The Riddle of the Labyrinth (52 page)

80
the language of Linear B was the indigenous Minoan tongue
: Evans (1894), 353ff.
The few scholars who dared to question him
: Chadwick (1967), 25.
Candidates ranged from the preposterous
: See, e.g., Ibid., 26ff.
“Evans does not . . . seem to have had”
: Ibid., 17.

81
“The throne
,
,
is high-backed”
: Evans (1935), 687.
“as an ideogram, and with a determinative meaning”
: Ibid.
“it surely indicates a royal owner”
: Ibid.
“its inclusion at any rate suggests”
: Ibid., 701.
“It is itself apparently the derivative”
: Ibid., 708.

82
a crucial clue hidden in this fragmentary tablet
: Ibid., 799, note 3.
“the discoverer of the script did not achieve”
: Myres (1941), 953.

CHAPTER FOUR: AMERICAN CHAMPOLLION

85
On the evening of June 15
: AEK gives the date of the lecture in a c. 1947 curriculum vitae, 4, AEK Papers, PASP.
She was by nature self-contained
: AEK's former student Eva Brann describes her thus in an unpublished biographical essay, “In Memoriam: Alice E. Kober” (2005), 3–5, AEK Papers, PASP.
speaking in public made her unbearably nervous
: AEK letter to JFD, Sept. 8, 1947, AEK Papers, PASP.
she typically put each of her published papers through a good ten drafts
: Kober's doing so is widely attested in her correspondence and other papers. See, e.g., AEK letter to JFD, Oct. 18, 1946, in which she says, “I usually write an article over about ten times” and AEK letter to JFD, Oct. 8, 1947 (both, AEK Papers, PASP), in which she speaks of writing the fourth draft of an article (several more drafts will follow), adding, “I always discard the first ten pages of anything I write.”
Before her now was her typescript
: Alice E. Kober, untitled Phi Beta Kappa lecture, Hunter College (June 15, 1946); unpublished manuscript, AEK Papers, PASP.
Physically, she was unprepossessing
: Brann (2005), 15.

86
“On every kind of writing material known to man”
: Kober, untitled Phi Beta Kappa lecture, Hunter College (June 15, 1946), 1, AEK Papers, PASP.
a cumbersome load of classes, as many as five at a time
: See, e.g., AEK letter to JLM, Nov. 28, 1948, AEK Papers, PASP, in which she writes, “Next week . . . I'm getting examinations from all five of my classes—130 long papers.”

87
“the person on whom an astute bettor”
: Thomas G. Palaima, “Alice Elizabeth Kober,” unpublished manuscript, University of Texas, Austin (n.d.).

      
one good article a year
: AEK letter to JFD, July 1, 1948, AEK Papers, PASP.

88
noted together in 1927
: Cowley (1927).
a discovery previously attributed to Ventris
: See, e.g., Robinson (2002), 87–88.
“There is no certain clue to the language”
: Alice E. Kober, “Form Without Meaning,” lecture to Yale Linguistics Club (May 3, 1948), 4, unpublished manuscript, AEK Papers, PASP. Italics added.
“To get further, it is necessary to develop a science of graphics”
: Ibid., 12.
she declared she would make the Minoan scripts her lifework
: E. Adelaide Hahn, “Alice E. Kober,” obituary note,
Language
26:3 (1950), 442.

89
But in the coming years, on her own time
: All coursework per AEK curriculum vitae (c. 1947), PASP.
“One can remain sure that no Champollion”
: Quoted in Robinson (1995), 115.
ever-present cigarette at hand
: Brann (2005), 4, speaks of AEK's being a chain smoker.
“working hundreds of hours with a slide-rule”
: Kober, “Form Without Meaning,” 13.
who savored detective stories
: AEK refers several times in her correspondence to reading detective stories as a pastime; see, e.g., AEK letter to JFD, Dec. 5, 1947, AEK Papers, PASP.
“method and order”
: This was a favorite expression of Agatha Christie's great detective Hercule Poirot. It was clear that AEK read Christie; in a published article not related to the Minoan scripts, “Tiberius, Master Detective,”
Classical Outlook
22:4 (Jan. 1945), 37, she writes of Emperor Tiberius having used his “little grey cells”—another favorite term of Poirot's—to resolve a murder investigation.

