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06-17-2019, 08:15 PM | #31 | |
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06-17-2019, 08:27 PM | #32 | |||
Wizard
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06-18-2019, 09:53 AM | #33 | |||
o saeclum infacetum
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That said, I think she did as good a job as possible in making difficult concepts accessible, understandable and interesting. And what a relief to read a current popular history book that does not create conversations, sidelong glances, gestures and so forth. They seem to be thin on the ground these days. |
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06-18-2019, 11:26 AM | #34 |
Professor of Law
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I am just spying on this discussion as I was too busy at work to get to this, but I thought I would pop in by way of contrast. Last year, I read Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer, also by Fox.
I enjoyed it immensely. Perhaps the narrative was made better by the sheer amount of first-person sources available to Fox in writing it. She quotes newspapers, diaries, and letters on virtually every page. I also wonder if the aforementioned book was also the beneficiary of 5 years more experience as a writer at the New York Times (and perhaps better editing). |
06-18-2019, 03:26 PM | #35 | |||
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06-18-2019, 06:17 PM | #36 |
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Victoria wrote:
"I think so too issybird. I thought Fox also did an excellent job of portraying what a labour of love the decipherment was for each of them. To maintain that level of commitment for decades with so little progress to encourage them was amazing. Let alone the fortitude and powers of concentration they had to muster to tackle the scripts in the midst war and crushing workloads - truly remarkable." I think that is very much the case. Though I really do think that Kober was far and away the most important link in the eventual decipherment--which is not to minimise the great intuitive leap of Ventris. Evans found the tablet but contributed little to the actual decipherment and released only a few. Others actually impeded the work by either not allowing Kober to see crucial tablets or loading her with what was a time-wasting secretarial task. Despite her brilliance, Kober was only an Assistant Professor and given Associate status only when she was dying. Further, she was refused the University of Pennsylvania position almost certainly because she was a particularly brilliant woman. I cannot but feel great sympathy for her. One thing that surprised me was that the book seemed to make much of the mystery concerning the destruction of Knossos. I thought it was reasonably accepted that the Minoan Civilisation was destroyed by the massive Santorini eruption. https://www.sciencealert.com/tree-ri...eruption-thera and https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/san...tion/size.html |
06-18-2019, 09:05 PM | #37 |
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Thanks for these interesting articles, fantasyfan.
I agree - I had thought there was no question about the cause of the destruction of Knossos. |
06-18-2019, 11:33 PM | #38 |
cacoethes scribendi
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Evans, for me, seems fairly clear and typical of his kind and time; he showed considerable dedication to his interests, but did not seem obsessed by them. But the other two...
I am a little conflicted over how I see Kober and Ventris. I think there is no question but that they both far overstepped the bounds of dedication into the yawning depths of obsession. Perhaps this problem called for that, but it's not healthy and it's not a guarantee of useful results. Kober is presented to us in this book as a dedicated worker without that spark of intuition demonstrated by Ventris, but note that much of the time Kober was working with just 700 words. A statistical analysis of 700 words* written in a small alphabet would be pushing the bounds, but when written in a syllabary this tiny sample can give no more than hints. Kober took those hints and made a number of intuitive leaps that were proven correct - compared to Ventris who made many such leaps, most of them wrong ... until he was right. Until the additional tablets (both from Knossos and Pylos) were made available, most people knew they did not have enough information for a reliable solution. Kober and Ventris knew this too, but rather than get on with life while waiting for the extra information, they continued to push and prod, hoping for revelation; for Ventris that seems part of his nature, for Kober this seems directly opposed to her professed believe in scientific method - making her dismissal of others' guesswork a bit unfair; Ventris had worked hard at his guesses, just as she had. * Quote from chapter 4: "For every word on the tablets—the two hundred published inscriptions gave decipherers about seven hundred different words to work with—she cut a separate card." |
06-19-2019, 08:39 AM | #39 |
o saeclum infacetum
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Kober was her own worst enemy. Even given the constraints of her time and that she was a woman and Jewish, she didn't seem to be able to free herself mentally from the constraints of the city university system after having graduated from Hunter where she worked during grad school and her life-long employment at Brooklyn. For all she espoused sharing, her publication of only three articles was problematic. I understand that Brooklyn didn't reward that (and I have no issue with the colleges of the city of New York that they saw their mission as teaching), but I have to think the lack of a paper trail hurt Kober when she was competing for the job at Penn (even though it was a longshot).
