The Riddle of the Labyrinth: the quest to crack an ancient code
by
Margalit Fox
Harper
Collins, 2013
In
1900, archeologist Arthur Evans discovered a series of tablets on the island of
Crete. The tablets dated from 1450 BCE, almost 700 years before the Greek
alphabet was developed. The tablets were written in an unknown script and in an
unknown language, referred to as Linear B. The Riddle of the Labyrinth tells
the story of how Linear B was decoded, and the contributions of the three major
players, Arthur Evans, Alice Kober and Michael Ventris. The process took 53
years. The work was done before computers were available to private citizens and
when paper was in such sort supply that Kober had to cut her own index cards
from church flyers and greeting cards.
From
reading this book, I learned that languages may be logographic where each
character depicts an idea (Chinese), or syllabic where each symbol refers to a
syllable (Japanese kana script) or phonetic where each character stands for a
sound. “By some estimates, only 15 percent of the roughly six thousand
languages spoken around the globe have written forms.”
I
recommend this book for anyone who is interested in codes, the development of
language or history.
