Alice Kober
| Alice Elizabeth Kober | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Alice Kober December 23, 1906 New York City |
| Died |
May 16, 1950 (aged 43) Brooklyn, New York City |
| Alma mater | Hunter College, Columbia University |
| Occupation | classicist |
Alice Elizabeth Kober (December 23, 1906 – May 16, 1950) was an American classicist best known for extensive investigations that eventually led to the decipherment of Linear B.
The daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Kober was born in Yorkville, a neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She attended Hunter College High School, and in the summer of 1924, she placed third in a New York City scholarship contest. The $100-a-year prize helped her to attend Hunter College, where she majored in Latin, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated magna cum laude. She earned a master's degree in classics at Columbia University in 1929 and a PhD in 1932.
While working on her doctorate, Kober taught at Hunter High and Hunter College and, in 1930, became an assistant professor of classics at Brooklyn College, where she remained for the rest of her career. A former student, Eva Brann, wrote that Kober was "aggressively nondescript....Her figure dumpy with sloping shoulders, her chin heavily determined, her hair styled for minimum maintenance, her eyes behind bottle-bottom glasses snapped impatiently and twinkled not unkindly." On campus she shared an office with four other faculty members and served on standard committees. After teaching herself Braille, she also brailled textbooks, library materials, and final exams for blind students at Brooklyn College. Kober lived with her widowed mother and, so far as is known, never had a romantic partner.
Beginning in the 1930s, Kober privately studied Linear B, as yet an undeciphered script of an unidentified Aegean language of the Bronze Age, keeping massive statistics on 180,000 hand-cut cards and tabulations in forty notebooks. Kober used a hand punch to create a kind of "database, with the punched holes marking the parameters on which the data could be sorted." She also mastered a host of languages, ancient and modern, including Hittite, Old Irish, Akkadian, Tocharian, Sumerian, Old Persian, Basque and Chinese. From 1942 to 1945, while teaching full-time in Brooklyn, she commuted weekly by train to Yale to take classes in advanced Sanskrit. She also studied field archeology in New Mexico and Greece.
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