2025/202: The Riddle of the Labyrinth — Margalit Fox
Wednesday, December 31st, 2025 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranth
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. [p. 38]
Margalit Fox offers the 'first complete account' of the decipherment of Linear B, the earliest Greek script, which was first identified on tablets excavated by Arthur Evans at Knossos. Fox worked with the newly-opened archive of classicist Alice Kober's papers to uncover her role in decoding an unknown language, written in an unknown script, with unknown meaning.
Credit for Linear B's decipherment is generally given to gifted amateur Michael Ventris, whose debt to Kober's work -- as Fox puts it -- 'he acknowledged less conspicuously than he might have' [p. 262]. It was Kober who determined that Linear B was a syllabary script rather than an alphabet; that it was inflected; that it was possible to distinguish relationships between the characters without any knowledge of their meaning. It was also Kober who worked extensively on Arthur Evans' Scripta Minoa, at the expense of her own work and her health: it's tempting to see Evans as a dragon hoarding his treasure, not allowing anyone to publish work on, or even view original photographs of, the thousands of tablets he'd discovered.
Kober was hampered by class, gender and the need to support her widowed mother (who, in the end, outlived her). She never married, and there is no indication of any romantic relationship, though she had a close scholarly friendship with archaeologist John Franklin Daniel: when he died at the age of 38, she was devastated. Despite her gifts as a classicist and a linguist, she was only awarded the rank of full professor a few months before her death. And she was rejected by academia in favour of less-qualified men. Grr.
Fox brackets her account of Kober's life and work with sections on Evans (apparently incredibly near-sighted, a huge advantage for an archaeologist) and Ventris (who was a navigator during WWII and was known for working on Linear B on the way home from bombing raids). Fox is at pains to be fair to them, but it's clear that her sympathies are with Kober: as are mine.
A fascinating book with clear explanations of linguistic theory for the non-technical reader. And the whole story of Linear B and the tablets, baked to clay, which record slaves and stores, rations and resources, ties in very well with some of my other reading, from 1177 BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed to The Hymn to Dionysus.
...what we have, then (and all we will ever have), are the records of the final year of each palatial center before some cataclysm—invasion, earthquake, lightning strike—and the subsequent fire reduced the Mycenaean Age to ash. [p. 272]
