Prophetically, that day, the book fell open to the entry on Linear B, and I was reminded of the story, which was at that time the only story anyone knew, that Linear B was this mysterious script dug up on clay tablets on Crete in 1900, and deciphered in 1952 by an amateur, the English architect Michael Ventris, and that was pretty much end of story. It's this very thick book of every kind of alphabet, syllabary, ideographic writing system from around the world, thousands of years of history with gorgeous illustrations of all kinds of weird scripts. Sitting at home to kill time I picked up one of my all-time favorite reference books, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, edited by Florian Coulmas. I was procrastinating while trying to finish the manuscript of my first book. What initially compelled you to write this book? It was an intense experience, but I certainly wasn't laboring under the same onus that the decipherers were, thank goodness. So for me the obsessive work ethic came just in making sure I could finish the book in at least a timely way.

I have the advantage of 50 years of hindsight.

And sadly, very often you can't, or even if it does, as you've seen from the Linear B story, it kind of destroys you.

It attracts obsessional types and there is something about it that just takes over your life and you have to solve it. There does seem to be something about decipherment that if your life isn't messed up going into it, it kind of messes you up. In The Riddle of the Labyrinth, linguist and obituary writer Margalit Fox chronicles three key figures in the decipherment of Linear B, an ancient Mycenaean script.ĭid the obsessive work ethic of the Linear B decipherers influence you as you wrote about them? In two interviews, Margalit Fox discusses her book Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind which offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world with a particular focus on a small Bedouin village where everyone 'speaks' a form of sign language that no outsider has been able to decode until now and The Riddle of the Labyrinth in which she chronicles three key figures in the decipherment of Linear B, an ancient Mycenaean script.

Margalit fox riddle of the labyrinth