She Refused to Guess

Alice Kober, Linear B, and the grammar every Latin student learns in the first month.

In 1900, at Knossos on the island of Crete, archaeologists began to dig up clay tablets, baked hard in the fire that had destroyed a palace. They were covered in a script no one could read. It came to be called Linear B. For half a century it defeated everyone who tried.

Most of those who tried began with a guess. The language must be Etruscan, perhaps, or some lost tongue of ancient Crete. Then they went looking for proof. Michael Ventris, the young Englishman who would finally read it, believed for years that it was Etruscan.

Alice Kober refused to guess.

She was a classics professor at Brooklyn College, where she taught Latin and Greek with a full course load from 1930 until her death. She would not ask what language the tablets were in. She asked a smaller and harder question: how does this language behave?

Cards in cigarette cartons

She worked at her dining table in Brooklyn, in the evenings, after a full day of teaching. Paper was scarce during and after the war, so she cut her own cards from whatever she could find: the backs of old greeting cards, the covers of exam booklets, library checkout slips. On them she recorded every sign, every word, and where each one appeared. She filed them in cigarette cartons. By the end she had made about 180,000.

It was not glamorous work. It was the kind of work most people decide is beneath them, or beyond them.

What a Latin student would notice

Then Kober noticed something any first-year Latin student would recognize. Certain words appeared in sets of three. They began the same way and differed at the end.

A Latin student meets the same pattern in the first month: dominus, dominī, dominō. The word stays the same. The ending changes to show what the word is doing in the sentence.

Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, had suspected that the language worked this way. Kober proved it. Without knowing a single word of it, she showed that the language of Linear B was inflected, and she showed how its endings fell across the syllable signs. That gave later scholars their first firm clues about which signs shared a sound.

The ending

Alice Kober died in 1950. She was 43.

Two years later, Ventris read the script, building on her method. The language was Greek, written centuries before Homer. It was one of the great intellectual achievements of the century. Ventris became famous. For years Kober’s part in it was barely mentioned, and her name was nearly forgotten until the journalist Margalit Fox told her story in The Riddle of the Labyrinth in 2013.

Her notebooks and cards survive. They are kept today at the University of Texas at Austin.

Why we tell this story

Students sometimes ask why we spend so long on endings. Why recite dominus, dominī, dominō when you could simply look a word up?

Alice Kober is the answer. The decisive tool in one of the great decipherments of the century was not a flash of genius. It was declension, the plainest page in a Latin textbook, held with enough patience that it finally gave up its secret.

A student who truly knows how endings work has learned more than a rule. That student has learned a way of seeing. Kober saw with it what no one else could.

Genius guessed. A Latin teacher counted, and she was right.

Sources: Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth (2013); Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory, University of Texas at Austin.