11 Facts About Alice Kober

Alice Elizabeth Kober was an American classicist best known for her work on the decipherment of Linear B Educated at Hunter College and Columbia University, Kober taught classics at Brooklyn College from 1930 until her death.

Alice Elizabeth Kober was born in New York on December 23,1906 to the Hungarian immigrants Franz and Katharina Kober.

Alice Kober was awarded an MA from Columbia in 1929, and a PhD in 1932.

From 1930 until her death in 1950, Alice Kober taught at Brooklyn College.

Unlike other scholars at the time, who began their analysis of the script by attempting to identify the language that it encoded, Alice Kober believed that any decipherment of Linear B must begin with the internal evidence of the Linear B tablets.

Alice Kober began her work on Linear B by analysing the individual characters on the tablets, compiling statistics about their frequency, the positions they appeared in, and the characters which they appeared alongside.

In 1945, Alice Kober published the first of three major papers on Linear B, "Evidence of Inflection in the 'Chariot' Tablets of Knossos", proving the hypothesis, first suggested by Sir Arthur Evans, that it recorded an inflected language.

Also in 1946, Alice Kober was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing her to take a year off from her teaching duties to work on Linear B full time.

Alice Kober traveled to England, spending five weeks at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she would have access to the entire collection of unpublished Linear B inscriptions discovered by Evans.

Alice Kober spent her time in Oxford copying these inscriptions by hand, so they could be analysed on her return to New York; where she had only previously had access to the approximately 200 already-published inscriptions, after her time at St Hugh's she had copies of nearly 1800.

In September 1947, at the instigation of John Franklin Daniel, the editor of the American Journal of Archaeology, Alice Kober began work on her third major paper on Linear B, summarizing the state of scholarship on the Minoan scripts; she submitted the finished manuscript in October 1947, and it was published in 1948.