The riddle of the labyrinth : the quest to crack an ancient code

An intellectual detective story follows the quest to unlock one of the great secrets of human history--the decipherment of Linear B, an unknown script from the Aegean Bronze Age.

User reviews

LibraryThing member Widsith

When, in 1900, Arthur Evans dug up a load of clay tablets stashed in a bathtub under a field in Crete, there didn't seem much hope that the writing on them would ever be understood. The people who wrote it had been ancient history by Homer's time, and the characters on the tablets looked nothing

like any other writing system known in the Mediterranean, or elsewhere – stylised symbols, some of them clearly iconographic, and others resembling bizarre geometric shapes or obscure implements.

Evans, who was familiar with the cuneiform script used by ancient Sumerians, called the Cretan writing ‘linear’ in contrast – meaning just that it consisted of lines rather than wedges. There were two main classes of this writing, which became known, unimaginatively, as Linear A and Linear B, the latter of which constituted the vast majority of what turned up in Evans's digs.

Deciphering unknown writing is hard. Sometimes you know the writing is being used to represent a known language, which helps; other times, you might have an idea what the characters sound like, but no idea what the sounds mean. The ‘Minoan’ writing of Crete was the worst of both worlds – no one knew what the characters sounded like, and no one knew what language they were trying to represent. It was a holy grail of linguistics – and OK, the French had cracked Egyptian hieroglyphs in the nineteenth century, but that was a parlour game by comparison: they had the Rosetta Stone to work from.

It took half a century, but Linear B was finally deciphered in 1952 by a quite remarkable armchair linguist – then working as an architect – called Michael Ventris. This book celebrates his achievement, but it also argues that much of the credit for the solution should really go to the American academic Alice Kobler, whose role in the story has previously been somewhat under-appreciated. (Well, I had never heard of her at any rate.)

Kobler spent years and years meticulously categorising every character used in Linear B – not just listing them all, but recording which characters were most likely to appear together, whether they were more likely to appear at the front of words or at the back of them, what variant forms they might have – and all of this while holding down a full-time teaching job and working with the extremely meagre resources that Evans had allowed to be released publicly.

It was by analysing this home-assembled mass data that Kobler eventually realised that Linear B must show an inflected language. She spotted recurring patterns in the endings of words such as:

𐀬𐀑𐀴𐀊
𐀬𐀑𐀴𐀍
𐀬𐀑𐀵

or

𐀒𐀜𐀯𐀊
𐀒𐀜𐀯𐀍
𐀒𐀜𐀰

which, she thought, could well be the equivalent to related forms in a language like Latin: dominus, dominum, domini. These patterns were the key to how the language was eventually deciphered. From the number of symbols used, everyone knew that Linear B was a syllabary rather than an alphabet – each character represented a syllable like "ba" or "lo" rather than an individual ‘letter’. If the words did indeed show inflectional endings, then this was a clue about which characters were linked. Consider if the Linear B examples were coding the Latin words I mentioned, with each character representing a different syllable:

𐀬𐀑𐀴𐀊 — do-mi-nu-suh
𐀬𐀑𐀴𐀍 — do-mi-nu-muh
𐀬𐀑𐀵 — do-mi-ni

Well, this would explain why the Linear B shows an alternation between 𐀴 and 𐀵 in the third character, and it would strongly suggest that those two characters represent the same initial consonant but with different vowels.

Using a combination of such inferences, Kobler put together a grid of related syllables, without ever speculating on what the actual phonetic values might be. This was in itself rather an inspirational idea, since everyone else working on the problem began by postulating sound values (usually based on some theory about how Linear B must be related to Etruscan or Basque or something), and then came up with a grid later. That was the wrong way round; and when Ventris finally made his own breakthrough, it was firmly based on what he called ‘Kobler's triplets’.

The author of this book reckons that, had Kobler lived a little longer (she died at 43, while deeply involved in the problem), she may well have got the solution first. That's debatable, but it's nice to read a summary of this story that has an argument to make, and the case for Kobler is very well put here, based on a cache of her private papers which, apparently, no one had really looked into before.

