What is unique about Alice Kober?
What is unique about Alice Kober?
Kober mastered a host of ancient and modern languages including Hittite, Old Irish, Akkadian, Tocharian, Sumerian, Old Persian, Basque and Chinese. Kober never married; she lived with her widowed mother and, so far as is known, never had a romantic partner.
What did Alice Kober die of?
Cancer
Alice Kober/Cause of death
How did Ventris decipher Linear B?
Comparing the Linear B tablets discovered on the Greek mainland, and noting that certain symbol groups appeared only in the Cretan texts, Ventris made the inspired guess that those were place names on the island. This proved to be correct.
What specific details did Alice Kober determine about Linear B before her death?
Kober now knew that Linear B was an inflected language, with word endings that shifted according to use – like Latin, or German or Spanish. Alice Kober was on the verge of deciphering Linear B. But before she could, she fell ill, suddenly, and died soon after.
What does Linear B look like?
Linear B consists of around 87 syllabic signs and over 100 ideographic signs. These ideograms or “signifying” signs symbolize objects or commodities. They have no phonetic value and are never used as word signs in writing a sentence….
| Linear B | |
|---|---|
| Unicode range | U+10000–U+1007F Syllabary U+10080–U+100FF Ideograms |
What was Alice Kober’s greatest contribution to the decipherment of Linear B?
Kober recorded her detailed analysis on index cards, which she made from the backs of old greetings cards, library checkout slips, and the inside covers of examination books. By hand, she painstakingly cut more than 180,000 tiny index cards, using cigarette cartons as her filing system.
Where was the mask of Agamemnon found?
Mycenae
The “Mask of Agamemnon” is one of the most famous gold artifacts from the Greek Bronze Age. Found at Mycenae in 1876 by the distinguished archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, it was one of several gold funeral masks found laid over the faces of the dead buried in the shaft graves of a royal cemetery.
Who is Alice Kober?
Alice E. Kober (1906-1950) was a Classical scholar and academician whose fastidiously detailed and documented life’s work contributed to the decipherment of Linear B.
What is Alice Kober’s contribution to Linear B?
The importance of her contribution has only come to light now that her archives – held at the University of Texas at Austin – have been catalogued. “Alice Kober is the great unsung heroine of the Linear B decipherment,” says Fox. “She built the methodological bridge that Ventris triumphantly crossed.
Would Ventris have cracked Linear B if not for Alice Kober?
Ventris was the very model of a solitary, tortured genius – so much so that the deciphering of Linear B has often been portrayed as his accomplishment alone. But some experts now argue that Ventris would never have been able to crack the code, had it not been for an American classicist, Alice Kober.
Where did Mary Kober live in the 1930s?
In the 1930s and 40s, Kober was an assistant professor at Brooklyn College in New York where she taught Latin and Greek classes all day. Kober lived with her widowed mother, and there is no record in her papers of a social or romantic life of any kind.
