The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

A couple of people have looked at this review, and commented that it’s a little long, so I’m gonna save you some time. I’m a Margalit Fox fan. I liked the first book I read, The Confidence Men (which is actually her most recent book), and this book is great, too. You should buy it and read it, and you should look at her other books, which I have not as yet read, and so cannot recommend. But if you’re looking at this, and the other reviews haven’t convinced you, well, read on. But the summary is this: this is a compelling story about a fascinating puzzle.Let’s be plain: Women generally get hosed when it comes to the credit for their discoveries. Rosalind Franklin’s work was absolutely critical to the discovery of DNA, yet I learned about her in the last couple of years (and I am, generously, middle-aged). Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars, yet two men were awarded a Nobel Prize based on her work. (And these were the men she was working with, so it’s not a valid argument to know they weren’t standing on the shoulders of a giant.) The Wikipedia entry for Marie Curie reads like a master class in the theory and application of sexism. (Marie Curie has got to be in the top 5, maybe top 1, of greatest scientists of all time. I will die on this hill.)And this book is largely about one of those women, Alice Kober. It’s not entirely about her; it’s about a puzzle, and the struggle to solve it. Part of that struggle is the set of obstacles to working on it at all. But Ms. Kober’s lack of credit is a major issue, and Margalit Fox’s description of her vital, but largely overlooked, work is enough of a reason to buy and read this book.It took a while for archeology to move toward science. I guess the progression goes from tomb robber to guy with a shovel to rich guy who pays other guys with shovels to scientists. Along the way, we preserve more and more and learn more and more. When this story really gets going, we’re just past the time when, in the words of René Belloq, “You would use a bulldozer to find a china cup.”In this case, the rich guy who pays other guys with shovels is Arthur Evans, who goes to Crete in pursuit of cool ancient stuff. (Okay, that’s an oversimplification. Arthur Evans was an accomplished archeologist, but had he not been a rich dude who could pay other dudes, this story would not have gotten off the ground.) Why Crete? Because he’s pretty sure he’s going to find, in addition to other awesome stuff, ancient writing that’s going to lead to a better understanding of Ancient Greece.He does. There’s a whole palace down there. He’s able to date it; it comes from 1450 BCE. It’s amazing. There are things in it that boggle the mind. There’s art, artifacts, and carvings. The real treasure, though, is the writing. He finds thousands of clay tablets, covered in a script no one’s ever seen before (well, not in this quantity). Actually, he finds evidence of two languages, Linear A and Linear B. No one’s ever translated Linear A, and while there are things that are important about it, that’s the basic takeaway. We just don’t know what it says. This book is about Linear B, which does get deciphered. That’s the core of the book.Personal aside: I knew about Linear A and Linear B. I knew one of them had been deciphered and one had not. I mixed them up when I was deciding to buy this book and assumed someone had deciphered the unknown one in the intervening 30 years. No, this is about the 1950’s decipherment of Linear B, and so the riddle of the labyrinth does have a solution, but it isn’t to Linear A.But I digress. Linear B is weird. It’s like hieroglyphics, but not. Some of the things are pictures, some of them are designs, some are combinations of the two. Evans pretty quickly figures out that what he’s looking at are bureaucratic records; tallies of things, probably so people could pay takes. (Fifty minutes after the first hominid killed the first pre-antelope with a rock, we invented taxes, so no one should be surprised that he finds thousands of these.)Evans is elated. The archeological scholars who work in this area are elated. He works on the foundations of publishing and deciphering the tablets. Slowly. Very very slowly. The problem for everyone else is that he won’t publish pictures of the tablets. So it’s hard to work on them. He doesn’t want to publish until he’s figured it out. Except, his hot take is wrong. And because his take is wrong, he can’t make progress. And so on.Enter Alice Kober. There’s this thing about scholars, real scholars. They find a thing they love, and they strive to understand it. If they solve it, they move on to the next level of understanding the thing. The goal is to find out something no one knows and tell other people about it. Dr. Alice Kober is a freakin’ scholar. Alice is practically a force of nature when it comes to deciphering things. Dr. Kober isn’t going to let a little thing like having bits and pieces of the treasure trove of symbols stop her.At this moment, I should mention that Ms. Fox doesn’t just want to tell us the story of how Linear B got solved. Ms. Fox wants us to understand how one would solve any problem like Linear B. She walks us through the levels of analysis that you do in order to puzzle out, as she describes it, an unknown language in an unknown script. I have to admit that she lost me from time to time here. I have no facility for languages. Ms. Fox does, and has written professionally about them. If you get lost in these bits, it’s okay. Ms. Fox makes sure to provide signposts and summaries so you can recapture the thread of the story if you get lost in what symbol means what and why we know that.The