THE

RIDDLE

THE

LABYRINTH

The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code and

the Uncovering of a Lost Civilisation

M A R G A L I T F O X

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3A Exmouth House

Pine Street

London EC1R 0JH

www.proﬁlebooks.com

First published in the United States of America in 2013 by

HarperCollins Publishers

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Clays, Bungay, Suffolk

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced

into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the

prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of

this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78125 132 4

eISBN 978 1 84765 970 5

Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer

holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061

Obituary Writer Margalit Fox The Riddle of the Labyrinth Biography — page 3

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in

themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate

them only in their effects. We know of them, among other

things, that they are always to their possessor, when inor-

dinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As

the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in

such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the

analyst in that moral activity which

disentangles

. . . . He

is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; ex-

hibiting in his solutions of each a degree of

acumen

which

appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural.

His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of

method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

—EDGA R A LL A N POE,

“THE MUR DER S IN THE RUE MORGUE,” 1841

Obituary Writer Margalit Fox The Riddle of the Labyrinth Biography — page 4

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations

xiii

Introduction

Prologue

Buried Treasure

BOOK ONE

THE DIGGER

Chapter 1

The Record-Keepers

Chapter 2

The Vanished Key

Chapter 3

Love Among the Ruins

BOOK T WO

THE DETECTIVE

Chapter 4

American Champollion

Chapter 5

A Delightful Problem

113

Chapter 6

Splitting the Baby

129

Chapter 7

The Matrix

151

Chapter 8

“Hurry Up and Decipher the Thing!”

177

Obituary Writer Margalit Fox The Riddle of the Labyrinth Biography — page 5

BOOK THREE

THE ARCHITECT

Chapter 9

The Hollow Boy

203

Chapter 10

A Leap of Faith

221

Chapter 11

“I Know It, I

Know

It”

233

Chapter 12

Solution, Dissolution

247

Epilogue

Mr. X and Mr. Y

269

Appendix: The Signs of Linear B

287

References

289

Notes

297

Acknowledgments

347

Picture Credits

351

Index

353

Obituary Writer Margalit Fox The Riddle of the Labyrinth Biography — page 6

I N T R O D U C T I O N

HIS IS THE TRUE STORY

of one of the most mesmerizing riddles

in Western history and, in particular, of the unsung woman

who would very likely have solved it had she only lived a little

longer. It is the account of the half-century-long attempt to de-

cipher an unknown script from the Aegean Bronze Age, whose

bare-bones name, Linear B, belies both its bewitching beauty

and its inexorable pull.

I ﬁrst encountered the tale of Linear B more than thirty

years ago, as a moony adolescent, and it has lost none of its mys-

tery or narrative power since. At its center was a set of tablets,

buried for almost three thousand years and ﬁrst unearthed only

at the dawn of the twentieth century. Dating from the second

millennium B.C., the tablets were inscribed with a set of pre-

historic symbols like no writing ever seen. Despite the efforts

of investigators around the globe, no one could discover what

language they recorded, much less what the curious inscriptions

said.

The decipherment of Linear B came to be considered one

of the most formidable puzzles of all time, and for ﬁve decades,

some of the world’s most distinguished scholars attempted

without success to crack the code. Then, in 1952, the tablets

Obituary Writer Margalit Fox The Riddle of the Labyrinth Biography — page 7

xvi INTRODUCTION

were deciphered seemingly in a single stroke—not by a scholar

but by an impassioned amateur, an English architect named

Michael Ventris. Young, dashing, and brilliant, Ventris had a

long obsession with the tablets, a prodigy’s gift for languages,

and, as I would later learn, a sorrowful history. His life, to my

teenage self, was the stuff of high romance. Still more romantic

was the fact that his great triumph culminated in tragedy: In

1956, just four years after solving the riddle, Ventris died at the

age of thirty-four, under circumstances that remain the subject

of speculation even now.

But as captivating as it was, the story I knew—the only story

anyone knew—was incomplete. A major actor in the drama was

missing: an American woman named Alice Elizabeth Kober.

Working quietly and meticulously from her home in New York

City, Kober was by the mid-twentieth century the world’s lead-

ing expert on Linear B. Though largely forgotten today, she

came within a hair’s breadth of deciphering the script before

her own untimely death in 1950.

Alice Kober’s story is presented here in full for the ﬁrst

time. As her published papers and private correspondence make

plain, it was she who built the foundation on which Ventris’s

successful decipherment stood, and it is clear that without her

work Linear B would never have been deciphered when it was, if

at all. In recent years, Kober’s role in the decipherment has been

likened to that of Rosalind Franklin, the English scientist now

considered the unsung heroine of one of the most signal intel-

lectual feats of the modern age, the mapping of the molecular

structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson.