90
Alice Elizabeth Kober was born
: Curiously, AEK's birth certificate, New York City Department of Health No. 1162, AEK Papers, PASP, lists her given name as Adele; this name appears nowhere else in her records.
Her parents had come to the United States
: Passenger records, SS
Statendam
, May 29, 1906, Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation, AEK Papers, PASP.
The couple settled in Yorkville
: AEK's birth certificate lists the family's address as 247 East 77th Street in Manhattan.
Census records list Franz's occupation
: United States census, Bronx, NY, 1930, AEK Papers, PASP; Franz Kober death certificate, New York City Department of Health No. AA37162, AEK Papers, PASP.
In the summer of 1924, she placed third
: “Awards of University Scholarships,”
New York Times
, Aug. 22, 1924, 16.
she took part in the Classical Club and the German Club
: Hunter College Yearbook (1928) 46, AEK Papers, PASP.
“As an undergraduate she impressed me”
: Ernst Reiss, letter of reference accompanying AEK's application for a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Nov. 1945, AEK Papers, PASP.

91
In 1928, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa
: “843 to Get Degrees at Hunter College,”
New York Times
, June 14, 1928, 24.
she graduated magna cum laude
: Ibid.
a major in Latin and a minor in Greek
: AEK Hunter College transcript.
C's and D's in gym
: Ibid.
followed by a Ph.D. in classics
: Alice Elizabeth Kober, “The Use of Color Terms in the Greek Poets, Including All the Poets from Homer to 146 B.C. Except the Epigrammatists,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1932.

      
she was working the entire time
: Job history per AEK's Guggenheim grant application, Nov. 1945, 2, AEK Papers, PASP.
at an annual salary of $2,148
: Salary history per ibid., 3.
“dry, refraining rigor”
: Brann (2005),
7
.
“She was, to coin a phrase”
: Ibid., 15.

92
“Everybody seems to handle Hrozný”
: AEK letter to JFD, Sept. 22, 1947, AEK Papers, PASP.
“When you wrote me in May, 1946”
: Cover letter accompanying AEK paper “The Language (or Languages) of the Minoan Scripts,” Classical Association of the Atlantic States (May 1946), unpublished manuscript, AEK Papers, PASP. Italics added.
Her life was her work
: Brann (2005) and Palaima and Trombley (2003) make a similar point.
After her father's death from stomach cancer
: Franz Kober died on Dec. 17, 1935, at sixty-two. Death certificate, AEK Papers, PASP.
in the house Alice owned
: In several places in her correspondence, AEK speaks of owning a house in Flatbush. See, e.g., AEK letter to JFD, Dec. 5, 1947, AEK Papers, PASP.

93
Kober did not write or lecture about the script publicly
: The first example of scholarly work by AEK on the subject in the AEK Papers, PASP archives is her 1941 paper, “Some Comments on a Minoan Inscription (Linear Class B),” presented at a meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (Dec. 31, 1941), AEK Papers, PASP. An abstract of the paper was published the next year in the
American Journal of Archaeology
46:1 (1942), 124.
“I have been working on the problems presented”
: AEK letter to Mary H. Swindler, Jan. 29, 1941, AEK Papers, PASP.
“of the kind so successfully used”
: Ibid., 12.

94
“As you are aware,” he says
: Conan Doyle (1903), 522.
when Kober first turned her attention to the Cretan scripts
: In a 1941 letter to Mary Swindler, editor of the
American Journal of Archaeology
, AEK writes of having worked on the Minoan scripts “for about ten years now.” Jan. 29, 1941, AEK Papers, PASP.
“thesaurus absconditus”
: AEK to ELB, June 7, 1948, ELB Papers, PASP.

