It was the British archetect Mike V who cracked it.........but he used her methods.........she layed the groundwork..................

Linear B[edit]

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.^[9] 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."^[10] 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 and Greece.^[11]

In 1946, Kober received a one-year Guggenheim Fellowship to study Linear B full-time.^[12] 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.^[13] Kober's major discovery was that Linear B was aninflected language, difficult to write in a syllabic script.^[14]

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.^[15] A chain smoker, Kober died, probably of cancer, in 1950 at the age of 43.^[16] 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.^[17]

Correspondence and papers[edit]

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 (PASP) at theUniversity of Texas at Austin: Alice E. Kober Papers.