All Scholars

Alice Kober played an important role in the classification of remains from Knossos and Pylos and the ultimate decipherment of Linear B. While an undergraduate at Hunter, Kober became interested in the seemingly impenetrable Minoan scripts found in the clay tablets unearthed by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos. Few of these had been published by the time Kober took her doctorate, but she devoted herself to the decipherment of the phonetic signs. To do so, she studied archaeology in New Mexico and at the ASCSA, acquainting herself with the scripts of as many ancient languages and cultures as she could. She studied the methodology of natural science as well as statistics in order to develop an original method of her own that ultimately detected inflection in Linear B in three examples known popularly as "Kober's Triplets." The abiding difficulty was the lack of classification or even publication of the majority of Evans' tablets. She enlisted the cooperation of Evans' associate Sir John Myres and began cataloguing and classifying the tablets and later some 1,700 Knossian documents in Oxford. Her work, published in the second volume of Myres's Scripta Minoa, was characterized by energy and a method based on sound scientific principles. Her teaching at Brooklyn College showed similar devotion and energy coupled with great sensitivity to the needs of the students. Sterling Dow said of her, "Her distinction was ... in the combination of constructive with destructive ability, of creation with criticism, of courageous imagination with acid analysis." Despite her important contributions, she remained an assistant professor for nearly 15 years, finally being promoted only four months before her death.