The catch? They were written in an unknown writing system encoding an unknown language, and there was nothing like the Rosetta Stone to help archaeologists out.
If these tablets could be translated, they would provide a wealth of information about a complex civilization that predated Homer. There were not enough samples of Linear A for it to be decoded (it still hasn’t to this day), but there were over 2,000 tablets containing Linear B. These tablets were inscribed with two unknown writing systems – Linear A and Linear B. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code is an appealing non-fiction account of the deciphering of the script Linear B and in particular the woman who was vital to its solution.In 1900 archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans uncovered a catch of fired clay tablets in Crete, the earliest writing ever discovered in Europe.
These include Michael Ventris, the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of the decipherment and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain a mystery.Īward-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox's riveting real-life intellectual detective story travels from the Bronze Age Aegean-the era of Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Helen-to the turn of the 20th century and the work of charismatic English archeologist Arthur Evans, to the colorful personal stories of the decipherers. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative.
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