first thing Dr. Kober does is decide that a bunch of theories are just plain wrong. No, that’s not true. The first thing she does is educate herself on everything she needs to work on the problem. She learns languages. She learns how deciphering works. She demonstrates she’s a genius and everyone else can eat her dust. Then, she works at her kitchen table, nights and weekends, struggling to document how these squiggles work together. Why nights and weekends? Because Dr. Kober can’t get financial support, real support. She’s got a job; she gets paid, but she’s a professor of classics. Professors of classics are not paid fantastically well. It’s hard to get funding. Funding for linguistic analysis isn’t falling from the sky either. She’s also, as noted above, a woman. Universities in the 1950’s, embarrassingly, were not hotbeds of equality. The idea that Dr. Kober should be supported with money and free time does not get a lot of traction. There are moments when she gets the help she deserves, but mostly she struggles.As Dr. Kober works, she invents tools to help her work. She has card files that not only document almost everything, but actually physically line up so she can address problems visually. Alice is the person who changes things. The scholars who work on this are a small group, and Alice is the mover and shaker. Unfortunately, that means she gets suckered into working with the english dude trying to publish the tablets after Evans’ death, and in comparison with Alice, he’s as sharp as a sack of wet mice. In what seems either lazy or sexist, he fobs off all the heavy lifting on her. Dr. Kober, is again overworked, underpaid, and not as celebrated as she should be.Unfortunately for everyone, her work, and the credit she deserves, Alice Kober dies of a mysterious illness in 1950. (The mystery isn’t that she was ill, it’s what her illness was. It’s well documented she was sick, but Ms. Fox couldn’t find out what killed her.)We now turn to Michael Ventris. Ms. Fox introduces him earlier in the narrative and weaves him into Dr. Kober’s story, but I like Alice Kober like better, so you meet him here. Ventris is not a scholar. He does not study other things.He is, however, a genius. And when I say that, I ain’t kidding. Ventris has a thing where he learns languages with ease. He masters Swedish in a matter of weeks because he had to go there for a while for work. (Ms. Fox emphasizes that this is unusual because he has this skill as an adult). But he’s not a professional, and he fumbles around for a while. During this period, he crosses paths with Alice Kober, and manages to piss her off. She did not suffer fools, and several of Ventris’ early theories are the ideas of a rank amateur. Also, when they meet personally, it’s on a project that scares the hell out of Ventris, and he suddenly remembers that he needs to do something else over there. But Ventris is a genius, and he picks up what’s being laid down. He asks scholars what they think, he studies what’s out there, and he goes beyond. Ventris cracks Linear B by asking, essentially the same question that cracks hieroglyphics: what if this thing here is a name?That turns out to be the vital insight. Turns out Linear B is Greek, just written in a script we didn’t know existed. This is very cool. See, Linear B is not an alphabet. It’s syllabic, and the intersection between spoken Greek, and the language Linear A represents, produces Linear B, which provides the Greeks with a way to write things down. We didn’t know Greek existed in 1450 BCE. We certainly didn’t know how it intersected with the Mycenaean civilization on Crete. Once other people applied Ventris’ insight (and scholarly analysis) to the foundations Kober laid, we got a wealth of knowledge about people we didn’t know anything much about.Ventris is 30, and he’s solved a key problem in an interesting field. He’s famous, he’s got books, people want to hear him talk. Now, Ventris is kind of an odd duck; in a lot of ways, he’s not that good at dealing with other people. Remember where he freaked out and ran away from a scholarly project about this subject he adored? Well, that seems to have affected him, and he also dies mysteriously. In this case, we do know what killed him: it was a truck. But we don’t know why he drove into the truck. Perhaps it was suicide; he definitely drove into a parked truck at high speed, during an errand that could not possibly have been important. Ms. Fox doesn’t spend any time on it beyond those ideas. But we don’t know what Ventris might have done had he not died.So, what’s the takeaway? In addition to all the other stuff all the other reviews will tell you, I’d like to just add that there’s a great beauty to scholarship for the sake of scholarship. No money, no huge fame, no real prizes. Just the acclaim of a small group of people, and the knowledge that now the world knows something it didn’t. The people who study these things, things that have no practical application, benefit all of us. An enormous number of people seem to think that learning things is worthless unless they can be applied right here, right now. That there’s no merit to spending time on anything that doesn’t make money. Some people have fetishized ignorance and anti-intellectualism to the point of absurdity. The Riddle of the Labyrinth reminds us that this view of the world leaves us without a significant amount of joy. It’s a celebration of a commitment to learning for the joy of it, solving a problem just to tell someone else something new. And Ms. Fox, in digging out Alice Kober’s story and telling us about it, reminds us that there’s always an unsung hero, often a woman, who makes it all happen. Isn’t that a good use of your time?

