Emmett L. Bennett, Jr.

Emmett Leslie Bennett Jr. (July 18, 1918 – December 15, 2011) 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.

Bennett was born on July 18, 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. Bennett worked as a cryptanalyst on the American effort decoding Japanese ciphers during World War II, despite not knowing any Japanese.

Bennett died in Madison, Wisconsin at the age of 93. He was survived by two daughters, three sons and four grandchildren.