Alice E. Kober

Born to Hungarian immigrants in Manhattan’s upper east side, Alice Kober majored in Latin at Hunter College, and earned Masters and PhD degrees in Classics from Columbia University. She was appointed Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College, where she lived out her career. Described by one of her students as ‘aggressively nondescript’, she was a relentless philologist, mastering in addition to Greek and Latin, Sanskrit, Hittite, Akkadian, Old Irish. Tocharian, Sumerian, Old Persian, Basque, and Chinese.  Her dissertation was on the use of color terms in Homer, but her life’s work was resolutely focused on deciphering the Mycenean script known as Linear B, for which she won a Guggenheim in 1946.  She kept statistics on 180,000 hand cut cards, using a hole punch system to organize inflections.  Her premature death cut her research short, but her work led to eventual decipherment by Michael Ventris.