Soru

The following passage is adapted from an essay on twentieth-century linguistics and the decipherment of ancient Aegean scripts.

In the history of epigraphy, few intellectual achievements rival the decipherment of Linear B, the Bronze Age administrative script discovered at Knossos and mainland Mycenaean sites in the early 1900s. While history often accords primary fame to Michael Ventris—the British architect who announced the script's decipherment in 1952—modern scholars increasingly recognize the foundational groundwork laid by Dr. Alice Kober, a professor of classics at Brooklyn College. Working throughout the 1940s until her untimely death in 1950, Kober engaged in an extraordinarily rigorous, empirical investigation of the undeciphered tablets at a time when digital data processing was virtually nonexistent.

To manage the vast array of character combinations without pre-existing bilingual glosses (such as the Rosetta Stone), Kober constructed an intricate, physical database. Over more than a decade, she accumulated approximately 180,000 individual index cards, onto which she meticulously transcribed character groups, contextual occurrences, and grammatical inflections. Because paper was scarce and strictly rationed during the height of the Second World War, Kober could not purchase standard academic index cards in bulk. Instead, she salvaged discarded tobacco boxes, cereal cartons, and promotional book flyers, cutting them by hand using scissors into small, uniform slips. Her colleagues at the college frequently gathered paper scraps from campus waste receptacles to support her labor-intensive filing system.

Kober’s manual database allowed her to identify systematic patterns of inflectional endings without making speculative assumptions about the phonetic values of the symbols. By analyzing how symbol clusters shifted across different contextual positions, she established that Linear B was an inflected language featuring distinct grammatical cases and gender declensions. She organized these relationships into what she termed "triplets"—grids that grouped related root signs with varying suffix signs. Crucially, Kober developed this structural framework while maintaining strict neutrality regarding the underlying language spoken by the scribes, resisting the temptation of her contemporaries to force the script into a Hellenic, Etruscan, or Semitic paradigm.

Following Kober’s death, her extensive grid system and cardboard slip archive were preserved. When Ventris renewed his analysis in the early 1950s, he relied heavily on Kober’s published grids and her physical index cards, which provided the structural foundation that eventually enabled him to confirm that Linear B encoded an early form of Greek. Kober’s meticulous physical catalog remains a testament to empirical rigor, demonstrating how systematic manual analysis paved the way for one of the greatest linguistic breakthroughs of the modern era.

Based on the passage, from what source did Alice Kober primarily obtain the paper material used to construct her index card database?