The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code - Margalit Fox

Written by Margalit Fox
Read by Pam Ward
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
Publisher: 2013 Tantor

Fox spins a fascinating yarn centered around an unlikely heroine: a devoted academic spinster who died before accomplishing her life’s mission of cracking an ancient script.

In 1900, famed archaeologist Arthur Evans uncovered the ruins of Knossos, a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece’s Classical Age. The massive discovery included a cache of ancient tablets, Europe’s earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain an enigma.

Award–winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox follows this intellectual mystery from the Bronze Age Aegean to a legendary archeological dig at the turn of the twentieth century, and on to the brilliant decipherers who finally cracked the code in the 1950s. These include Michael Ventris, the amateur linguist who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of his findings; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.

Working at her kitchen table in the 1940s, hand-cutting over 150,000 cards to systematically catalogue Linear B, Kober and her “passion… for the life of the mind” historically have been overshadowed by the two more famous men who bookended her endeavors. Fox’s deft explanations of the script-solving process—complete with supplemental photos and illustrations of the text—allow readers to share in the mental detective work of cracking the lost language. Ultimately, the revelation here is the enduring nature of writing as an expression of humanity, a message passed not through content, but through the act of interpretation and the passionate endeavor to understand

Two ebook included, the book text and the book of codes mention in the introduction. My new rip from CD.