fuckyeahhistorycrushes:Wow. Who is this gentleman with movie-star good looks? Why, it’s Michael Vent
fuckyeahhistorycrushes:Wow. Who is this gentleman with movie-star good looks? Why, it’s Michael Ventris (1922-1956), the main decipherer of Linear B. He was basically hella good at languages and knew like 12 languages by the time he was a teenager, he served in the RAF in WWII, and then he was trained as an architect. But this was not enough for Michael Ventris. Oh no. As a hobby, he worked on deciphering Linear B, the long unknown script found on tablets from Knossos, Crete. Basing his work off of the work of other earlier linguists who made progress with the script but never cracked it, Michael Ventris discovered that the script was encoding Greek and was subsequently able to decipher most of it. Tragically, he died young in a car crash and was not able to contribute more to Mycenaean studies or to make any more ladies swoon with his magnificent cheekbones. A gentleman, a linguist, a genius, he will live on forever in our hearts. -- source link
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