Name: The Riddle of the Labyrinth
Rating: 4.142857142857143 (7 reviews)
ISBN: 9780062228833

Margalit Fox

An intellectual detective story follows the quest to unlock one of the great secrets of human history--the decipherment of Linear B, an unknown script from the Aegean Bronze Age.

The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

The Riddle of the Labyrinth

Dimitris Papastergiou

It was ok, and I liked half of it, or so. It's an interesting story about Knosos mainly and the language the ancient Greeks were speaking/writing way before the Classical age of Greece.

Here's my problem, I want to read about the history. I don't want to learn how to decipher, or to have to google a bunch of stuff just to have a simple understanding of what the hell you're talking about. Which was still fine, and I did, but after awhile it got a chore to do all that again and again. 

The story was interesting too, right up until the point where it was taking too damn long to tell us about all the people who were involved in the deciphering of the Linear B and everything, which at first was really fun to read, but then I was thinking while reading, do I really need to know all of their lives and what happened before and after and in the middle of the deciphering with stuff and info that had nothing to do with the main story? No. I don't and didn't care for it. 

There was also some mystery created in this one about a certain person that with a quick research you'll find out there was no foul play or anything "mysterious" suggested in the book, but I guess that created some excitement for the book? I don't know. Don't care. It was just weird and not true. Which then, begs the question, if that wasn't something that didn't happen, what else in it is just an elaborate story, or a guess? Because we're talking about historical stuff here. Oh well.

I liked it. Don't get me wrong, it was well written and besides that it would get into too much about the people involved and their personal lives, it's a real page-turner about pretty much everything you need to know for Linear B for how the deciphering started and eventually was completed. How many people were involved what they did and did not, how they got help and how they helped each other pretty much either knowingly or not.

All of it was great and learning stuff about the the Mycenaean civilization back then was even better, especially to what their writings meant and everything about their beliefs, system, trades, tombs, temples etc.

You wanna learn about all that? Go ahead, it's the book you've been looking for.

Pierke Bosschieter

Sara Piteira 

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 mesmerizing pull on the imagination. But, captivating as it is, this 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.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

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