The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

New York Times reporter Margalit Fox tells a real-life intellectual detective story about how an ancient language on tablets unearthed in Crete was deciphered. In The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, she paints portraits of three pivotal figures. English archeologist Arthur Evans who discovered a cache of ancient tablets; Michael Ventris, the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.