Riddle Of The Labyrinth

Product Description

The decoding of Linear B is one of the world's greatest stories: from the discovery of a cache of ancient tablets recording a lost prehistoric language to the dramatic solution of the riddle nearly seventy years later it exerts a mesmerizing pull on the imagination. But captivating as it is this story is missing a crucial piece. Two men have dominated Linear B in popular history: Arthur Evans the intrepid Victorian archaeologist who unearthed Linear B at Knossos & Michael Ventris the dashing young amateur who produced a solution. But there was a third figure: Alice Kober without whose painstaking work recorded on pieces of paper clipped from hymn-sheets & magazines & stored in cigarette boxes in her Brooklyn loft Linear B might still remain a mystery. Drawing on Kober's own papers
- only made available recently
- Margalit Fox provides the final piece of the enigma & along the way reveals how you decipher a language when you know neither its grammar nor its alphabet as well as the stories behind other ancient languages like the dancing-man Rongorongo of Easter Isl&.