Alice Kober

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Alice Elizabeth Kober
Alice Kober in 1946
Born
Alice Kober

December 23, 1906
New York City
DiedMay 16, 1950 (1950-05-17) (aged 43)
Brooklyn, New York City
Alma materHunter College (BA)
Columbia University (MA, PhD)
RelativesFranz Kober (Father), Katharina Kober (Mother), William Kober (Brother)

Alice Elizabeth Kober (December 23, 1906 – May 16, 1950) was an American classicist best known for her work on the decipherment of Linear B. Educated at Hunter College and Columbia University, Kober taught classics at Brooklyn College from 1930 until her death. In the 1940s, she published three major papers on the script, demonstrating evidence of inflection; her discovery allowed for the deduction of phonetic relationships between different signs without assigning them phonetic values, and would be a key step in the eventual decipherment of the script.

Early life and education

Alice Elizabeth Kober was born in New York on December 23, 1906 to the Hungarian immigrants Franz and Katharina Kober. The family lived in

PhD in 1932.[6] Her PhD dissertation was on "The Use of Color Terms in the Greek Poets, Including all the Poets from Homer to 146 BC except the Epigrammatists",[7] supervised by Charles Knapp.[8]

As a graduate student, Kober studied widely, taking classes in mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy as well as classics.

Hurrian, Lycian, and Lydian.[10]

Career

The library at Brooklyn College, where Kober taught from 1930 until her death

From 1930 until her death in 1950, Kober taught at Brooklyn College.[2] In 1936 she became assistant professor there; in 1950 she was promoted to associate professor.[7] Brooklyn College was primarily a teaching rather than a research institution, and she taught a full course load, sharing an office with four others.[11] From 1944, she also converted textbooks and exams into braille for all of Brooklyn College's blind students.[12]

Kober was a member of many professional organisations, including the

American Philological Association,[6] and the Linguistic Society of America.[2] From the early 1940s, she was the faculty adviser to the Hunter College chapter of Eta Sigma Phi, an honor society for classics.[13] In 1948, she was made a research associate of the University of Pennsylvania's museum.[14]

Linear B

Kober never married, and is not known to have had any romantic relationships; aside from her teaching commitments, she dedicated her life to the decipherment of Linear B.

Second World War made paper harder to come by – 180,000 index cards made from scrap paper with her research notes.[19]

Linear B tablet found at Pylos. Kober dedicated her life to the decipherment of the script.

In 1945, Kober published the first of three major papers on Linear B, "Evidence of Inflection in the 'Chariot' Tablets of Knossos", proving the hypothesis, first suggested by

Sir Arthur Evans, that it recorded an inflected language.[20] In 1946 she published the second of her major papers on the script, "Inflection in Linear Class B",[c] which expanded on the work in her 1945 paper.[21] This paper, according to Maurice Pope her "most rigorous and most famous" work,[22] would prove to be a crucial step in the eventual decipherment of Linear B.[23] In it, Kober identified so-called bridging syllables, where the beginning of the syllable is part of the root of a word, and the end is part of the inflected suffix; this allowed for the identification of phonetic relationships between sets of Linear B signs.[24]

Also in 1946, Kober was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing her to take a year off from her teaching duties to work on Linear B full time.

St. Hugh's College, Oxford, where she would have access to the entire collection of unpublished Linear B inscriptions discovered by Evans.[26] Kober spent her time in Oxford copying these inscriptions by hand, so they could be analysed on her return to New York; where she had only previously had access to the approximately 200 already-published inscriptions,[27] after her time at St. Hugh's she had copies of nearly 1800.[28]

In September 1947, at the instigation of

John Franklin Daniel, the editor of the American Journal of Archaeology, Kober began work on her third major paper on Linear B, summarizing the state of scholarship on the Minoan scripts;[29] she submitted the finished manuscript in October 1947,[30] and it was published in 1948.[31] Building on her 1945 and 1946 papers, in this article Kober set forth a grid of ten Linear B characters, showing for each which other signs it shared a consonant or vowel with.[32] In the late 1940s, she also began proofreading and typing up John Myres' manuscript of Scripta Minoa II.[33] She returned to Oxford in 1948 to work with Myres on the preparation of the manuscript for publication, and agreed to assist with Scripta Minoa III, which was to cover Linear A.[34]

