Alice Kober

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Alice Elizabeth Kober (born December 23, 1906 in New York - † May 16, 1950 in Brooklyn , New York) was an American classical scholar and archaeologist who worked on the deciphering of the Mycenaean-Greek language, as it was in. Michael Ventris and John Chadwick Shape of the Linear B tables is available, worked and recognized the first facts about the structure of language.

Live and act

Alice Kober studied in New York. In 1928 she graduated from Hunter College and received her doctorate in 1932 from Columbia University with a classical philology thesis. From 1935 to 1950 she was Associate Professor of Languages at Brooklyn College in New York and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 .

In the early 1940s Alice Kober got access to the Linear B panels from Arthur Evans' estate . For forty years scientists had tried in vain to solve this script and language. Kober started from scratch with his own new approaches. She found out for the assumed nouns that there was a strongly inflected language with only three cases - nominative, dative and accusative. According to Kober's theory, the characters represented syllables. The first two syllables of the respective noun - according to Kober - always belonged to the root of the word. As the third syllable of a noun, she took a bridging syllable - consisting of a consonant, also belonging to the stem, followed by a vowel for the inflection. With this structure, Kober started out from Akkadian in her working hypotheses .

Alice Kober died of lung cancer in 1950 before completing her life's work . She never married. The brother William Kober mourned the sister. During her lifetime, the researcher confessed to her student Eva Brann : "... you only know when it tickles your spine that you've achieved something really great." In 1952, Ventris and Chadwick deciphered them on the basis of Kober's research results the Linear B panels.

Fonts

  • The Use of Color Terms in the Greek Poets, Including All the Poets from Homer to 146 BC Except the Epigrammists. (Diss. Columbia University) Humphrey Press, New York 1932. 130 pages

literature

  • Obituary: † Alice E. Kober. In: Minos 1, 1951, pp. 138-139. Full text (PDF, 100 kB)
  • Eva TH Brann: In Memoriam Alice E. Kober, Professor of Classics, Brooklyn College 1935–1950. Publishing house St. John's College, Annapolis (Maryland). 28 pages
  • Margalit Fox: The riddle of the labyrinth. The quest to crack ancient code and the uncovering of a lost civilization . Profile Books, London 2013, ISBN 978-1-78125-132-4 . ( About the book )
  • Simon Singh: Secret Messages. The art of encryption from ancient times to the Internet. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2012 (11th edition), ISBN 978-3-423-33071-8 , pp. 274-280.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Document for the Guggenheim grant 1946
  2. ^ Eva Brann, quoted in Singh, p. 274, 4th Zvu
personal data
SURNAME Kober, Alice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kober, Alice Elizabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American classical philologist and archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 23, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 1950
Place of death Brooklyn