The big leap that Ventris himself made came when he realised that some of the words in Linear B appeared only on the tablets from Crete, and were not found in any of the writing that had been dug up subsequently on the Greek mainland. Perhaps, he reasoned, that was because they were local place-names. This turned out to be the case, and after some trial-and-error guesswork he eventually found the sound values that would make this work. (𐀬𐀑𐀵, in fact, is ru-ki-to or Lyktos, while 𐀒𐀜𐀰, ko-no-so, is Knossos itself.)

Working with these sounds, it soon became clear that the Linear B material was an extremely archaic form of Ancient Greek, now known as Mycenaean Greek. This was a shock to everyone, not least Michael Ventris, who was convinced that the Greeks had come to the area centuries later.

Most of what is on the tablets is objectively fairly dry – bureaucratic records of crop storage, taxation, censuses. But that's for the ethnologists and historians to worry about. From a linguistic point of view, the whole story is a phenomenal example of how ruthless logic and leaps of inspiration can combine to produce solutions that seemed almost miraculous. Cracking Linear B must be one of the most amazing intellectual achievements of the century, and it sounds silly, but my heart was racing in parts of this like I was reading a detective story. Not so much whodunnit, but howthehelltheydunnit.

Show Less

20 more

LibraryThing member emanate28

A fascinating account of how an ancient script was cracked, to a large part thanks to the plodding, incredibly labor-intensive, and unacknowledged work of one woman, Alice Kober.

I had never even imagined that there would be a way to crack an unknown script of an unknown language; yet she quietly

worked away at it on her free time in the days where there were no computers, doing everything manually. It's simply mind-boggling. And heartbreaking that she didn't live to complete it; rather (on retrospect) having her precious remaining time wasted by an older scholar who didn't even appreciate her contributions or her genius.

It was also a glimpse of how difficult it was for women to break into the academic word in that era...although I'm sure it's still challenging for women today.

The only thing that i didn't like was the rambling beginning chapter, which was repetitive and didn't get anywhere.

An eye-opening read, recommended!

Show Less

LibraryThing member rivercityreading

Being a history nerd, I went into The Riddle of the Labyrinth hoping to find a twisty linguistic mystery I might be able to keep in my back pocket for my World History classes. What I was thrilled to find running parallel to that mystery was a lovely biography of the woman who helped solve it.

In

1900, clay tablets bearing unfamiliar symbols were discovered on the Mediterranean island of Crete, believed to be from a civilization that flowered 1,000 years before the Classical Age of Greece. For years archaeologists and linguists studied the script, now known as Linear B, attempting to break the writing down to its most basic form and find a key to the mystery of the civilization.

By mid-century, classics professor Alice Kober had inched close to discovering that key, working painstakingly by hand with few resources and little help. However, her work was often overlooked and her opportunities cut off due to her gender. Across the world unassuming architect, Michael Ventris, had been given every opportunity for success, despite his lack of schooling. Through floundering mistakes, Ventris eventually used the patterns that Kober laid out to become the recognized decipherer of Linear B.

I was thrilled by how much The Riddle of the Labyrinth surprised me. I thought I would spend much of the book trying to wrap my mind around the Linear B puzzle, but I could not stop thinking about Alice Kober and her work. The pictures of the coding system she created by hand on scraps of paper during the paper shortage in World War II are absolutely incredible. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of time and devotion that goes into creating a database by hand...and then cutting it small enough to fit into cigarette cartons. She is beyond fascinating. But my heart just broke repeatedly for her, as she was such a victim of the time she was living in. Imagine what should could have done living in 2013, with that drive and ferocity!

While it would be easy to make Michael Ventris out to be a villain in the story, Margalit Fox draws beautiful parallels between the two researchers. Both Kober and Ventris were, at times, highly unappreciated and underestimated by the academic community, though for different reasons. They both held strong to beliefs about the texts that, once deciphered, wound up quite wrong. In the end, the mystery behind Linear B was uncovered by the combination of their work, not solely one or the other.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth is a surprising blend of ancient and contemporary history that will have you turning over language, gender and the rigor of academic research.
(posted at rivercityreading.blogspot.com)

Show Less

LibraryThing member BLBera

"The pull of an undeciphered ancient script comes not only from the fact that its discoverer cannot read it, but also from the knowledge that once, long ago, someone could. To Evans, the scribes of Knossos were real people who had set down the workings of their Bronze Age world, precisely and

deliberately, on pieces of wet clay. Men could read those tablets once."

