Alice Kober

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 Yorkville, Manhattan, and Franz worked as a furniture upholsterer and later an apartment superintendent. She had one brother, William, two years younger. Kober studied at Hunter College High School, and in 1924 won a $100-per-year scholarship. She went on to attend Hunter College, where she majored in Latin or classics and graduated magna cum laude in 1928. It was during her undergraduate studies that Kober was first introduced to the Minoan scripts. After graduating, she began postgraduate study at Columbia University, simultaneously teaching in the Hunter College classics department. She was awarded an MA from Columbia in 1929, and a PhD in 1932, with her dissertation on "The Use of Color Terms in the Greek Poets, Including all the Poets from Homer to 146 BC except the Epigrammatists". As a graduate student, Kober studied widely, taking classes in mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy as well as classics. After finishing her PhD, she gained experience in archaeology, taking part in fieldwork in Chaco Canyon organised by the University of New Mexico in 1936, and in Greece with the American School of Classical Studies in Athens in 1939. She studied a variety of languages. As well as mastering Greek, Latin, French, German, and Anglo-Saxon, she took courses in Sanskrit at the Linguistic Institute in 1941 and 1942, and at Yale from 1942 to 1945; she also took classes in Hittite, Old Persian, Tocharian, Old Irish, Akkadian, Sumerian, Chinese, and Basque. In late 1946, at the beginning of her Guggenheim Fellowship, she studied several languages of ancient Asia Minor, including Carian, Hattic, Hurrian, Lycian, and Lydian. Career