decipher because no one even knew what language the Minoans spoke. Over the next few decades, the decipherment of Linear B became a holy grail for professionals and amateurs alike, and it attracted innumerable theories. 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. It wasn't until 1952 that an amateur, an architect named Michael Ventris, deciphered the code, proving that the Linear B tablets recorded the earliest known examples of the Greek language.

Fox's day job is as an obituary writer for the New York Times. (In fact, when I saw her speak I thought she was going to talk about working for the obits.) She brings to The Riddle of the Labyrinth and obituarial eye, insofar as she uncovers the forgotten figure at the center of the story, the one between Evans and Ventris whose hard work enabled the decipherment, but whose work has been almost completely forgotten: Alice Kober. It was Kober who correctly identified Linear B as an inflected language (it uses word endings for grammatical purposes) and built the first "grid" that assigned syllabic sounds to the Linear B symbols. Without Kober's intuition and hard work, Ventris would never have been able to crack the code.

One of the really satisfying things about The Riddle of the Labyrinth is Fox's lucid explanations of the process that Kober and Ventris went through to decipher the language. Kober's breakthrough is one of those simple movements that good literary detectives make, which make everyone else look like fools: having assumed that the language of Linear B was inflected, she observed that you could match up symbols that started with the same consonant sound. (It takes a little bit longer than a paragraph like this to explain, but imagine if you had a script that recorded words like "kisses" and "kissing" using symbols that represented whole syllables. You'd have a symbol for "ki" and symbols for the sounds "sses" and "ssing"--but you would know those symbols both started with the same sound.) Fox's explanation of the codebreaking required to beat Linear B is fun and clear, and written on a really human scale.

But she also makes it clear that what was needed was not just cleverness or intuition. Kober's work was painstaking, and involved hours of labor, including the creation of an immense box of cards for each word, around the edges of which Kober punched holes so you could immediately see what symbols two or more words had in common. In the story that's been told about Linear B, it's Ventris' cleverness that gets lionized, especially because he fits our paradigm for the lone genius, working late at night--both an amateur and a man. But Kober, Fox shows, was no less clever than Ventris (maybe more so), and what's more, almost all of the gruntwork was hers. If she hadn't died so young of a mysterious illness, Kober might have beat Ventris to the prize, or perhaps they would have gotten there together.

Fox doesn't intend to take anything away from Ventris, who really did finally unlock the secrets of Linear B, but her framing is a challenge to the way we like these sort of stories to go. Linear B wasn't deciphered in a single stroke of genius, but thanks to the hard work of many people over many years, and the glory, as is so often the case, has never been appropriately distributed. The decipherment brought to light the forgotten lives of thousands of early ancient people; The Riddle of the Labyrinth does much the same for Alice Kober.