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The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code 
by Margalit Fox
Ecco
Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College in the 1930s and '40s, played a key role in solving one of the 20th century's great academic riddles: how to read a 3,400-year-old script known as Linear B, unearthed amid the ruins of the Minoan civilisation of Crete, the mythic home of the labyrinth of Daedalus and the Minotaur.
Kober deserves much of the credit for "one of the most prodigious intellectual feats of modern times", Margalit Fox writes in The Riddle of the Labyrinth. Yet after Kober's death in 1950, she was forgotten. Fox, an obituary writer at The New York Times, set out to rectify this, and by retrieving a woman who might otherwise have vanished, she ends up performing an act of historical redemption akin to the one her subject accomplished.
The Riddle of the Labyrinth, a gripping and tightly focused scholarly mystery informed by Fox's knowledge of linguistics, recounts the story of Linear B through three people who fell under its spell.
The first is Arthur Evans, the archaeologist who, digging on Crete in 1900, discovered clay tablets with an unknown script. It was written with linear strokes rather than with Egyptian-style hieroglyphs or the cuneiform wedges of Mesopotamia, so he called it Linear B. (An earlier script unearthed at the site was named Linear A.) Evans tried for decades to decode these symbols but didn't come close.
A second Englishman, Michael Ventris, began trying to crack the code after encountering Evans on a school trip in 1936, when he was 14. Working at the same time as Kober and using some of her methods and observations, the architect and amateur linguist finally succeeded just before his 30th birthday.
Both men achieved fame in their lifetime, but Fox makes a case for Kober, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, as the story's hero. Kober dedicated her life to solving the riddle. She never married, and her extensive correspondence contained just two mentions of a social life.
There was hardly time. To aid her quest, she learned Chinese, Akkadian, Persian, Hittite and Basque, among other tongues.
That the code could be cracked is a testament to what the human brain, or at least the rare human brain, is capable of.
In explaining the problem and eventual solution, Fox makes the complexities of linguistic scholarship accessible, weaving observations about language into the stories of her primary characters, two of whom met untimely ends.
The New York Times


Book review: The Riddle of the Labyrinth, by Margalit Fox

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Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College in the 1930s and '40s, played a key role in solving one of the 20th century's great academic riddles.


Book review: The Riddle of the Labyrinth, by Margalit Fox

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College in the 1930s and '40s, played a key role in solving one of the 20th century's great academic riddles.

Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College in the 1930s and '40s, played a key role in solving one of the 20th century's great academic riddles.