I'd heard about the riddle of Linear B, solved long before I was born, but had never heard the story of how it was unraveled. The tale is far more interesting and human than the content of the texts we have in Linear B.Margalit Fox has long written obituaries for the New York Times, but as I understand this is her first book. There is something about her style which strikes me as "relentlessly fair". I felt I came away with a sense of each of the major players as people and professionals largely devoid of speculation, which I admire.This book is as remarkable for being an account of research in wartime as it is of deciphering an ancient language. It should give us pause to consider the conditions under which scholars operated in the mid-20th century, when WWII interrupted not only the communication and travel channels of academics, but their supplies of paper, ink, food and fuel. The scholars in this tale could not take correspondence for granted, and sent their manuscripts to Europe packed alongside instant soup and oranges preserved in wax. As late as 1948, fuel rations in England could only keep the temperature in Cambridge's libraries at around 50 F. Think about that for a moment, and consider doing what these people did under similar circumstances.Fox devotes one section to each of the people she sees as having been most important in the decryption of Linear B scripts. First, she tackles the archaeologist Arthur Evans, who unearthed the series of clay tablets while excavating the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete in 1902. Evans fell in love with the culture he imagined flourished on Crete or, more accurately, with his own ideas about it. Evans became one of the grandfathers of modern archaeology, and even his unsupported theories held sway for decades after his death.Second, Fox seeks to restore to prominence the contributions of Alice Elizabeth Kober, a professor of classics at Brooklyn College. Kober spent nearly two decades obsessively devoted to solving the problem of Linear B, working mostly alone at her kitchen table, but corresponding with dozens of scholars. She took a calculated, scientific, and incredibly effort-intensive approach, essentially building an analog database on hand-made punch cards. It was a brilliant move, as it freed her from conscious and unconscious assumptions that derailed other attempts. It seems she was considered one of the leaders in the field in her own time, but a combination of financial limitations, gender bias and tragedy kept her from devoting her life to researching Linear B full-time before her early death in 1950. It seems Kober's primary occupation was known only to the handful of scholars working seriously on Linear B. She did not publish much in her short life, and was by all accounts a fairly introverted person who did occasional give lectures, but never enjoyed public speaking. Ventris himself did not give her sufficient credit for building the extensive foundation that allowed him to crack Linear B two years after her death, but then again it may simply be that he himself did not live long enough to give credit where credit was due. Kober's papers have only recently become accessible to scholars, and they demonstrate just how extensive her correspondence was with the leading scholars working on Linear B, and how vital her contribution was to the ultimate solution.Third, Fox turns to the genius who finally cracked the code, a young architect named Michael Ventris. Ventris was a savant in terms of both quantitative reasoning and language acquisition. He knew dozens of languages, and could pick up a new one at the drop of a hat. Ventris became interested in Linear B as a boy, partly as an escape from his cold and unhappy upbringing. In every phase of life, Linear B became something of a refuge for Ventris; he allegedly brought his decryption materials on board the RAF bomber where he served as navigator during WWII. However, it's possible that the tortured inner world that drove Ventris so completely into complex intellectual puzzles got the best of him in the end.Evans, Kober and Ventris each devoted much of their lives to decoding Linear B, often to the exclusion of family, friends or other official responsibilities. Something about the lure of this puzzle compelled each of them to spend hours, months and years cracking the code. Margalit Fox does an admirable job in exploring the personalities, motivations and methods of each of them, and how each provided an indispensable piece of the solution.

