The Riddle of the Labyrinth
by Margalit Fox · first published 2013
50% recommend50% neutral
In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the languag
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The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox is also a good book on this topic. It talks a lot about the people who laid the foundation for Michael Ventris, particularly Alice Kober.
on “The Griffin Warrior Tomb Upends What We Know About the Roots of Mycenae” ↗…Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World by Noel Malcolm - This one is really good, covering the history of a single family amidst the relationships between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian world. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox - Another excellent book, this discussing how Linear B was deciphered, with particular emphasis placed on Alice Kober, whose work was largely overlooked…
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite history books?” ↗Somewhat off-topic but if you clicked in here, you might be interested in this book: "The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code".
on “First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo CS student” ↗The book "The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code" by Margalit Fox is about the deciphering of the Mycenaean Linear B script. One of the striking (to me) things described in the book was how they even figured out how…
on “Babylonians Were Using Geometry Centuries Earlier Than Thought” ↗…rewards we can earn when we aspire to these values. Later books did a much better job shining a light on Ventris' collaborators, in particular the scientifically far more rigorous Alice Kober (e.g. The Riddle of the Labyrinth), but I will never forget reading Chadwick with 14, or thereabouts, and feeling profoundly affected. A formative read, even if the actual state of science on Linear B is quite a bit more complicated!
on “Cracking the code of Linear B” ↗Via this post I found the book "The Riddle of the Labyrinth" about the people who deciphered Linear B. Thank you Hacker News, looking forward to reading this!
on “Exploring Linear A” ↗