The Riddle of the Labyrinth (15 page)

But Kober also made much larger discoveries—findings that illuminated the internal workings of Linear B words and symbols—and it was these that had profound implications for Ventris's solution. Her work reads like a how-to manual for archaeological decipherment, something acutely needed for Linear B, a textbook case of an unknown script writing an unknown language. “There is no certain clue to the language of the Minoan scripts,” Kober said in a 1948 lecture at Yale. “All we have are the inscriptions they left, and the symbols they contain.” She added: “To get further, it is necessary to develop a science of graphics.” It was just such a science that Kober, from the first, had set out to construct.

NO ONE BELIEVED Alice Kober when she declared she would make the Minoan scripts her lifework. The year was 1928, and she announced her ambition upon her own graduation from Hunter College. At first glance, she seemed an unlikely candidate to solve a mystery that had already endured for almost three decades. She was young—barely twenty-one—and though she had majored in classics, she had none of the specialized background in historical linguistics that might have put such a calling within reach. Nor was she trained in archaeology, statistics, or any other discipline essential to the decipherer's art.

Above all, she simply did not look the part: With its aura of bravura, derring-do, and more than a dash of imperialism, archaeological decipherment was the time-honored province of moneyed European men. That the upstart American daughter of working-class immigrants would even contemplate the field was dismissed as youthful fantasy.

But in the coming years, on her own time, Kober would systematically acquire every needed weapon in the decipherer's arsenal. She learned a spate of ancient languages and scripts with the methodical ardor of a Champollion. She studied archaeology, linguistics, statistics, and, for their methodology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics. All this—more than a decade of concerted study—she did merely to lay the groundwork for her eventual assault on Linear B.

In 1942, Michael Ventris, then only twenty but already passionately interested in the Cretan scripts, wrote confidently from London, “One can remain sure that no Champollion is working quietly in a corner” on the riddle of Linear B. But in fact there was, directly across the Atlantic, sitting quietly at the dining room table of her modest Brooklyn house, ever-present cigarette at hand, and “working hundreds of hours with a slide-rule,” as she later wrote. For it was Alice Kober, like Champollion in his day, who imposed scientific precision on the romantic, undisciplined attempts that had gone before. To the riddle of Linear B she brought the skills of a crack forensic analyst in a detective story, who gleans vital information after lesser investigators have trampled through, an unflappable Holmes in a sea of Lestrades. It was only fitting that she, who savored detective stories in what small spare time she had, would give the decipherment the “method and order” she so esteemed.

ALICE ELIZABETH KOBER was born in Manhattan on December 23, 1906, the elder of two children of Franz and Katharina Kober. Her parents had come to the United States from Hungary earlier that year; Katharina would have been pregnant with Alice when they arrived in May. The couple settled in Yorkville, a historically German and Hungarian neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Census records list Franz's occupation as upholsterer and, in later years, apartment-building superintendent. A son, William, was born to the Kobers two years after Alice.

Few traces of Kober's early life are extant. As a teenager, she attended Hunter College High School, one of the city's elite public schools, which, like Hunter College itself, was then for women only. In the summer of 1924, she placed third among 115 New York City high school seniors in a statewide college scholarship contest. Her prize, a hundred dollars a year for four years (about $1,300 a year today), was undoubtedly welcome in a family of modest means. That fall, she entered Hunter College, where she took part in the Classical Club and the German Club.

Even in a college known for its brilliant young women, Kober by all accounts stood out. “As an undergraduate she impressed me by her earnest application to her work, and even more by her independent judgment, which let her accept no statement of the teacher without subjecting it to critical study,” one of her professors, the classicist Ernst Reiss, later wrote. “Coupled with this was a still more valuable trait, an intellectual honesty, which induced her readily to revise her own opinion when she became convinced of the correctness of the opposition.”

At Hunter, Kober took a course in early Greek life, and it seems to have been there that she encountered the Minoan scripts. In 1928, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; she graduated magna cum laude that year, with a major in Latin and a minor in Greek. (C's and D's in gym appear to have put summa cum laude out of reach.) Accepted to graduate school at Columbia, she earned a master's degree in classics in 1929, followed by a Ph.D. in classics there in 1932.

Kober's passage through graduate school, rapid by any standards, was all the more impressive in that she was working the entire time, first at Hunter High School, where she was a substitute Latin teacher, and afterward at Hunter College, where she was an instructor in Greek and Latin. In 1930, two years before she was awarded her doctorate, Alice Kober, then not quite twenty-four, became an instructor at the newly created Brooklyn College at an annual salary of $2,148—just under $30,000 today.