What makes Kober’s achievement especially striking is that

she did her groundbreaking work entirely by hand—sitting

Obituary Writer Margalit Fox The Riddle of the Labyrinth Biography — page 8

INTRODUCTION xvii

night after night at her dining table with little more than paper

and ink—without the aid of “IBM machines,” as she dismis-

sively called them. Yet for several reasons, not least among them

that history is nearly always written by the victors, her contribu-

tion to the unraveling of Linear B has remained almost com-

pletely absent from the historical record.

Until now, only two slender histories of the decipherment

have been published,

The Decipherment of Linear B

(Cambridge

University Press, 1958), by John Chadwick, and

The Man Who

Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris

(Thames &

Hudson, 2002), by Andrew Robinson and neither devotes

much space to Kober. They could hardly have done otherwise:

Kober’s private writings, including her decade-long correspon-

dence with other Linear B scholars, as well as her own pains-

taking analysis of the script, thousands of pages of documents

in all, became available only recently. As a result, thanks to the

newly opened archive of her papers at the University of Texas,

this book can offer the ﬁrst complete account of the decipher-

ment.

“I DON’T LIKE

the idea of getting paid” for scholarly writing,

Kober said in 1948. “If I wanted to make money writing, I’d

write detective stories.” That, as it turns out, is precisely what

she

was

writing: Read today, her work is a forensic playbook

for archaeological decipherment.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth,

which centers on the cryptanalytic process involved in unravel-

ing an unknown script, is a paleographic procedural, following

the work of Kober and others step by step as they solve a riddle

that had deﬁed solution for more than half a century.

Obituary Writer Margalit Fox The Riddle of the Labyrinth Biography — page 9

xviii INTRODUCTION

This book is also an ampliﬁcation—even a refutation—of

the few, brief biographical sketches of Kober that have appeared

in published accounts of the decipherment over the years. Be-

cause the writers had none of her personal correspondence on

which to draw, they were obliged to conjure Kober whole from

her few, rigorous published articles. As a result, these sketches

inevitably leave the reader with the impression of a stern, hu-

morless woman who had little passion for anything outside the

serious enterprise of deciphering Linear B.

“In the words of Ventris written after the decipherment,

her approach was ‘prim but necessary,’ ” Andrew Robinson has

written in

Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeci-

phered Scripts,

published in 2002. “To go further would re-

quire a mind like his that combined her perseverance, logic and

method, with a willingness to take intellectual risks.”

Kober was indeed cautious and methodical, but she

was also, as her hundreds of letters amply attest, funny, self-

deprecating, charming, and intensely concerned about practi-

cally everything. She moved through her short life with a quiet,

burning ardor—for teaching, for learning, for the just treat-

ment of her fellow human beings—that belied her prim exterior

and seemed born of what she evocatively called “a feeling for

the ﬁtness of things.” Her correspondence also makes clear that

she did allow herself to entertain, privately, some intellectually

risky approaches to the riddle of Linear B. Some of these, ar-

rived at independently by Ventris after Kober’s death, would

bring about its solution.

The scholarly ﬁeld on which Kober did battle in the 1930s

and ’40s was very much a man’s world, and it is understand-

able, if now unpalatable, that her male contemporaries so often

Obituary Writer Margalit Fox The Riddle of the Labyrinth Biography — page 10

INTRODUCTION xix

characterized her in terms of maidenish qualities. That at least

some twenty-ﬁrst-century writers continue to accept this ap-

praisal is far less understandable, and far less palatable.

In focusing on Kober’s story, I in no way intend to dimin-

ish the stunning achievement of Ventris, or of Arthur Evans,

the English archaeologist who uncovered the tablets. Kober’s

role in the decipherment, so vital yet so long overlooked, is the

essential missing piece of this extraordinary story. I have chosen

to quote extensively from her letters in the chapters devoted to

her life, for it is through them, even more than through her

masterful published writings, that she truly reveals herself.

All this said,

The Riddle of the Labyrinth

also discharges a

debt to Ventris. In my daytime life, I have the great privilege

of working as an obituary news writer at the

New York Times,

where I am paid to write the narrative histories of extraordi-

nary people who have done extraordinary things. In Septem-

ber 1956, after Ventris died, obituaries appeared in newspapers

throughout Europe. But for unknown reasons, most American

papers, including the

Times,

overlooked the news of his death

entirely. It can happen. Receiving timely news from abroad was

a less reliable proposition then, and obituaries were less valu-

able journalistic properties. Assuming that word of the death

reached the

Times

’s newsroom at all, it would have taken little

more than one bleary-eyed night editor who had heard neither

of Ventris nor of Linear B for the obituary to have been con-

signed to the spike. As a result, Ventris’s achievement remains

less well known than it might be. And so, to rectify the omis-

sion six decades belatedly—and to uphold the honor of my pro-

fession—here, too, is his story.

What is more, the process by which Ventris cracked the

Obituary Writer Margalit Fox The Riddle of the Labyrinth Biography

Prompt to Clone This Obituary Writer Margalit Fox The Riddle of the Labyrinth Biography

Apply this example's core structure, strategic pacing, and structural hierarchy directly to your own topic.

What are you generating today?