Review by New York Times Review
On March 30, 1900, during the excavation of the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete, site of the legendary labyrinth from which Daedalus and Icarus took flight, workmen unearthed a clay tablet inscribed with an unknown script. Some of the characters of the script looked like the letters of an alien alphabet, others like alien hieroglyphics. In the following weeks and months workmen unearthed more tablets, several hundred of which had fallen from a floor above into a terra cotta bathtub. The tablets contained messages sent from the dawn of history, from before the time of Homer, but they were messages that could not be received. No one knew what language people spoke 30 centuries ago on Crete, and there was no Rosetta stone among the discoveries at Knossos. (There were, however, other enchanting wonders - elaborate lavatories, murals of griffins and dolphins.) For 50 years, the inscriptions seemed impossible to crack. The code's ultimate decipherment would turn out to be one of the great scientific detective stories of the 20th century - The Mysterious Case of Linear B. In Margalit Fox's new history of the case, "The Riddle of the Labyrinth," Sherlock Holmes makes several cameo appearances, and for good reason. In Fox, the story has found a worthy Conan Doyle. In the best detective stories, the mysteries of human character are as compelling as the enigmatic clues, and as central to the plot, which explains why Fox structures her book as a triptych of biographies. In the first panel of the triptych, we meet Arthur Evans, the gentleman archaeologist who led the excavation at Knossos and who named the script Linear B - Linear because the characters had been scored with a stylus in linear strokes (imagine writing graffiti in wet concrete with a stick), B because among the tablets were samples of the script's more primitive antecedent, Linear A. The third and final panel Fox devotes to Michael Ventris, the British architect who in 1952 dramatically announced on BBC radio that he, an ardent amateur with no formal training in linguistics or cryptography, had at long last solved the mystery. But it's the figure in the middle panel, an unknown chain-smoking classicist from Brooklyn named Alice Kober, who is the hero of the story as Fox tells it, and it's Fox's portrait of Kober that is her book's greatest contribution. Fox writes obituaries for The New York Times, and she has a skilled obituarist's eye for the telling detail. For his expedition to Crete, Arthur Evans brought two dozen tins of ox tongue, 12 plum puddings and a Union Jack. Even on a dig, he dressed in suit and tie and carried a walking stick he'd nicknamed Prodger. He possessed, Fox writes, "all of his era's thirst for scientific inquiry, most of its grand passions and many of its reflexive prejudices." He also possessed "the characteristics necessary for a world-class archaeologist: tirelessness, fearlessness, boundless curiosity, wealth, and" - Fox dryly adds - "myopia." Evans's myopia wasn't merely of the ocular sort. As was customary for archaeologists, he reserved for himself the right to decipher the relics he'd found, making only a handful of the tablets public. Initially he made swift progress, puzzling out the ancient Cretan numerical system, determining that the hash marks appearing at periodic intervals divided the strings of characters into words the way spaces divide ours. He figured out that certain characters were logograms - pictures that stand for words. A tiny likeness of a horse's head was the logogram for "horse"; a tiny symbol that to my eyes resembles a television antenna was the logogram for "tree." Soon, however, his progress stalled. Decades passed, and still Evans refused to share his data set. Why, exactly, his progress stalled requires more than a rudimentary understanding of the science of archaeological decipherment, and here Fox successfully executes the balancing act of translating and distilling a specialized field of knowledge for a general audience without oversimplifying or succumbing to the didacticism of a textbook. Even as we learn the difference between logographic and alphabetic writing systems, and the difference between a writing system and a language, and what "determinative" and "syllabary" mean, and how exactly Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta stone and how Sherlock Holmes solved the mystery in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men," Fox draws us ever deeper into the labyrinth. As in a mystery novel, she is leaving the reader a trail of carefully placed clues, but she is also preparing for the grand entrance of her detective. For Fox doesn't merely recount the history of Linear B, which has been told before (in previous tellings, it's Ventris who has elicited the comparisons to Holmes). She's out to correct the historical record, by rescuing Kober from obscurity and giving her discoveries their due. In this respect, Kober calls to mind other women in science - Rosalind Franklin, whose work produced the key Watson and Crick needed to unlock DNA, or Marie Tharp, the oceanographic cartographer, who (because midcentury research vessels were considered unsuitable for women) ended up on shore, making a map of the ocean floor and in the process discovering the rift valley in the mid-Atlantic ridge, a discovery that helped confirm the then controversial theory of plate tectonics. Born in 1906, the daughter of working-class Hungarian immigrants, Kober nonetheless managed to earn a Ph.D. in classics from Columbia. She was short and wore thick glasses. A former student remembered her as "dumpy," but also as an enthralling lecturer. In her intellectual life, she could be dauntless. Of a linguist who she felt had been treated "with kid gloves," Kober remarked, "I suppose it's because nobody thinks a man with Hrozny's reputation could possibly be as stupid as he seems." But she was just as merciless, if not more, toward herself. Her approach to the riddle of Linear B was monomaniacally methodological. In a 1948 paper published in The American Journal of Archaeology, she summarized the riddle pithily: "An unknown language, written in an unknown script cannot be deciphered. . . . It is our task to find out what the language was, or what the phonetic values of the signs were, and so remove one of the unknowns." Here's how you go about removing an unknown if you are Alice Kober: When not teaching introductory Latin to undergraduates at Brooklyn College, study a logographic foreign language (like Chinese), a syllabic one (Akkadian) and an alphabetic one (Persian). Spend several years searching Classical Greek for loan words ("linguistic ghosts," Fox calls them) that for arcane reasons obvious only to linguists clearly predate Classical Greek. Compile, with fastidious accuracy, a master list of these words, among them, all words containing the suffix "-inth" (look again at Fox's title). Do whatever