The Riddle of the Labyrinth

From The Guardian:

Minos, a bronze-age king who ruled over the city-state Knossos in Crete, wasn't one for winning hearts and minds. According to Greek mythology, he'd regularly (possibly as often as every year – accounts differ) throw 14 kids to the minotaur in his labyrinth, built by Daedalus, whom he also locked up. He had a mechanical giant who patrolled the shore outside his palace.

He was also real, according to Arthur Evans, an English archaeologist who unearthed an ancient palace with a maze of interconnected rooms at Knossos in 1900. Inside the palace were hundreds of clay tablets written in a script that had never been seen before. The tablets dated to about 1450BC – seven centuries before the Greek alphabet existed – making them the earliest examples of writing ever found in Europe. But if there were revelations in these texts about Minos, they were locked away. No one even knew the language that they transcribed, and there were no handy Rosetta Stone-style translations lying around.

The quest to crack this code has been traced by authors before, as acknowledged by Margalit Fox, an obituary writer at the New York Times with a masters in linguistics. Her innovation, in this well-paced "palaeographical procedural", is to place Alice Kober, a classics lecturer from a working-class family of Hungarian immigrants living in Brooklyn, at the centre of the story.

While it was an anxious architect called Michael Ventris who finally made the breakthrough in 1952, Fox argues that Kober deserves more credit than she's been given for her groundwork. In fact, Fox suggests that if Kober had been better supported in academia, and less willing to donate hundreds of hours of unpaid secretarial work to an Oxford University professor (reading between the lines: if she'd been a man), she might have got there first.

The details of how the tablets were deciphered are complicated, and it's a credit to Fox's clear, confident writing that following them isn't too painful. As with any good detective story, there's a driving narrative behind the puzzle, peopled by solitary sleuths who allow marital problems or bills to stack up as they devote themselves to the hunt.

Kober remained single throughout her life, living with her mother and making a pre-digital database by filling out 180,000 homemade index cards with detailed information about each sign. Her breakthrough was to do with certain triplets of words that shared a root but had different endings: they allowed her to compile tables of signs that shared consonants or vowels, even if she didn't know which sounds these were. (Read more.)

Share