Meta Description: Join Dr. Jeff Winkle and Dr. David Noe in Ad Navseam Episode 122 as they interview Margalit Fox about the decipherment of Linear B. Discover Alice Kober’s 180,000 index cards, the mystery of ancient Cretan scripts, and resources to master the Latin language.
Introduction: Bunker Life and Caribbean Suntans
Welcome back, classical gourmands, to Episode 122 of the Ad Navseam Podcast! Broadcasting directly from the subterranean depths of Vomitorium South, your hosts, Dr. Jeff Winkle and Dr. David Noe, are thrilled to be back at the microphones.
Jeff opens the episode by noting how incredibly grateful he is for the natural, cool climate of the underground bunker. Outside in West Michigan, the weather is blazing hot, completely replacing the miserable, transitional season of “Smarch” with oppressive summer heat. Meanwhile, Dave is feeling exceptionally rested and ready, having just returned from a relaxing family vacation in the Caribbean, specifically visiting the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Aside from some light reading, Dave took a complete break from Greek and Latin, opting instead to enjoy the sunshine and local cuisine.
With the academic year officially concluded and the life of the temporarily unemployed professor in full swing, the hosts turn their attention to a very special guest interview.
Entering the Labyrinth: An Interview with Margalit Fox
For this episode, the boys welcome the esteemed author and journalist Margalit Fox to discuss her 2013 book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code.
Fox spent an impressive twenty-four years working for the New York Times, spending her last fourteen years as a senior obituary writer. She explains that writing obituaries is often mistakenly viewed as the “Siberia” of the newsroom, but it is actually the absolute best beat in journalism. Because the writer must track a subject from the cradle to the grave, obituaries offer a pure, built-in narrative arc. Fox uses this exact narrative framework to construct her books, expanding the structure of a thousand-word news feature into a compelling, book-length history.
Her book traces the grueling, fifty-year academic quest to decipher Linear B, an ancient, mysterious script unearthed on the island of Crete. Fox centers the narrative around three distinct figures: the famous archaeologist Arthur Evans, the unsung academic heroine Alice Kober, and the architect Michael Ventris.
The Locked Room Mystery of Crete
To set the historical stage, Fox explains the initial discovery of the script. In 1900, the wealthy English archaeologist Arthur Evans was excavating at Heraklion on the island of Crete. One of his local workmen brushed off a strange clay tablet and handed it to Evans, saying, “Gramata” (writing).
The Bronze Age tablets were inscribed with bizarre symbols, including horse heads, shapes resembling telegraph poles, and philodendron leaves. Fox describes the situation as the linguistic equivalent of a locked-room mystery. Unlike the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were cracked using the bilingual Rosetta Stone, Linear B offered absolutely zero linguistic keys. Scholars did not know what the tablets said, what the strange pictograms meant, or even what underlying language the script recorded, as multiple ethnic groups had passed through the Aegean during the Bronze Age.
Fox carefully outlines the three major types of writing systems to help the audience understand the decipherment process:
- Logographic: Used in languages like Chinese, one character stands for one entire word. These systems require tens of thousands of individual characters.
- Syllabic: Each character stands for a distinct syllable (e.g., ma, pa, bo). Syllabaries generally contain between 80 and 200 characters.
- Alphabetic: A character generally stands for a single sound. Alphabets, like the Roman writing system, typically only contain a few dozen characters.
Because Linear B contained roughly 85 distinct characters, researchers correctly deduced that it was a syllabary, specifically a “CV” type where each character represents one consonant plus one vowel.
Alice Kober: The Rosalind Franklin of Linear B
The true heart of Fox’s book is the story of Alice Kober, whom Fox accurately titles the great unsung heroine of the decipherment.
Kober was an overworked, underpaid classics professor at Brooklyn College in the 1930s and 40s. Saddled with a massive teaching load of five classes at a time, Kober spent her late evenings sitting at the dining room table in Flatbush, chain-smoking cigarettes and obsessively poring over the Cretan inscriptions. Unlike many amateur decipherers who wasted their time trying to force the script to match ancient Hittite or Polynesian, Kober possessed a steel-trap mind. She stubbornly refused to guess the underlying language, preferring instead to dwell in a strict, mathematical world of “form without meaning”.
Due to strict paper rationing during World War II, Kober could not acquire proper office supplies. Instead, she hand-cut 180,000 index cards from the backs of greeting cards, church circulars, and stolen library checkout slips. Using a manual slide rule, she meticulously logged the frequency of every single character. Because she lacked proper storage, she archived her massive catalog inside empty Lucky Strike cigarette cartons.