Margalit Fox does an outstanding job of piecing together the deciphering of what came to be known as Linear B tablets. These clay tablets were found on Crete and dated from around 1500 BC.

In her introduction, Fox introduces the three main characters of the decoding project: Arthur Evans, the "digger," Alice Kober, the "detective," and Michael Ventris, the "architect." Fox reveals that one of the main reasons for writing this book is to bring Kober's achievements to light. Since Kober was very much a woman in a man's world as she worked on the tablets for about twenty years until her death in 1950, Fox feels that Kober was never given credit for her contributions.

Fox uses pictures and diagrams to help with her explanations, which I found to be clear, even when she discusses the technicalities involved in decoding an unknown language. In fact, the story is riveting.

I won't give away the solution here -- I'll just say that the decoding of the tablets has increased greatly our understanding of the past.

Fascinating book -- highly recommended.

Show Less

LibraryThing member pwaites

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code is an appealing non-fiction account of the deciphering of the script Linear B and in particular the woman who was vital to its solution.

In 1900 archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans uncovered a catch of fired clay tablets in Crete, the

earliest writing ever discovered in Europe. These tablets were inscribed with two unknown writing systems – Linear A and Linear B. There were not enough samples of Linear A for it to be decoded (it still hasn’t to this day), but there were over 2,000 tablets containing Linear B. If these tablets could be translated, they would provide a wealth of information about a complex civilization that predated Homer. The catch? They were written in an unknown writing system encoding an unknown language, and there was nothing like the Rosetta Stone to help archaeologists out. Linear B was the great puzzle of the 20th century.

Linear B was eventually cracked by an amateur, an architect named Michael Ventris, but Ventris was building upon the intensive work of Alice Kobar, a classics professor who’s contributions to the solving of Linear B has gone almost unnoticed.

Fox divides The Riddle of the Labyrinth into three sections, telling the stories of Evans, Kobar and Ventris. She clearly explains the science of the linguistics and cryptology involved, making a complex subject generally accessible, and crafts a fascinating book.

I highly recommend The Riddle of the Labyrinth to anyone with a passing interest in history, linguistics, or archaeology.

Originally posted The Illustrated Page.

Show Less

LibraryThing member jcbrunner

Margalit Fox’s Riddle of the Labyrinth is a wonderful book about two triumphant nerds whose lives are cut short. In her day job, obituaries editor at the New York Times, Margalit Fox is familiar with the life and death of the famous and the not so famous. Alice Kober and Michael Ventris are

without doubt part of the second category despite their important contribution to the knowledge of ancient history. Outsiders both, they deciphered Linear B as Mycenaean Greek. The actual deciphering was achieved by the English architect Michael Ventris, while much of the methodological approach was developed by the chain-smoking New Yorker Alice Kober, a classics teacher version of Helene Hanff. Both Kober and Ventris were extreme introverts, living in and for their archaeological dream.

Both were hampered in their undertaking by bureaucracy and ignorant professionals who jealously guarded “their” materiel, sometimes for decades. British archaeologist Arthur Evans who discovered the tablets sat on his discovery far too long and prevented others from doing what he himself had neither interest nor aptitude. The book is thus an indirect plea for open access and crowd-sourcing: All bugs are shallow if one throws sufficient eyeballs on a problem. Grants should be structured that they require early and full online access to the material, so that others can join (and surpass) the grantees. All too often, institutions hinder progress by cutting off access and preventing especially unorthodox approaches.

While the book is somewhat biased against the amateur Michael Ventris, it is a nice tribute to Alice Kober who deserves to be better known. The early tragic deaths of both protagonists will probably prevent the book from reaching the wide circulation it deserves. The names of Kober and Ventris will join the ranks of the deciphered but unknown listed in the Linear B tablets.

