I have read every page of the manuscript in draft and proof stages. In short, Margalit gives us Kober as a full human being.

But it was also deeply satisfying, worth all the painstaking effort, and fun. Bennett, Jr., and John Franklin Daniel was a life calling (alongside her full-time obligations as a professor with major teaching obligations). For her working with other serious scholars like Johannes Sundwall and Emmett L. Margalit also gives us a way of grasping Kober’s sense that work on the scripts was what we might call ‘a sacred duty’.

“Kober was ‘the person on whom an astute bettor with full insider information would have placed a wager’ to decipher the script.” -Thomas Palaima She places the the work of Alice Elizabeth Kober in the context of the research done on the Aegean linear scripts from 1900 through the decipherment of Linear B in 1952. Margalit used the PASP archives and the School of Information resources at UT Austin in order to tell the story of the decipherment of Linear B.

The Times Sunday Review for has a biographical essay about Kober by Fox: Drawing on Kober's own papers - only made available recently - Margalit Fox provides the final piece of the enigma, and along the way reveals how you decipher a language when you know neither its grammar nor its alphabet as well as the stories behind other ancient languages, like the dancing-man Rongorongo of Easter Island.Margalit Fox’s new book The Riddle of the Labyrinth (Ecco Press) will be released on May 14. Two men have dominated Linear B in popular history: Arthur Evans, the intrepid Victorian archaeologist who unearthed Linear B at Knossos and Michael Ventris, the dashing young amateur who produced a solution.īut there was a third figure: Alice Kober, without whose painstaking work, recorded on pieces of paper clipped from hymn-sheets and magazines and stored in cigarette boxes in her Brooklyn loft, Linear B might still remain a mystery. But this captivating story is missing a crucial piece. The decoding of Linear B is one of the world's greatest stories: from the discovery of a cache of ancient tablets recording a lost prehistoric language to the dramatic solution of the riddle nearly seventy years later, it exerts a mesmerising pull on the imagination.

Margalit fox riddle of the labyrinth