It was in the spring of 1900 that Arthur Evans, the celebrated archaeologist, unearthed clay tablets covered in unfamiliar scrawls while excavating Knossos, in Crete. The new script, which he named Linear B, contained a combination of thin stick-like characters, closer in resemblance to hieroglyphs than to today’s Roman alphabet, with a series of pictograms obviously representing concepts such as “man”, “goat” or “chariot”.
Translating Linear B proved immensely difficult. Unlike the Rosetta Stone, the discovered tablets had no accompanying text in other scripts, leaving classicists with little to go on other than supposition. Evans died in 1941 with the script untranslated.
Bennett, who combined a classical academic training with the experience of deciphering Japanese coded messages in the Second World War, spent much of the 1940s attempting to identify the individual characters that constituted Linear B. Working alongside fellow American academic Alice Kober, Bennett spent hours drawing intricate, crossword-like grids to record the frequency of possible characters. In 1951 he finally published The Pylos Tablets, which revealed the fruits of his labour: more than 80 distinct Linear B characters, each representing a syllable (albeit in a still unknown language).
The discovery proved a turning point. By 1952 Linear B had been deciphered by an enthusiastic amateur classicist from England, Michael Ventris, who finally cracked the code by realising that the script was a very early version of Greek (a suggestion previously dismissed by Arthur Evans). Ventris admitted that Bennett’s work had been crucial, praising his thesis as “a wonderful piece of work”.
The subsequent translation of Linear B tablets, which by the 1950s had been discovered right across Crete and mainland Greece, detailed the inner administrative workings of conurbations in the Mycenaean period (1600-1200BC), revealing how ancient societies prepared for harvests, religious occasions and war.
Emmett Leslie Bennett Jr was born on July 12 1918 in St Paul, Minnesota, to Emmett Bennett Sr and Mary Buzzelle Bennett. He attended the University of Cincinnati, where he earned a Bachelor’s, Master’s and a PhD in Classics.
He studied under Carl William Blegen, the American archaeologist who was renowned for his excavations in modern-day Greece and Turkey. Professor Blegen acted as mentor to his student, in 1939 entrusting Bennett with the set of Linear B tablets from Pylos which would become the subject of his influential 1951 monograph.
Bennett took a break from academia to help America’s war effort, applying his aptitude for translation to encrypted Japanese messages. Despite not speaking Japanese, his ability to spot patterns among the seemingly meaningless list of symbols proved highly valuable.
As Bennett worked on Linear B throughout the late 1940s, he struck up a transatlantic correspondence with Ventris, sharing thoughts and findings in a surprisingly co-operative manner. Ventris himself had been fascinated by Linear B since first setting eyes on Arthur Evans’s Cretan tablets as a 14-year-old schoolboy. Despite pursuing a living as an architect, he retained an obsessional interest in the mysterious script.
It was Ventris who became celebrated when he finally deciphered Linear B in 1952 (he was killed in a car crash four years later). For Bennett, a life of academia beckoned. He took up positions at Yale and the University of Texas before eventually joining the Department of Classics at the University of Wisconsin in 1959, where he taught until his retirement in 1988.
Bennett was known as the founding father of the study of Mycenaean scripts. He was said to be able to distinguish the work of different Bronze Age scribes by their hand writing alone.
Emmett Bennett earned a host of honours. In 1991 he was awarded the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour, the highest award that the Greek government can bestow on a foreigner.
Bennett’s wife, Marja, predeceased him in 2005. He is survived by two daughter and three sons.
Emmett Bennett, born July 12 1918, died December 15 2011