Kober’s dedication was staggering. When Arthur Evans died in 1941, his successor finally allowed Kober to travel to England to view the original, unpublished tablets. Because photocopiers did not exist, Kober trained herself like an elite Olympic athlete, practicing at home until she could accurately hand-copy 150 ancient inscriptions in a single twelve-hour day.
Fox also notes Kober’s immense personal charity. She spent countless hours teaching herself Braille so she could translate the poet Horace for a blind student, and she frequently sent scarce post-war rations—like waxed oranges and jars of Nescafé (with the acute accent meticulously hand-drawn on the label)—to impoverished European colleagues. Tragically, Kober died at the young age of 43 from what was almost certainly a rare form of cancer, entirely missing the final decipherment.
Michael Ventris and the Greek Conquistadors
The puzzle was finally completed in 1952 by Michael Ventris, a wealthy English architect and amateur linguist.
Building directly upon Kober’s foundational discovery that Linear B was an inflected language (meaning words utilized suffixal grammar), Ventris took a massive leap of faith. Knowing that the tablets were municipal records, Ventris hypothesized that many of the repeating words were actually derivational forms of Cretan place names. He plugged in the characters for the ancient city of “Knossos,” causing a chain reaction that unlocked the phonetic values of the entire script.
In June of 1952, Ventris took the microphone at BBC Radio and announced an earth-shattering reality: Linear B was actually an incredibly early, archaic dialect of Greek, spoken a full five hundred years before Homer. The historical implications were immense. It proved that unlettered Greek “conquistadors” had swarmed into Crete and aggressively appropriated the indigenous writing system (Linear A) to awkwardly record their own spoken language.
Sadly, Ventris suffered from intense imposter syndrome. Despite solving a puzzle that had baffled Oxford scholars for half a century, he was wrecked by self-doubt and tragically died in a high-speed car accident at age 34.
Schliemann’s Cameo and Hollywood Screenplays
During the interview, Dave and Jeff point out some of the fascinating historical cameos in the book. Fox explains that Heinrich Schliemann, the famous excavator of Troy, actually attempted to purchase the Knossos site before Arthur Evans. Fox humorously notes that Schliemann funded his archaeology by making two distinct fortunes: cornering the European indigo market and starting a lucrative bank in Sacramento during the California Gold Rush to hold the miners’ loot.
Before concluding the interview, Fox reveals that she is currently learning the exacting art of screenwriting to adapt her 2021 book, The Confidence Men (a true story about British officers escaping an Ottoman POW camp using a Ouija board), into a feature film.
Sponsors: Fueling the Classical Renaissance
With the interview wrapped up, the hosts sincerely thank their loyal sponsors.
- Ratio Coffee: While vacationing in the Caribbean, Dave’s family thoughtfully provided him with instant and drip coffee. While he appreciated the gesture, he secretly longed for the perfect cup waiting at home. The Ratio 8 machine completely eliminates the dreaded “brackish tang” by utilizing a wide Fibonacci shower screen. This screen evenly distributes water, preventing carbon dioxide from forming trapped bubbles and cavities in the grounds during the crucial “bloom phase”. Visit ratiocoffee.com and use the code ANCOA6 (the “A” stands for awesome) to receive 15% off your order.
- Hackett Publishing: For fifty years, Hackett has offered accessible, beautifully produced texts from all corners of academia. Beyond classical epics, their catalog features vital philosophical texts like Nicholas White’s A Companion to Plato’s Republic and historical debates from Old Berlin. Go to hackettpublishing.com and use the code AN2023 to receive 20% off your entire order and free shipping.
- MossMethod & LatinPerDiem: Take your ancient Greek from neophyte to erudite by visiting LatinPerDiem.com. Dave’s thorough, self-paced modules come complete with interactive Zoom classes. Alternatively, if you want to master the Latin language entirely from the ground up (ab initio), check out latinperdiem.com to learn using Hans Ørberg’s famous curriculum.
The Gustatory Parting Shot
To officially close out Episode 122, Dave delivers a slightly more reserved Gustatory Parting Shot than usual, courtesy of the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell from her work Cranford.
“Many a one has been comforted in their sorrow by seeing a good dish come upon the table.”
Jeff strongly agrees, noting that being presented with a juicy hamburger and a side of fries is an absolute game-changer when you are burdened with a heavy load of cares. A special thanks to Mishka the sound engineer and Scott Van Zen for the blistering guitar riffs. Stay cool in the bunker, keep your index cards organized, and keep taking in the classics. Valete!
