Emmett L. Bennett, Jr.

Who was Emmett L. Bennett, Jr.?

Emmett Leslie Bennett, Jr. was an American classicist and philologist whose systematic catalog of its symbols led to the solution of the mystery of reading and interpreting Linear B, a syllabary used for writing Mycenaean Greek, a 3,300-year-old script that was used 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 who 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.

Bennett was born on July 12, 1918, in Minneapolis and attended the University of Cincinnati, where he studied the classics, earning bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees, and was a student of the American archaeologist Carl Blegen, who had uncovered a series of tablets inscribed in Linear B during excavations he had conducted at Pylos in 1939.