Alice Elizabeth Kober was an American classicist best known for extensive investigations that eventually led to the decipherment of Linear B.
Life and career
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. While working on her doctorate, Kober taught at Hunter High and Hunter College and, in 1930, became an assistant professor of classics at Brooklyn College, where she remained for the rest of her career. A former student, Eva Brann, wrote that Kober was "aggressively nondescript....Her figure dumpy with sloping shoulders, her chin heavily determined, her hair styled for minimum maintenance, her eyes behind bottle-bottom glasses snapped impatiently and twinkled not unkindly." On campus she shared an office with four other faculty members and served on standard committees. After teaching herself Braille, she translated textbooks, library materials, and final exams for blind students at Brooklyn College. Kober never married, and no evidence exists to indicate a rich personal life. Kober lived with her widowed mother and, so far as is known, never had a romantic partner.
Linear B
Beginning in the 1930s, Kober privately studied Linear B, as yet an undeciphered script of an unidentified Aegean language of the Bronze Age, keeping massive statistics on 180,000 hand-cut cards and tabulations in forty notebooks. Kober used a hand punch to create a kind of "database, with the punched holes marking the parameters on which the data could be sorted." She also mastered a host of languages, ancient and modern, including Hittite, Old Irish, Akkadian, Tocharian, Sumerian, Old Persian, Basque and Chinese. From 1942 to 1945, while teaching full-time in Brooklyn, she commuted weekly by train to Yale to take classes in advanced Sanskrit. She also studied field archeology in New Mexico. In 1946, Kober received a one-year Guggenheim Fellowship to study Linear B full-time. Making the acquaintance of John Linton Myres, she gained access to many more Linear B inscriptions collected by the archaeologist of Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans, and hand copied most of them at Oxford University in 1947. Kober's major discovery was that Linear B was an inflected language, difficult to write in a syllabic script. Further progress in deciphering the language was delayed by her renewed teaching duties and the thankless job of proofreading and correcting Myres's Scripta Minoa. A chain smoker, Kober died, probably of cancer, in 1950 at the age of 43. After her death, the architect Michael Ventris built on Kober's work and with some inspired guesses deciphered the script in 1952, establishing that it was Mycenaean Greek.
Correspondence and papers
Kober's extensive correspondence and papers, including support for her search for inflections in Linear B, are available online at the Program for Aegean Scripts & Prehistory at the University of Texas at Austin: .
