A couple of people have looked at this review, and commented that it’s a little long, so I’m gonna save you some time. I’m a Margalit Fox fan. I liked the first book I read, The Confidence Men (which is actually her most recent book), and this book is great, too. You should buy it and read it, and you should look at her other books, which I have not as yet read, and so cannot recommend. But if you’re looking at this, and the other reviews haven’t convinced you, well, read on. But the summary is this: this is a compelling story about a fascinating puzzle.
Let’s be plain: Women generally get hosed when it comes to the credit for their discoveries. Rosalind Franklin’s work was absolutely critical to the discovery of DNA, yet I learned about her in the last couple of years (and I am, generously, middle-aged). Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars, yet two men were awarded a Nobel Prize based on her work. (And these were the men she was working with, so it’s not a valid argument to know they weren’t standing on the shoulders of a giant.) The Wikipedia entry for Marie Curie reads like a master class in the theory and application of sexism. (Marie Curie has got to be in the top 5, maybe top 1, of greatest scientists of all time. I will die on this hill.)
And this book is largely about one of those women, Alice Kober. It’s not entirely about her; it’s about a puzzle, and the struggle to solve it. Part of that struggle is the set of obstacles to working on it at all. But Ms. Kober’s lack of credit is a major issue, and Margalit Fox’s description of her vital, but largely overlooked, work is enough of a reason to buy and read this book.
It took a while for archeology to move toward science. I guess the progression goes from tomb robber to guy with a shovel to rich guy who pays other guys with shovels to scientists. Along the way, we preserve more and more and learn more and more. When this story really gets going, we’re just past the time when, in the words of René Belloq, “You would use a bulldozer to find a china cup.”
In this case, the rich guy who pays other guys with shovels is Arthur Evans, who goes to Crete in pursuit of cool ancient stuff. (Okay, that’s an oversimplification. Arthur Evans was an accomplished archeologist, but had he not been a rich dude who could pay other dudes, this story would not have gotten off the ground.) Why Crete? Because he’s pretty sure he’s going to find, in addition to other awesome stuff, ancient writing that’s going to lead to a better understanding of Ancient Greece.
He does. There’s a whole palace down there. He’s able to date it; it comes from 1450 BCE. It’s amazing. There are things in it that boggle the mind. There’s art, artifacts, and carvings. The real treasure, though, is the writing. He finds thousands of clay tablets, covered in a script no one’s ever seen before (well, not in this quantity). Actually, he finds evidence of two languages, Linear A and Linear B. No one’s ever translated Linear A, and while there are things that are important about it, that’s the basic takeaway. We just don’t know what it says. This book is about Linear B, which does get deciphered. That’s the core of the book.
Personal aside: I knew about Linear A and Linear B. I knew one of them had been deciphered and one had not. I mixed them up when I was deciding to buy this book and assumed someone had deciphered the unknown one in the intervening 30 years. No, this is about the 1950’s decipherment of Linear B, and so the riddle of the labyrinth does have a solution, but it isn’t to Linear A.
But I digress. Linear B is weird. It’s like hieroglyphics, but not. Some of the things are pictures, some of them are designs, some are combinations of the two. Evans pretty quickly figures out that what he’s looking at are bureaucratic records; tallies of things, probably so people could pay takes. (Fifty minutes after the first hominid killed the first pre-antelope with a rock, we invented taxes, so no one should be surprised that he finds thousands of these.)
Evans is elated. The archeological scholars who work in this area are elated. He works on the foundations of publishing and deciphering the tablets. Slowly. Very very slowly. The problem for everyone else is that he won’t publish pictures of the tablets. So it’s hard to work on them. He doesn’t want to publish until he’s figured it out. Except, his hot take is wrong. And because his take is wrong, he can’t make progress. And so on.
Enter Alice Kober. There’s this thing about scholars, real scholars. They find a thing they love, and they strive to understand it. If they solve it, they move on to the next level of understanding the thing. The goal is to find out something no one knows and tell other people about it. Dr. Alice Kober is a freakin’ scholar. Alice is practically a force of nature when it comes to deciphering things. Dr. Kober isn’t going to let a little thing like having bits and pieces of the treasure trove of symbols stop her.
At this moment, I should mention that Ms. Fox doesn’t just want to tell us the story of how Linear B got solved. Ms. Fox wants us to understand how one would solve any problem like Linear B. She walks us through the levels of analysis that you do in order to puzzle out, as she describes it, an unknown language in an unknown script. I have to admit that she lost me from time to time here. I have no facility for languages. Ms. Fox does, and has written professionally about them. If you get lost in these bits, it’s okay. Ms. Fox makes sure to provide signposts and summaries so you can recapture the thread of the story if you get lost in what symbol means what and why we know that.