Death and legacy

In July 1949, Kober fell ill and was hospitalised.[35] She died on May 16, 1950, aged 43.[36] There is no record of the cause of her illness in her correspondence, death certificate, or obituaries.[37] According to her cousin, family rumor held that she died of stomach cancer.[38] Kober left her archives to Emmett L. Bennett Jr.,[39] an American classicist with whom she had corresponded since 1948.[40] They are held by the University of Texas at Austin.[41]

Kober is remembered as an important contributor to the decipherment of Linear B. In an obituary in the journal Language, Adelaide Hahn wrote that "if and when this decipherment is ultimately achieved, surely her careful and faithful spade-work will be found to have played a part therein".[2] This prediction would prove true: after Michael Ventris' decipherment of the script, his collaborator John Chadwick recognised her for laying the foundation, and described her contributions to the study of Linear B as "the most valuable" before Ventris' final solution.[42]

Select bibliography

  • Kober, Alice (1932). The Use of Color Terms in the Greek Poets, Including all the Poets from Homer to 146 BC except the Epigrammatists (Thesis). New York City: Columbia University.
  • Kober, Alice (1945). "Evidence of Inflection in the 'Chariot' Tablets of Knossos". American Journal of Archaeology. 49 (2): 143–151.
    S2CID 245266039
    .
  • Kober, Alice (1946). "Inflection in Linear Class B: I – Declension". American Journal of Archaeology. 50 (2): 268–276.
    S2CID 192544434
    .
  • Kober, Alice (1948). "The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory". American Journal of Archaeology. 52 (1): 82–103.
    S2CID 193101644
    .

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Her obituary in Language lists her major as classics; Margalit Fox says Latin
  2. ^ During Kober's lifetime, Linear B was referred to as a Minoan script; only in 1953 did Michael Ventris and John Chadwick reject the designation Minoan in favour of Mycenaean.[4]
  3. ^ Though the publication date of the paper was 1946, it was not printed until 1947.[21]

References

  1. ^ a b Fox 2013, p. 90.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Hahn 1950.
  3. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 90–91.
  4. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 255–256.
  5. ^ Fox 2013, p. 91.
  6. ^ a b Minos 1951.
  7. ^ a b c Voight.
  8. ^ Dow 1954, p. 153.
  9. ^ Fox 2013, p. 115.
  10. ^ Fox 2013, p. 116.
  11. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 108–109.
  12. ^ Fox 2013, p. 110.
  13. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 110–111.
  14. ^ Fox 2013, p. 169.
  15. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 92–93.
  16. ^ Fox 2013, p. 93.
  17. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 102–103.
  18. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 93, 104–107.
  19. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 104–106.
  20. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 119–121.
  21. ^ a b Fox 2013, p. 134.
  22. ^ Pope 1975, p. 161.
  23. ^ Fox 2013, p. 141.
  24. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 135–141.
  25. ^ Fox 2013, p. 113.
  26. ^ Fox 2013, p. 129.
  27. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 129, 141–142.
  28. ^ Fox 2013, p. 149.
  29. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 154–155.
  30. ^ Fox 2013, p. 156.
  31. ^ Fox 2013, p. 163.
  32. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 164–165.
  33. ^ Fox 2013, p. 157.
  34. ^ Fox 2013, p. 173.
  35. ^ Fox 2013, p. 190.
  36. ^ Fox 2013, p. 199.
  37. ^ Fox 2013, pp. 190–191.
  38. ^ Fox 2013, p. 191.
  39. ^ PASP.
  40. ^ Fox 2013, p. 180.
  41. ^ Gallafent 2013.
  42. ^ Chadwick 1967, p. 35.

Works cited

External links

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