Encounter 25 · 25 of 42 · 1948
The grid she left
In 1948 Alice Kober published a paper that separated fact from theory in Linear B. She showed the script inflected. She did not claim to read the language.
Brooklyn
What they knew
- Linear B words inflect. Same stem, different endings: the triplets.
- Some signs share a consonant or a vowel. A phonetic grid can be started from that, without naming the tongue.
- Decipherment, she said, was premature until the signs were counted and juxtaposed.
What they could not know
- What language the tablets held.
- Whether a method that refused guessing would be enough.
- Whether anyone would keep the grid after the drawer closed.
The situation
Alice Kober taught classics at Brooklyn College from 1930. Linear B was still unread. Paper was short in wartime: notes on scrap, exam backs, greeting cards, files in cigarette cartons. A 1945 paper in the American Journal of Archaeology already treated inflection. In 1948 she published “The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory.” She did not guess the language.
The thing is the grid. A woman at a Brooklyn table cutting cards so that a sign’s neighbors could be seen without a story attached. The 1948 paper separated fact from theory. It insisted that counting and juxtaposition come before any claim to read.
The task before us is to analyze these scripts thoroughly, honestly, and without prejudice. Any discussion of the possibility of ultimate decipherment is premature.Alice E. Kober, “The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory,” American Journal of Archaeology 52, no. 1 (January–March 1948): 82–103.
1948
The page
Triplets on an AJA table. Inflection shown. Language unnamed. She did not claim to read.
1952
A later leap
Michael Ventris showed the language was an early form of Greek.1 July 1952, afterward. She had died 16 May 1950. Chadwick later called her work the most valuable before the solution. Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth (2013), is a guide to the cards, not the cards. The popular count of some 180,000 cards is later tally, not a 1948 colophon.
1952 does not rewrite 1948 as “she almost had Greek.” She had inflection and a grid. That is the chair.
What was at stake
A script still unread. A grid unfinished. No one yet required to use it.
The next move
She published the 1948 table of triplets. She did not claim to read the language.
What they had
- Cigarette-carton files
- A refusal to leap
- Other people’s tablets
- A page in the AJA
What happened
The language was still unnamed. She died on 16 May 1950, in Brooklyn, at forty-three.
The language still unnamed.
Private. No one else will see it.