Unfortunately, she seemed rather to despise her students; you'd think they might have been a fantastic resource for the grunt work of her efforts. But she preferred to be secretive, hunched over her dining table every night, even as she deplored the lack of time. Yes, she was a perfectionist, but that wasn't realistic especially given the limited sample she had. |
06-19-2019, 11:24 AM | #40 |
cacoethes scribendi
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So I finished.
Fox's idea that Ventris "fled" from Myres and Kober ("a pattern of abdication he would repeat throughout his life"), because he felt cowed by the academics seemed to me to be - at best - an inappropriate assumption. And after reading of the later circumstances, close to his death, I get the strong impression Ventris suffered from major depressive episodes. As others have observed, Fox goes too far in trying to champion Kober and belittle Ventris. Actually, I also think she goes to far in trying to champion Ventris, exaggerating how unique these two were. That they were both geniuses is not in doubt, nor is their obsessive natures. But very smart, obsessive problem solvers are not that rare, and once the volume of tablets was published, it seems pretty certain to me that someone would have been along in fairly short order to solve the riddle*. The advantage that Ventris (and Kober had she lived longer) had over others was the head start offered by their decades long obsession. I think, now that I've finished the book and seen how Ventris did it, that Kober probably would have solved the problem, given time. We learn later in the book (Ch11) that despite criticising others for experimenting with associating sounds with symbols, Kober wasn't beyond doing that herself (had tried with Cypriot). This, it seems, turned out to be part of how Ventris began his conversion to thinking Greek might be the base. As may be expected from the above, I found the concluding chapter of the book to be especially annoying and disappointing. However my opinion was somewhat raised by the epilogue and its discussion of how much worth there is in the plain facts of how a society lived. So I'd agree with others, a rating of around 3 to 3.5. Happy to have read it, but think it could have been better. * The problem, while there were only 200 tablets, 700 words, available was especially hard, potentially impossible to get all the way out. But the problem with thousands of tablets, and knowing now that it had links to a known language (which need not have been the case, observe that Linear A is still unsolved), is quite a different proposition. |
06-19-2019, 11:34 AM | #41 |
cacoethes scribendi
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Definitely. I got the impression she was afraid of taking risks, so she only published things she felt confident of. Ventris, while on his high-notes rather than depressive episodes, took risks. Many of his ideas turned out wrong, but eventually he found one that worked. Kober should have realised that this is one of the ways science works, and why peer review is part of the process. Ventris took advantage of that, Kober did not.
That said, I guess being a woman in at that time, the risks of getting it wrong were probably higher than they were to Ventris. Finding the right trade-off cannot have been easy. |
06-19-2019, 11:58 AM | #42 | |
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Knossos was destroyed by the eruption. However the site was destroyed and rebuilt several times. I think the mystery the author was referring to, took place after after the eruption, called the late bronze age collapse. I found the sequencing in the book a bit confusing but I understood that the Minoans built Knossos and had a flourishing society, with a written language. The Greek Mycenaeans invaded Crete and took over the Knossos site after the Minoans were destroyed. (I assume by the eruption, but I don’t remember her referencing this?) Not having their own writing, they used the Minoan’s system to compose the Linear B tablets that Evans found. However, the Greek Mycenaeans were only at Knossos for a short time before they were toppled too. Apparently many civilizations across the Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa mysteriously collapsed in the late bronze age. Scholars don’t have a lot of information, but some extant accounts referred to an invasion of an unidentified ‘sea peoples’. I first read about it in “The Bible Unearthed”, which I picked up after seeing a PBS NOVA series by the same name. https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Unearth...al-text&sr=1-1 It seems that many advances made by those societies were completely lost, and people were plunged into a prolonged dark age. Last edited by Victoria; 06-19-2019 at 12:03 PM. |
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06-20-2019, 07:04 AM | #43 |
Wizard
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Good points, Victoria, thank you.
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06-24-2019, 01:50 PM | #44 |
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Just checking in. I'm afraid I'm going to end up passing this month. Family health issues continue, and I just don't have time or energy to read non-fiction, no matter how much I was looking forward to this book. I expect I'll circle back around to it at some point, but not really in time to be much of a part of this discussion. My apologies to the group, but "Necessity Exists" (Victoria will get the reference, at least. )
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06-24-2019, 07:35 PM | #45 |
Snoozing in the sun
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Best wishes for all the health issues to be resolved quickly Charlie.
I think we were all pretty much in agreement on this book, so there probably isn’t anything much more to say about it, unless someone comes up with a new angle! |
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