Quite interesting... although I have the feeling that the author is a bit biased with one of the three protagonists: Alice Kober who happens to be an American female scholar... more or less like the author... So, I have perceived a sense of distortion in telling the facts. On the other hand, my guts say that the other two ones were really the hand (Arthur Evans) and the mind (Michael Ventris) of the decipherment: both British guys... And I am Italian so I am not biased by nationality... Anyhow a great book I truly recommend to anyone willing to go to Crete and to better understand the story of the island.

Although this book focueeses on Alice Kober's contribution to the decipherment of Linear B script it also covers off both Arthur Evans and Michael Ventris and, at the end, also provides a description of what we have learned from the texts. As such it is a must read for anyone wanting to understand something about the decipherment.The kindle book suffered terribly from the practice of embedding bitmapped graphics into the text. As these are often so gle characters they were often completely inaccessible, nor do they scale with the text. Kindle desperately needs a menu option to lie all of the bitmaps on a page or else to have a bitmap magnifying glass of some kind.Anyway, I digress. Although I would recommend this book as a quick study of the decipherment and of Kober's contribution in particular it is not a great read and failed to provide a good insight into enough of the intellectual process involved in the decipherment.

This is a superb book about a fascinating subject and the people involved in it. The deciphering of Linear B is one of the great stories of scientific archaeology of the 20th century. Apart from building a picture of the main protagonists, the author clearly describes the methods used and the traps into which many of those involved fell before the final breakthrough. The book restores Alice Kober to her rightful place in the story through her painstaking work over many years while not detracting from the contributions of the eventual decipherer Michael Ventris. The epilogue describing everyday life in Mycenaean Crete through the bureaucratic records recorded in the decoded clay tablets is masterful, painting a picture of a sophisticated civilisation predating classical Greece by some 500 years.

Read this book because I knew 'zilch' on the matter and it intrigued me. The book is split into 3 parts each of which deals with one the 3 characters connected with cracking the code. The author concentrates (and favours the 2nd) whom she feels has not received the attention that she deserves (echoes of the DNA code). I found the characters more interesting than the code (which turns out to be stockroom inventory) and which proves that when it comes to academic disputes Brutus does not get a look in!

This book tells how Linear B - an unknown writing system in an unknown language, recorded on ancient clay tablets - was eventually deciphered. It does so through the lives and dedication of the three main people involved. This could have been an immensely dull history, but is actually very readable, both in its biographical content and in the very easy to understand way that it unfolds the methods used to solve the mystery.If the subject of codes and/or ancient languages interests you, I recommend this book.