In 1900, archeologist Arthur Evans uncovered a cache of clay tablets in an unknown script on Crete. For 50 years, scholars across the world struggled to decipher that script--Linear B--without knowing what language it encoded. In 1952, an amateur named Michael Ventris solved the puzzle with what is often presented as a single stroke of inspiration. Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth adds a new layer to this story.
Ventris's inspiration, it turns out, was based on the work of another, largely forgotten, scholar--classicist Alice Kober. Working alone in her Brooklyn, N.Y., home, Kober created a new methodology for decoding the unknown script without the benefit of a bilingual text or a computer. She also identified the keys that allowed Ventris to make his imaginative leap.
Fox (Talking Hands) divides her story into three parts, focusing on the charismatic digger Evans, the methodical detective Kober and the brilliant architect Ventris in turn. She handles the mix of biography, archeology, cryptology and linguistics with a sure touch. Technical discussions of how to decipher an unknown script written in an unknown language are as engaging as the lives of her protagonists.
In a satisfying conclusion, The Riddle of the Labyrinth ends where it begins, with the tablets themselves and what we have learned from them. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins