Riddle of the Labyrinth

Resumen del libro

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 mesmerising pull on the imagination. But this captivating 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.

Biografía del autor

Margalit Fox (Nueva York, 1961) es periodista y escritora. Escribe de forma habitual en The New YorkTimes y es autora, entre otros títulos, de The Riddle of the Labyrinth (2013), seleccionado por The New York Times Book Review como uno de los mejores libros del año. En 2016, el Poynter Institute nombró a Fox como una de los seis mejores escritores en la historia de The New York Times.