it takes to get your hands on copies of the tablets in Evans's collection. Fill 40 notebooks with words. During the paper shortages of World War II, when paper becomes unavailable, start cutting out index cards from "church circulars, the backs of greeting cards, examination-book covers, checkout slips from the college library" - accumulating 180,000 cards. (These index cards will bear an uncanny resemblance, in the end, to the tablets you are attempting to decipher.) Catalog the frequency with which any given character appears. Also catalog the position of characters in words. Note "repeated instances of two- and three-character clusters." Turn the many empty cigarette boxes you have lying about the house you share with your widowed mother into miniature file cabinets in which you file your index cards. (From these file cabinets, Fox notes, there still wafts the scent of tobacco, and on them appear such unintentionally eloquent phrases as HERBERT TAREYTON: THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT THEM YOU'LL LIKE.) Compile all (or almost all) of the necessary clues, do the painstaking groundwork, find the key that will unlock the code and then, heartbreakingly, prematurely and swiftly, from causes possibly smoking-related, at age 43, in 1950, on the brink of plausible triumph - well, I don't want to spoil it for you. The weaknesses of Fox's book emerge in her portrait of Michael Ventris, which leans heavily on previous studies of Linear B; she quotes more than once from a 2002 BBC biopic, "A Very English Genius," based on a biography by Andrew Robinson, "The Man Who Deciphered Linear B." "Granted, I have a brief for Kober," Fox concedes, "just as Robinson did for Ventris." She also concedes that had Kober lived, she might not have made the insightful leap Ventris made in figuring out how to use the key that Kober had found. The messages sent 30 centuries ago by Cretan scribes did not turn out to contain proto-Homeric poetry, as more fanciful antiquarians had hoped. The tablets were the accounting books of the Palace of Knossos. They nevertheless contain archaeological significance and accidental eloquence, which Fox unfolds beautifully in her closing chapter. What stays with you aren't the wonders of ancient Crete, however, but the genuinely heroic character and tragically abbreviated life of an unsung classicist who spent all but the last year of her career as a lowly assistant professor in Brooklyn. Donovan Hohn is the author of ¿Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.¿
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 2, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Discovered on ancient clay tablets in Crete in 1900 and deciphered half a century later, Linear B is the oldest known dialect of the Greek language, dating from about 1450 BCE. The story of its discovery by British archaeologist Arthur Evans and decipherment by British architect Michael Ventris is often told, but what is less frequently documented is the story of the American woman, Alice Kober, who laid much of the groundwork for the decipherment and who might have cracked the code herself, if she had not died in her early forties. Focusing on Kober's efforts to tease meaning out of the strange, hitherto unknown symbols, Fox tells the story behind the story. Yes, Ventris made some brilliant deductive leaps, but without Kober's years of painstaking work, those leaps could not have happened. You might think a book about trying to decipher a 3,000-year-old language wouldn't be particularly exciting, but in this case you'd be wrong. Fox is a talented storyteller, and she creates an atmosphere of almost nail-biting suspense. We know the code was eventually cracked, but while we're reading the book, we're on the edge of our seats. This one deserves shelf space alongside such classics in the literature of decryption as Simon Singh's The Code Book (1999).--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Linguist and New York Times senior writer Fox spins a fascinating yarn centered around an unlikely heroine: a devoted academic spinster who died before accomplishing her life's mission of cracking an ancient script. In 1900, aristocratic archaeologist Arthur J. Evans put his "tirelessness, fearlessness, boundless curiosity, wealth, and myopia" to work in excavating Knossos, where Linear B-the script in question-was discovered on clay tablets in the ruins of a Cretan palace. Architect Michael Ventris eventually completed the decipherment of the language, having built off the work of Alice Kober, the languages professor at the heart of the tale. Working at her kitchen table in the 1940s, hand-cutting over 150,000 cards to systematically catalogue Linear B, Kober and her "passion... for the life of the mind" historically have been overshadowed by the two more famous men who bookended her endeavors. Fox's deft explanations of the script-solving process-complete with supplemental photos and illustrations of the text-allow readers to share in the mental detective work of cracking the lost language. Ultimately, the revelation here is the enduring nature of writing as an expression of humanity, a message passed not through content, but through the act of interpretation and the passionate endeavor to understand. Photos & illus. Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman, Inc. (May 14) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Linear B is a script first found on clay tablets excavated on the island of Crete and later at Pylos on the Greek mainland and dating to the Mycenaean period, circa 1400 BCE. The story of its decipherment by Michael Ventris (1922-56) has already been told, e.g., in John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B (1958), and in Andrew Robinson's The Man Who Deciphered Linear B (2002). Now Fox (senior writer, New York Times; Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind), a trained linguist, brings to the fore the groundbreaking work of American classical scholar Alice Kober (1906-50) whose syllabic grids made Ventris's breakthrough possible. Fox starts with the story of "The Digger," Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941), the British archaeologist who excavated the first tablets on Crete and made the first attempts to decode them. The reader then meets Kober, whom Fox dubs "The Detective" for her discovery of the syllabic nature of the script. Kober's work enabled "The Architect" Ventris to identify the texts as archaic Greek. Fox totally engages the reader in the decipherment process and summarizes the content of the tablets: primarily inventory records of people and produce. VERDICT This exciting linguistic adventure, intended for the nonspecialist, is recommended to anyone interested in archaeological mysteries-and even to crossword puzzle enthusiasts!-Edward K. Werner, St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Pierce, FL (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