The archaeologist Eva Brann, who studied with Kober at Brooklyn in the late 1940s, recalled her teacher's “dry, refraining rigor” in a biographical essay written in 2005:

Toward those she did not respect intellectually (and there were many), Kober could be withering. In a 1947 letter to a colleague, she loosed her scorn on the eminent Czech linguist Bedřich Hrozný. Hrozný had made his name by deciphering ancient Hittite in the 1910s and was just then attempting to do the same for Minoan, with conspicuously less success. “Everybody seems to handle Hrozný with kid gloves,” Kober wrote. “I suppose it's because nobody thinks a man with Hrozný's reputation could possibly be as stupid as he seems.”

Her harshest criticism, though, was reserved for herself. In 1947, she sent the editor of the journal
Classical Weekly
a lecture on the Cretan scripts he had solicited for publication. Her cover letter read, revealingly: “When you wrote me in May, 1946 I answered that I didn't think it was worth printing. . . . It still seems to me that it isn't quite the thing for the Classical Weekly, though it isn't as bad as I thought it was at the time. . . . The subject is one, as you will see, to which I have a strong emotional reaction, and
emotion and scholarship do not belong together
.”

Her life was her work, and what a great deal of work there was. Kober never married, nor is there evidence she ever had a romantic partner. After her father's death from stomach cancer in 1935, and with her brother grown and gone, she and her mother lived together in the house Alice owned in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. It was there, night after night, after her classes were taught and her papers graded, that she turned to what she considered the true enterprise of her life: the deep, serious business of deciphering Linear B.

Kober did not write or lecture about the script publicly until the early 1940s, but her private papers make clear that she had begun tackling it long before. “I have been working on the problems presented by the Minoan scripts . . . for about ten years now, and feeling rather lonely,” she wrote to Mary Swindler, the editor of the
American Journal of Archaeology
, in January 1941.

Where Evans's approach to Linear B was scattershot, impressionistic, and anecdotal, from the start Kober imposed more rational methods. Her first order of business, starting in the 1930s, was frequency analysis: the creation of statistics “of the kind so successfully used in the deciphering and decoding of secret messages,” as she wrote, for every character of the script.

Anyone who has solved a Sunday newspaper cryptogram has met frequency analysis head-on. At its simplest, it entails pure counting, with the decipherer tabulating the number of times a particular character appears in a particular text. If the text is long enough, the frequency count for each letter should mirror its statistical frequency in the language as a whole. It was frequency analysis that let Sherlock Holmes decipher this secret message, one of several at the center of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story “The Adventure of the Dancing Men.” (The font used here differs somewhat from the original, but the message is the same):

As Dr. Watson and a provincial police inspector look on, Holmes elucidates his method. “As you are aware,” he says, “E is the most common letter in the English alphabet, and it predominates to so marked an extent that even in a short sentence one would expect to find it most often.” To Holmes, it was immediately apparent that the character
, the most frequent in the cipher, stood for “e.” As for the rest of the alphabet, he continued, “Speaking roughly, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, and L are the numerical order in which letters occur.” (The message, quickly unraveled, read: “Elsie. Prepare to meet thy God.” Happily, Elsie did not.)

Every language has its own characteristic letter frequencies, and for decipherment, this fact can be telling. In German, the eleven most frequent letters, in descending order, are
e n i r s t a h d u l
. In French, they are
e a s t i r n u l o d
. Thus, for a simple substitution cipher like the one above, a moderately skilled investigator can use frequency analysis first to identify the underlying language (assuming it is one whose letter frequencies are known) and then to crack the cipher itself.

For frequency analysis to work properly, the text of the cipher must be long enough to provide a statistically significant sample. And that, for Kober and other investigators of Linear B, was precisely the problem: Evans, resolute as ever in old age, had continued to sit on his data. In the early 1930s, when Kober first turned her attention to the Cretan scripts, the only inscriptions to which anyone had access were the tiny handful Evans had published in
Scripta Minoa
in 1909, plus the small set published covertly by the Finnish scholar Johannes Sundwall—the “thesaurus absconditus,” scholars called it. The two sets together totaled fewer than one hundred inscriptions, less than one-twentieth of what Evans had unearthed at Knossos.

With so little text available, how can a decipherer even begin? Kober began by looking for ghosts.

EVERY LANGUAGE GLIMMERS with sparks of earlier ones. These sparks—a word, a place-name—are the residual traces of languages spoken before, often long before, in the same part of the world. Though tiny, the sparks can illuminate a history of invasion, conquest, trade, and the wholesale movement of populations. In the West Germanic language known as English, we can discern Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain in the first century B.C. from linguistic survivals like
wine
(from Latin
vinum
) and
anchor
(Latin
ancora
) that remain in use today. We see the enduring presence of the Celts, who inhabited Britain before the Romans and for some time afterward, in place-names like Cornwall, Devon, and London. We also see the legacy of the Viking conquests of Britain toward the end of the first millennium: Many English words starting with
sk-
, like
skill, skin
, and
skirt
, are of Scandinavian origin. And so on.