An American teacher she made some valuable contributions to the work. Between the story of Evans and of Ventris though falls a sketch of Alice Kober, the scholar I had not heard about before the summer of 2013. His story is the third told in the book and it was rather interesting to learn more about Ventris, his background and his tragic death. The person who finally managed to do so was British architect, Michael Ventris. There were, however, a number of other people working on translating linear B, ranging from serious scholars to out and out crackpots. As the discoverer Evans had the first right to publish his findings, but as the decades passed he did not do so and he died in 1941 without having cracked the code. At the time it was discovered it was not known what language it represented. One of the greatest of his finds there was the script known as Linear B. Evans' interpretation of what he found there, for good or ill, has influenced the popular vision of the culture he unearthed. Divided into three sections this book deals with a short biography of Sir Arthur Evans, the discoverer of Knossos, a huge bronze age site on Crete. In fact I had heard the name of one of the characters for the first time on a radio program this summer. However, the story available to the average reader lacks some facts that make the main characters more human.

I can think of few stories in 20th archaeology more intriguing than the discovery and translation of Linear B, one of two scripts discovered on the island of Crete during Sir Arthur Edwards excavations there. These include Michael Ventris, the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of the decipherment and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.ĭiscovery and Translation of Linear B Script For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain a mystery.Īward-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox's riveting real-life intellectual detective story travels from the Bronze Age Aegean-the era of Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Helen-to the turn of the 20th century and the work of charismatic English archeologist Arthur Evans, to the colorful personal stories of the decipherers. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative.

Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox