The Riddle of the Labyrinth

I, academically speaking, basically grew up on tales of Linear B. I mean I distinguished myself on the residency interview trail by being the only medical student to have spent several semesters TAing cryptography; meeting [a:Simon Singh 10894 Simon Singh https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1263127928p2/10894.jpg] is one of the highlights of my life. And Linear B is basically the epitome of a code-breaking story: elegant statistics, linguistic analysis and finally, a successful decryption.And at the same time, there is something so deep in the human experience about decrypting a language, rather than just a code. I am a deep believer in the idea that written language, more so even than DNA, is the heritable code of humanity, and Linear B is one of the very first written human languages. This is a beautiful portal to 3,500 years ago. It turns out that people 3,500 years ago were people. They recorded things, they thought, they counted, the preserved themselves for us – how freaking amazing is that?I've never read anything by [a:Margalit Fox 650994 Margalit Fox https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1360786032p2/650994.jpg] before, but she really does justice to these compelling ideas. She never walks away from the “riddle” part of Linear B – she drops tantalizing hints. Nothing compels reading like hearing: “and this tablet would be the key to solving the puzzle, 20 years later.” Her narrative really reads like a mystery.Finally, Fox is the first author to give Alice Kober her full due in the decryption and Fox does not give short shrift to the gender issues that have prevented Kober from being fully recognized until now. Fox obviously feels deeply for Kober, who died prematurely, likely of cancer – she tells the story as a tragedy, and certainly that adds another layer of this story about learning of the humanity of our ancestors.