Question

For decades following Sir Arthur Evans’s discovery of clay tablets inscribed with Linear B at Knossos, scholars operated under the assumption that the script encoded an indigenous, non-Indo-European Aegean language. This linguistic bias severely hampered early decipherment efforts, as researchers attempted to map the symbols onto Etruscan or Basque phonetic frameworks. A pivotal shift occurred when classicist Alice Kober recognized that deciphering an unknown script written in an unknown language required analyzing internal structural relationships rather than forcing external linguistic parallels. Kober meticulously cataloged recurring patterns of word endings across hundreds of tablet inscriptions, establishing that the variations represented grammatical inflections. To systematically track these morphological shifts, she developed a grid matrix that organized symbols sharing common consonants along vertical axes and common vowels along horizontal axes, all without knowing the actual phonetic values of any symbol. Contrary to the prevailing belief that Kober disproved a Greek origin for Linear B, her work remained strictly agnostic regarding the underlying language. Instead, her structural grid provided the critical mathematical architecture that Michael Ventris subsequently utilized. Ventris, building upon Kober’s inflected triplets and hypothetical sound-value assignments, eventually demonstrated that Linear B was an early archaic form of Mycenaean Greek. While popular accounts frequently attribute the decipherment solely to Ventris’s 1952 breakthrough, contemporary epigraphers emphasize that Ventris’s phonetic decipherment would have been impossible without Kober’s prior establishment of the script’s internal syllabic grid.

According to the passage, Alice Kober’s development of the structural grid matrix involved which of the following?