Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Deciphering of Linear B and the Discovery of a Lost Civilisation (repost)
Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Deciphering of Linear B and the Discovery of a Lost Civilisation by Margalit Fox
English | 2013 | ISBN: 1781251320 | 352 pages | PDF | 6,9 MB
English | 2013 | ISBN: 1781251320 | 352 pages | PDF | 6,9 MB
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.
But, captivating as it is, this story is missing a crucial piece. 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. 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. 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.