In my experience, that kind of bespoke nerdiness is relatively rare. A few chapters in, I found myself thinking about a specific and unusual form of literary pleasure: that of seeing one’s own pet subjects reflected in a book. What does make for fascinating reading is Fox’s book, which recounts the 50-year quest to decipher Linear B, the writing on those tablets. But for a long time after their discovery that didn’t matter, because no one had any idea at all how to read them. Fully 800 of them are, as Margalit Fox writes in her new book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, “quite literally devoted to counting sheep.” In short, they are not the world’s most fascinating reading material. Essentially the scattered files of an early civilization’s accounting department, the tablets list rations of wheat and figs, record the results of the local census, and keep track of broken versus unbroken chariot wheels. Viewed in a certain light, the thousands of inscribed clay tablets unearthed over the past century on Crete and mainland Greece are profoundly boring.
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