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

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the story of the three main people behind the solution to Linear B, a script found in abundance in Crete and one archaeological site on mainland Greece. It's older by centuries than any other translated in that area, and puts paid to the idea that classical Greek society was the first major civilization in that place. More importantly, as it turns out, Linear B is also related to Greek, which most experts of the early 20th century thought impossible. The fun part about this book is that most of the work was done on the puzzle by a small-time American professor--a woman!--in the 1940s, and an untrained-in-classics hobbyist in England in the early 1950s. Weirdly, both of them died fairly young after all their work on decoding and translating. Interesting, fun read.

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