Alice Elizabeth Kober, American Classicist and Archaeologist
Dec. 23, 1906-May 16, 1950

Alice Elizabeth Kober was an American classicist best known for extensive investigations that eventually led to the decipherment of Linear B. The daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Kober was born in Yorkville, a neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She attended Hunter College High School, and in the summer of 1924, she placed third in a New York City scholarship contest. The $100-a-year prize helped her to attend Hunter College, where she majored in Latin, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated magna cum laude. She earned a master's degree in classics at Columbia University in 1929 and a PhD in 1932.

One of the most tantalizing mysteries of the modern age centered on a long-lost script from Aegean antiquity known as Linear B.  Inscribed on clay tablets around 1450 B.C., Linear B was unearthed in 1900 on Crete, amid the ruins of a lavish Bronze Age palace.  No one knew what language it recorded, much less what it said.  The mystery endured for more than 50 years.  In 1952 Michael Ventris, a brilliant melancholic English architect who had been obsessed with Linear B since he was a boy.  But there is a quiet backstage figure behind the towering public one.  Like Rosalind Franklin, whose work, long unacknowledged, informed the mapping of the structure of DNA, The figure behind Ventris's achievement was Alice Elizebeth Kober. 

 

Each night after her classes were taught and her papers graded, she sat at the table in the house she shared with her widowed mother and, cigarette burning beside her, sifted the strange Cretan inscriptions.  She cataloged every word and every character of Liner B on homemade index cards, cut painstakingly by hand from whatever she could find.  On her cards she noted statistics on every character of the script.  Ventris and Kober met only once, but from through her few, rigorous published articles, which together form a ho-to manual for deciphering an unknown script, she handed Ventris the key to the locked room.  After her death, he attacked the mystery with renewed vigor and brought about its solution.  It is now clear that without Dr. Kober's work, Ventris cold never have deciphered Linear B when he did, if ever.  Her archives are at the University of Texas.