The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox

because the system of writing is unknown, and sometimes because, although we know what sounds to ascribe to the different signs, the language is unknown.
    These documents range in date all the way from Neolithic times to the present. Some are probably in the process of being written at this very moment. Those, however, that were written at periods which we may call the fringes of history, are especially important for the light that they may cast on the past. . . .
    The woman was Alice Kober, an assistant professor of classics at Brooklyn College. By day, she taught a cumbersome load of classes, as many as five at a time—things like Introductory Latin, and Classics in Translation. By night, working almost entirely on her own, as she had for the past fifteen years, she chipped away, methodically and insistently, at the scripts of Minoan Crete. Now, at thirty-nine, although few people knew it, she was the world’s foremost expert on Linear B.
    Though she is all but forgotten today, Alice Kober single-handedly brought the decipherment of Linear B closer to fruition than anyone before her. That she very nearly solved the riddle is a testament to the snap and rigor of her mind, the ferocity of her determination, and the unimpeachable rationality of her method. Kober was “the person on whom an astute bettor with full insider information would have placed a wager” to decipher the script, as Thomas Palaima, an authority on ancient Aegean writing, has observed.
    Strikingly, she got as far as she did without being able to see any of the tablets firsthand. Even more remarkable was the fact that by the time she addressed the group at Hunter, Kober had already done groundbreaking work on Linear B in an era when there were barely two hundred inscriptions available for study.
    That Kober’s vital contribution to the decipherment has been largely overlooked is due in great measure to her early death, in 1950, just two years before Michael Ventris cracked the code. It is also due to her quiet, deliberate way of working, step by incremental step, never committing her ideas to print until they met her exacting standards of proof. As a result, she published little—it was more than enough for her, she used to say, to come out with one good article a year. But though her major work spans barely half a decade, from 1945 to 1949, she is now regarded as having built the solid, unassailable foundation on which Ventris’s decipherment was erected. For as Ventris himself acknowledged publicly not long before his own untimely death, he had arrived at his solution using the methods Alice Kober had so painstakingly devised.
    Along the way, Kober solved a host of small mysteries, many of which had bedeviled investigators from Arthur Evans onward. Among them were these: proving which sign depicted the male animal and which the female in paired logograms likeand; correctly identifying the Minoan words for “boy” and “girl,” noted together in 1927 and likewise indistinguishable; and being the first to pinpoint the special meaning of the sign, a discovery previously attributed to Ventris.
    But Kober also made much larger discoveries—findings that illuminated the internal workings of Linear B words and symbols—and it was these that had profound implications for Ventris’s solution. Her work reads like a how-to manual for archaeological decipherment, something acutely needed for Linear B, a textbook case of an unknown script writing an unknown language. “There is no certain clue to the language of the Minoan scripts,” Kober said in a 1948 lecture at Yale. “All we have are the inscriptions they left, and the symbols they contain.” She added: “To get further, it is necessary to develop a science of graphics.” It was just such a science that Kober, from the first, had set out to construct.
    NO ONE BELIEVED Alice Kober when she declared she would make the Minoan scripts