Show Less

LibraryThing member mcdenis

In our current era of hackers who break into computer code this story highlights real people who by dint of what we would now think of as primitive resources such as 3x5 cards and diligent searching and matching and mathematical skill uncover the secrets of Linear B. At first blush Linear B looks

like chicken scratches on clay tablets. It was in fact a written language at first thought to be Minoan. Later at the end of the search it was deemed to be very early Greek (about 500 years early). A key player, who was never recognized for her efforts, was the American Alice Kober, a classist who died just before the big discovery. The baton of cryptogaphy was picked up by Micheal Ventris, an eccentric English architect. He made the final breakthrough. The participants in this real drama are bought to life in this historical detective stroy, copiously illustrated with Linear B with an attractive book cover and very artistic artwork on the inner flaps.

Show Less

LibraryThing member dpappas

The pull of an undeciphered ancient script comes not only from the fact that its discoverer cannot read it, but also from the knowledge that once long ago, someone could.

As someone who had no previous knowledge of the discovery of Linear B and the eventual deciphering of it, this book was

absolutely fascinating. I decided to read this after seeing a positive review of the book. I was wary that the book was going to be dry and somewhat boring but I needn't have worried because this was a vibrant yet informative book.

Margalit Fox covers not only Alice Kober but also Sir Arthur Evans and Michael Ventris. All three played critical roles in the discovery or eventual deciphering of Linear B. I liked that while Fox tended to focus on Kober, she also spent plenty of time discussing Evans and Ventris. The author shows a clear disdain for Evans and I feel like her disdain really overtakes her section on Evans. Fox also shows a sort of disdain towards Ventris and really drives home her point that he would never have been able to decipher Linear B without Kober's previous work on the subject. While Fox clearly admires the work that Kober has done I was glad that that her section on Kober didn't turn into hero worship.

Reading this book has made me want to know more about Linear B and also the still undeciphered Linear A. Fox mentions other books that have discussed these topics and they all seem so fascinating and I look forward to one day reading those as well.

Show Less

LibraryThing member rakerman

Fascinating detective story about the dedication and brilliance needed to decode an unknown script whose underlying language wasn't known.

LibraryThing member susanamper

The most interesting story is that of Margalit Fox, and I would like to have known more about her.

Learning the mystery of the labyrinth was ok, but the story did not have momentum after the death of Fox.

LibraryThing member drmaf

This book is basically the story of 3 people who all played a part in deciphering the long-lost Minoan Linear B script. The two stories that book-end this tome are the stories of two well-known figures - Arthur Evans, who discovered the Minoan civilization and its tantalizing tablets, and Michael

Ventris, who finally cracked the code a half century later. But the real heart of the book, both literally and figuratively, is the story that has been almost forgotten, that of Alice Kober, the crusty, chain-smoking virginal scholar from Brooklyn, who did more than anyone else to decipher the script, but was cruelly robbed by a tragically early death from finally solving the problem and claiming the credit. Fox's sympathies are clearly with Kober, both Evans and Ventris are criticised, Evans for his stubborn refusal to release the tablets for other scholars to study, and Ventris for his opportunism in leap-frogging on Kober's work to grab the laurels, while Kober, despite her obvious character flaws, sails through Fox's narrative like a righteous feminist martyr. The book is compulsively readable. Fox has taken what is really a very dry academic subject and made it a very human story of ambition, toil triumph, tragedy and discovery. Its not the first book that has been written on the Linear B decipherment story, but so far, I think its the best.

Show Less

LibraryThing member stuart10er

Interesting short work on the 3 people most responsible for finding and then decyphering the written language known as Linear B. That is a script found on Crete at Knossos and then other locations in Aegean. The first to be profiled is Evans who discovered the tablets - in fine shape at the ruins

of King Minos' palace at Knossos. As an archeologist, he was able to find them but didn't really make much sense of them. There was no Rosetta stone to use to figure it all out. The 2nd person is Alice Kober - who is the unsung person who spent the bulk of her short life trying to figure it out and came very close but while missing the final decyphering by her death she put in place rigorous analytical models and methods that are still being used today. The final person is the amateur Ventris who finally cracked the code building on Kober's work and finding out that Linear B was not Etruscan (as he thought) or some form of Polynesian (as some theories said) but rather just an ancient form of Greek. Greek hadn't yet appropriated the Phoenician script that it uses today (as we all use today) but rather wrote Greek using this Cretan script. Tough nut to crack - but they figured it out. Well laid out story outlining this.

