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The Riddle of the Labyrinth

The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

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The Riddle of the Labyrinth

By: Margalit Fox
Narrated by: Pam Ward
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About this listen

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 1,000 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 decipherment; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.

©2013 Margalit Fox (P)2013 Tantor
Expeditions & Discoveries Greece Linguistics

Critic Reviews

"Fox is a talented storyteller, and she creates an atmosphere of almost nail-biting suspense. . . . This one deserves shelf space along such classics of the genre as Simon Singh's The Code Book." (Booklist Starred Review)

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Excellent in every way

Margalit Fox has done a masterful job of taking a complex topic and making it readily comprehensible to readers without any knowledge of ancient languages or earlier examples of 'crack[ing] an ancient code'. The life of Dr Alice Kober, whose tireless and painstaking work was a major contributor to the eventual deciphering of Linear B, is a sad story of brilliance constrained by 1930s and 1940s attitudes to professional women and, eventually, ill health. Pam Ward is the ideal narrator and manages all the foreign language words and sounds effortlessly.

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