Emmett Leslie Bennett

Emmett Leslie Bennett Jr. was an American classicist and philologist whose systematic catalog of its symbols led to the solution of reading Linear B, a 3,300-year-old syllabary used for writing Mycenaean Greek hundreds of years before the Greek alphabet was developed. Archaeologist Arthur Evans had discovered Linear B in 1900 during his excavations at Knossos on the Greek island of Crete and spent decades trying to comprehend its writings until his death in 1941. Bennett and Alice Kober cataloged the 80 symbols used in the script in his 1951 work The Pylos Tablets, which provided linguist John Chadwick and amateur scholar Michael Ventris with the vital clues needed to finally decipher Linear B in 1952.

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