Show Less

LibraryThing member Joanne53

A well written history on the people who solved the puzzle of Linear B. The account gives proper credit to the woman, Alice Kobler, whose research and methods were instrumental in deciphering the Mycenean script, but whose work had been overlooked.

LibraryThing member mamzel

I found this book quite interesting but I admit that few people probably would be as interested in the topic of deciphering a lost language. Tablets were found in Crete featuring a previously unknown language. There were no indications of whether it was phonetic or hieroglyphic based. The

discoverer of the tablets was slow in releasing the scripts which frustrated those attempting to decipher it. One of those was an American lady named Alice Kober. She was able to lay the ground work that allowed subsequent linguists to assign sounds to the symbols and translate the scripts. Alas, she died before her job was completed but her work was picked up by an English man named Michael Ventris.

The book gave examples of the symbols and charted the course taken by these and others involved in the project. I was able to follow most of the steps involved. It truly was quite fascinating.

Show Less

LibraryThing member delphica

This was a thrill a minute. If you are very geeky. I tore through it -- the story of the deciphering of Linear B, with special emphasis on the role of Brooklyn College professor Alice Kober. Her contributions have not always been widely recognized, mostly because she was a woman working in a very

male-dominated field.

The author did a fabulous job with telling the story in a very clear and straightforward way. The linguistics information never gets too dense, however I never felt like it was too dumbed down. A good sense of the personalities of the various Linear B players comes through, but never with the sense that the author has started turning them into fictional characters. The primary source material is well selected and nicely incorporated into the book.

Show Less

LibraryThing member konastories

Joy's review: Really fun reading about three brilliant and obsessed individuals who tried to crack the code of Linear B. Hard going in time before computers or today's instant collaboration. They also had the bad luck to be interrupted by a couple of world wars! An excellent narrative history.

LibraryThing member moncur_d

I've been a sucker for the Minoans since I did a school project on them in grade six, and I've always had a fascination with writing systems.

This brook brings the two together beautifully stepping through the techniques to decrypt linear B - baically the Bletchley Park of 1300 BC.

The book's clear,

well written, and explains the concepts clearly - no knowledge of Mycenean Greek or cryptography required - it's a detective story, and an utterly facinating one ...

Show Less

LibraryThing member mkfs

The story of the deciphering of Linear B, told through the lives of the three people who were most influential in the process: the man who discovered the tablets, the woman who analyzed the alphabet, and the man who identified the language, ultimately cracking the code.

After reading the

introduction, I thought this was going to be yet another exposé about how well-known person X (Watson and Crick, Rodin, Louis Prima, etc) stole the work of female assistant/lover/wife Y and built their success on top of that. Thankfully, the story is more complicated than that: the woman at the center of the story, Alice Kober, was struck down by illness before she could complete her analysis. She clearly changed the field with a novel analytic method, and ultimately paved the way for others to decipher the clay tablets. The story that emerges is therefore one of collaboration among scientists, rather than cut-throat competition.

The treatment of the analytic method is quite good: a little dumbed-down, perhaps, but still detailed enough to appease those who are interested. The format of the book, three mini-biographies, works very well, and keeps what could be a dry subject from getting stale.

Show Less

LibraryThing member fmclellan

Read this pretty much in one gulp. Amazing story, terrifically told. What a subject and what a great group of characters! Congratulations to the author.

LibraryThing member puttocklibrary

A fascinating history of how the ancient language Linear B was deciphered, and the previously little known history of the woman, Alice Kober, who provided the key to deciphering it.

This book was very well written, and while definitely not someone who can crack even simple myself, the logic of how

this language was deciphered is very clearly laid out and easy to follow.

Show Less

LibraryThing member john.cooper

Quick, fun read for those, like me, have always viewed mysterious scripts as the ultimate "secret codes" — so much more interesting than the simple alphabetic ciphers that I could see no challenge in even as an 8-year-old. Now, an unknown script recording an unknown language — that's a

challenge! Fox does a great job of breaking down the strategies and the staggeringly immense amount of painstaking work necessary to solving such a puzzle, perhaps the greatest puzzle possible in cryptography. She makes it readable and does a great job of bringing in the human characters (eccentrics all, as they probably have to be) who take on these puzzles as their life task.

Show Less

Fewer