Riddle of the Labyrinth The

In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language masterfully blending history linguistics and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1000 years before Greece&;s Classical Age he discovered a cache of ancient tablets Europe&;s earliest written records. For half a century the meaning of the inscriptions and even the language in which they were written would remain a mystery.                                              Award-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox''s riveting real-life intellectual detective story travels from the Bronze Age Aegean&;the era of Odysseus Agamemnon and Helen&;to the turn of the 20th century and the work of charismatic English archeologist Arthur Evans to the colorful personal stories of the decipherers. These include Michael Ventris the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of the deipherment; and Alice Kober the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.