The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox

Drawing on Kober's own papers - only made available recently - Margalit Fox provides the final piece of the enigma, and 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 Island. But there was a third figure: Alice Kober, without whose painstaking work, recorded on pieces of paper clipped from hymn-sheets and magazines and stored in cigarette boxes in her Brooklyn loft, Linear B might still remain a mystery. The Riddle of the Labyrinth, a gripping and tightly focused scholarly mystery informed by the author’s own knowledge of linguistics, recounts the story of Linear B through three people who. Winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of three previous books, Conan Doyle for the Defense, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, and Talking Hands, Fox lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson. 'The Riddle of the Labyrinth', by New York Times writer Margalit Fox, tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of languagethe race to decipher the Bronze Age script known as Linear B, first dug up on clay tablets in Crete in 1900. Two men have dominated Linear B in popular history: Arthur Evans, the intrepid Victorian archaeologist who unearthed Linear B at Knossos and Michael Ventris, the dashing young amateur who produced a solution. Riddle of the Labyrinth The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code and the Uncovering of a Lost Civilisation by Margalit Fox. 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.īut, captivating as it is, this story is missing a crucial piece. Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox, 2014, Profile Books Limited edition, in English.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox