Alice Kober's conrtibution for deciphering Linear B

After the death of Sir Arthur Evans, his ambition for deciphering the clay tablet scripts known as Linear B was left to surviving scholars, experts and individual researchers. Among them was an American female classicist, Miss Alice Kober. According to Margalit Fox, an author on Linear B, Kober ‘was an assistant professor at Brooklyn College in New York where she taught Latin and Greek classes all day’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620). She ‘lived with her widowed mother, and there is no record in her papers of a social or romantic life of any kind. Instead, for almost two decades (in 1930s and 40s), Alice Kober devoted herself to trying to crack this mysterious Bronze Age script’ (ibid). Through her ‘hours and hours of unseen labour’, Fox adds, ‘She turned herself into the world’s leading expert on Linear B’ (ibid). On top of Latin and Greek, she also learned Egyptian. Akkadian. Sumerian, and Sanskrit – partly due to the academic climate on Linear B where, ‘Greek had been ruled out by scholars at the time’ (ibid) – but she also rigorously refused ‘to speculate on what the language was, or what the sounds of the symbols might be’ (ibid). Instead, she established her own methods and poured her efforts described as following:

‘… she set out to record the frequency of every symbol in the tablets, both in general, and then in every position within a word.
She also recorded the frequency of every character in juxtaposition to that of every other character.
It was a mammoth task, performed without the aid of computers. In addition, during the years surrounding World War II, writing materials were hard to come by.
Kober recorded her detailed analysis on index cards, which she made from the backs of old greetings cards, library checkout slips, and the inside covers of examination books.
By hand, she painstakingly cut more than 180,000 tiny index cards, using cigarette cartons as her filing system’ (ibid).

Alice Kober

 As a result of her hard work, she ‘spotted groups of symbols that appeared throughout the inscriptions – groups that would start the same, but end in consistently different ways. That was the breakthrough. Kober now knew that Linear B was an inflected language, with word endings that shifted according to use’ (ibid). Despite her marvellous achievement and the fact that she was ‘on the verge of deciphering Linear B’ (ibid), misfortune fell on her before she could complete the work. Alice Kober ‘fell ill, suddenly, and died soon after. The cause of her death is not known for sure, but it may well have been a form of cancer. It was 1950, and she was 43’ (ibid). At the point, where Kober ‘had correctly deciphered around one third of the Linear B characters’ (ibid), the mission was left for the third person – Michael Ventris.

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/discovery-and-deciphiering-of-the-crete-inscriptions-liner-b/