95
linguistic survivals like
wine: All examples of linguistic survivals in British English are from Thomas Pyles,
The Origins and Development of the English Language
, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 313ff.
“would be of great importance to scholars”
: Alice E. Kober, “The Gender of Nouns Ending in -inthos,”
American Journal of Philology
63:3 (1942), 320–27.

96
pre-Hellenic words ran “into the thousands”
: AEK to JFD, Feb. 1, 1947, AEK Papers, PASP.
Among the pre-Hellenic words Kober identified
: Ibid., 321.
She had tried several times to tear herself away
: AEK to JFD, May 22, 1942, AEK Papers, PASP.
“I've resigned myself”
: Ibid.

97
who quickly appropriated Evans's Villa Ariadne
: Horwitz (1981), 247.
“No archaeologist, however able”
: Alice E. Kober, “Some Comments on a Minoan Inscription (Linear Class B),” paper presented at meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (Dec. 31, 1941); abstract published in
American Journal of Archaeology
46:1, 124.

98
This was also the case for the words “boy” and “girl”
: Cowley (1927).
almost assuredly meant “total”
: See, e.g., Alice E. Kober, “The Cryptograms of Crete,”
Classical Outlook
22:8 (May 1945), 78.

      
Blissymbolics was invented after World War II
: See, e.g., Charles Kasiel Bliss,
Semantography: A Non-Alphabetical Symbol Writing, Readable in All Languages; a Practical Tool for General International Communication, Especially in Science, Industry, Commerce, Traffic, etc., and for Semantical Education, Based on the Principles of Ideographic Writing and Chemical Symbolism
, 3 vols. (Sydney: Institute for Semantography, 1949).

99
the full solution
: The answer to the Blissymbolics problem appears below:

103
“It is possible to prove, quite logically”
: Kober, “Form Without Meaning,” 3–4.
“I am interested”
: AEK to JLM, Oct. 29, 1948, AEK Papers, PASP.
“We cannot speak of
language,
but only of
script”: Alice E. Kober, “The Cretan Scripts,” lecture to the New York Classical Club (May 17, 1947); unpublished manuscript, AEK Papers, PASP; emphasis in original.

104
“in patterns of selection and arrangement”
: Barber (1974), 145. In making this statement, Barber credits Paul L. Garvin,
On Linguistic Method: Selected Papers
(The Hague: Mouton, 1964), 22ff., 78–79.
“each sign bears a relation”
: Barber (1974), 117.
she would fill forty of them
: All forty notebooks are contained in the AEK Papers, PASP archive.

106
“a distinctive fingerprint”
: Barber (1974), 18.

107
“may be represented by from two”
: Ibid., 108.
“You can figure out for yourself”
: AEK to JFD, Oct. 27, 1947, AEK Papers, PASP.

108
by stacking two or more cards together
: Kober explains the principle behind the cards in a letter to JS, Feb. 25, 1947, AEK Papers, PASP.
“Making all these files takes time”
: AEK to HAM, Jan. 27, 1946, AEK Papers, PASP.
“reveal a gentler side”
: Palaima and Trombley (2003).
“I . . . teach in my spare time”
: AEK letter to JFD, May 4, 1942, AEK Papers, PASP.
“Brooklyn College never did anything for me”
: AEK to JFD, July 1, 1948, AEK Papers, PASP.

109
She shared an office with four other people
: AEK to ELB, Feb. 16, 1949, AEK Papers, PASP.
asked to give private instruction in Horace
: AEK curriculum vitae (c. 1947), 5, AEK Papers, PASP.

110
from 1944 onward, she brailled textbooks
: Ibid.
It took as many as fifteen hours
: “Adventure by Research Proves Ample Reward,”
Brooklyn Eagle
, April 28, 1946.
In a letter to her department chairman
: AEK letter to “Professor Pearl” [Joseph Pearl, chairman of the Department of Classical Languages at Brooklyn College], May 21, 1946, AEK Papers, PASP.