The Riddle of the Labyrinth (14 page)

Evans also succumbed early to the siren song of iconicity, an easy thing to do given Linear B's pictorial nature. Like every archaeologist of his time, he had studied the Egyptian decipherment closely, but the methods that had worked for Champollion would not work for him. For Evans, a major stumbling block was the concept of determinatives, the little icons inside an Egyptian cartouche that signaled the word's membership in a category, like “male,” “female,” or “royal.”

Because Linear B had so many little icons of its own, at least some of them, Evans concluded, must be determinatives. He found the character
especially seductive. To Evans, it looked like a throne, viewed from the side, with a scepter protruding. “The throne,
, is high-backed . . . like that in the ceremonial Palace chamber,” he wrote. Because this sign occurred in many Linear B words, Evans concluded that it was used, at least some of the time, “as an ideogram, and with a determinative meaning.” Where the character appeared alongside a symbol depicting an object—a chariot, for instance—“it surely indicates a royal owner,” Evans wrote. When it was used near an apparent personal name, he said, “its inclusion at any rate suggests a royal lineage.” (As it turns out,
represents the vowel sound “o” and nothing more, but this would not be known for half a century.)

In Evans's hands, other Linear B signs took on iconic dimensions. Of the character
, one of the “masons' marks” found on the wall at Knossos and later on many tablets, he wrote, “It is itself apparently the derivative of a façade or porch of a building.” He made similar conjectures about dozens of signs, a fanciful approach that seriously impeded his efforts to decipher the script.

From 1900 till his death in 1941, Evans tried repeatedly to induce a decipherment from the teeming mass of symbols, as if he could compel the language of the tablets to reveal itself through his accustomed force of will. This obstinacy made him choose to disregard a crucial clue hidden in this fragmentary tablet:

Had Evans allowed himself to follow the clue—deductively—to its logical outcome, he would have been able to unravel Linear B almost immediately.

In the end, as John Myres wrote in Evans's obituary, “the discoverer of the script did not achieve his ardent desire to decipher it.” But by the time of Evans's death, that desire was alight in others, including two who would prove far more successful than he.

New York, 1946

O
N THE EVENING OF JUNE 15, a small, sober-looking woman stood before an audience at Hunter College in Manhattan. The college was her alma mater, and now, two decades after her own luminous career there, she had been invited to address the new crop of Phi Beta Kappa initiates, Hunter's brightest students.

She was by nature self-contained, and speaking in public made her unbearably nervous; each time she did it, she vowed it would be the last. Her talk, like everything else she wrote, was the product of hours of meticulous planning, composition, and revision—she typically put each of her published papers through a good ten drafts until she was satisfied. Before her now was her typescript, its handwritten emendations in her tidy pedagogical script attesting to continued reflection and reworking.

Physically, she was unprepossessing—perhaps, in the parlance of the day, even plain. Short and roundish, she had neat, unstylish hair and dress; solemn, heavy-lidded eyes framed by spectacles; and a thin mouth that gave the impression of primness. Though she was not yet forty, she seemed, like many academic women of her era, prematurely and irretrievably middle-aged.

But as soon as she began to speak, her words had the hypnotic pull of a fairy tale:

The woman was Alice Kober, an assistant professor of classics at Brooklyn College. By day, she taught a cumbersome load of classes, as many as five at a time—things like Introductory Latin, and Classics in Translation. By night, working almost entirely on her own, as she had for the past fifteen years, she chipped away, methodically and insistently, at the scripts of Minoan Crete. Now, at thirty-nine, although few people knew it, she was the world's foremost expert on Linear B.

Though she is all but forgotten today, Alice Kober single-handedly brought the decipherment of Linear B closer to fruition than anyone before her. That she very nearly solved the riddle is a testament to the snap and rigor of her mind, the ferocity of her determination, and the unimpeachable rationality of her method. Kober was “the person on whom an astute bettor with full insider information would have placed a wager” to decipher the script, as Thomas Palaima, an authority on ancient Aegean writing, has observed.

Strikingly, she got as far as she did without being able to see any of the tablets firsthand. Even more remarkable was the fact that by the time she addressed the group at Hunter, Kober had already done groundbreaking work on Linear B in an era when there were barely two hundred inscriptions available for study.

That Kober's vital contribution to the decipherment has been largely overlooked is due in great measure to her early death, in 1950, just two years before Michael Ventris cracked the code. It is also due to her quiet, deliberate way of working, step by incremental step, never committing her ideas to print until they met her exacting standards of proof. As a result, she published little—it was more than enough for her, she used to say, to come out with one good article a year. But though her major work spans barely half a decade, from 1945 to 1949, she is now regarded as having built the solid, unassailable foundation on which Ventris's decipherment was erected. For as Ventris himself acknowledged publicly not long before his own untimely death, he had arrived at his solution using the methods Alice Kober had so painstakingly devised.

Along the way, Kober solved a host of small mysteries, many of which had bedeviled investigators from Arthur Evans onward. Among them were these: proving which sign depicted the male animal and which the female in paired logograms like
and
; correctly identifying the Minoan words for “boy” and “girl,” noted together in 1927 and likewise indistinguishable; and being the first to pinpoint the special meaning of the sign
, a discovery previously attributed to Ventris.