Michael Ventris deciphers Linear B

In June 1952 the English architect and amateur linguist Michael Ventris announced that the tablets in the Linear B script, found by Arthur Evans at Knossos in 1900 and by Carl Blegen at Pylos in 1939, were written in an early form of Greek. Most experts, including Evans, had assumed the language was Minoan. Ventris reached his result using grids of the signs' sounds, and was helped by the philologist John Chadwick, with whom he published the proof in 1953. The tablets are palace inventories, pushing back written Greek by 500 years, to about 1400 BC. Ventris died in a car accident at 34 in 1956.

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