The first thing Dr. Kober does is decide that a bunch of theories are just plain wrong. No, that’s not true. The first thing she does is educate herself on everything she needs to work on the problem. She learns languages. She learns how deciphering works. She demonstrates she’s a genius and everyone else can eat her dust. Then, she works at her kitchen table, nights and weekends, struggling to document how these squiggles work together. Why nights and weekends? Because Dr. Kober can’t get financial support, real support. She’s got a job; she gets paid, but she’s a professor of classics. Professors of classics are not paid fantastically well. It’s hard to get funding. Funding for linguistic analysis isn’t falling from the sky either. She’s also, as noted above, a woman. Universities in the 1950’s, embarrassingly, were not hotbeds of equality. The idea that Dr. Kober should be supported with money and free time does not get a lot of traction. There are moments when she gets the help she deserves, but mostly she struggles.
As Dr. Kober works, she invents tools to help her work. She has card files that not only document almost everything, but actually physically line up so she can address problems visually. Alice is the person who changes things. The scholars who work on this are a small group, and Alice is the mover and shaker. Unfortunately, that means she gets suckered into working with the english dude trying to publish the tablets after Evans’ death, and in comparison with Alice, he’s as sharp as a sack of wet mice. In what seems either lazy or sexist, he fobs off all the heavy lifting on her. Dr. Kober, is again overworked, underpaid, and not as celebrated as she should be.
Unfortunately for everyone, her work, and the credit she deserves, Alice Kober dies of a mysterious illness in 1950. (The mystery isn’t that she was ill, it’s what her illness was. It’s well documented she was sick, but Ms. Fox couldn’t find out what killed her.)
We now turn to Michael Ventris. Ms. Fox introduces him earlier in the narrative and weaves him into Dr. Kober’s story, but I like Alice Kober like better, so you meet him here. Ventris is not a scholar. He does not study other things.
He is, however, a genius. And when I say that, I ain’t kidding. Ventris has a thing where he learns languages with ease. He masters Swedish in a matter of weeks because he had to go there for a while for work. (Ms. Fox emphasizes that this is unusual because he has this skill as an adult). But he’s not a professional, and he fumbles around for a while. During this period, he crosses paths with Alice Kober, and manages to piss her off. She did not suffer fools, and several of Ventris’ early theories are the ideas of a rank amateur. Also, when they meet personally, it’s on a project that scares the hell out of Ventris, and he suddenly remembers that he needs to do something else over there. But Ventris is a genius, and he picks up what’s being laid down. He asks scholars what they think, he studies what’s out there, and he goes beyond. Ventris cracks Linear B by asking, essentially the same question that cracks hieroglyphics: what if this thing here is a name?
That turns out to be the vital insight. Turns out Linear B is Greek, just written in a script we didn’t know existed. This is very cool. See, Linear B is not an alphabet. It’s syllabic, and the intersection between spoken Greek, and the language Linear A represents, produces Linear B, which provides the Greeks with a way to write things down. We didn’t know Greek existed in 1450 BCE. We certainly didn’t know how it intersected with the Mycenaean civilization on Crete. Once other people applied Ventris’ insight (and scholarly analysis) to the foundations Kober laid, we got a wealth of knowledge about people we didn’t know anything much about.
Ventris is 30, and he’s solved a key problem in an interesting field. He’s famous, he’s got books, people want to hear him talk. Now, Ventris is kind of an odd duck; in a lot of ways, he’s not that good at dealing with other people. Remember where he freaked out and ran away from a scholarly project about this subject he adored? Well, that seems to have affected him, and he also dies mysteriously. In this case, we do know what killed him: it was a truck. But we don’t know why he drove into the truck. Perhaps it was suicide; he definitely drove into a parked truck at high speed, during an errand that could not possibly have been important. Ms. Fox doesn’t spend any time on it beyond those ideas. But we don’t know what Ventris might have done had he not died.
So, what’s the takeaway? In addition to all the other stuff all the other reviews will tell you, I’d like to just add that there’s a great beauty to scholarship for the sake of scholarship. No money, no huge fame, no real prizes. Just the acclaim of a small group of people, and the knowledge that now the world knows something it didn’t. The people who study these things, things that have no practical application, benefit all of us. An enormous number of people seem to think that learning things is worthless unless they can be applied right here, right now. That there’s no merit to spending time on anything that doesn’t make money. Some people have fetishized ignorance and anti-intellectualism to the point of absurdity. The Riddle of the Labyrinth reminds us that this view of the world leaves us without a significant amount of joy. It’s a celebration of a commitment to learning for the joy of it, solving a problem just to tell someone else something new. And Ms. Fox, in digging out Alice Kober’s story and telling us about it, reminds us that there’s always an unsung hero, often a woman, who makes it all happen. Isn’t that a good use of your time?
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The first type, in which a written symbol stands for a whole word (or a whole concept), is called logographic (or ideographic) writing.Highlighted by 292 Kindle readers- By some estimates, only about 15 percent of the roughly six thousand languages spoken around the globe have written forms.Highlighted by 267 Kindle readers
- In the third type of writing system, symbols stand for individual sounds. This is an alphabet. We owe the alphabet to the Phoenicians, a Semitic people, who fashioned a letter-by-letter writing system from an earlier Semitic script in about 1000 B.C.Highlighted by 257 Kindle readers
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- Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2021
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Top reviews from other countries
- Philip I. ReevesReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 28, 2024
Fascinating story beautifully told
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- dgmReviewed in Australia on February 18, 2015
Excellent book, nicely technical and a detective story to boot
