Linear B, 16th St.

Emmett L. Bennett, a classicist who played a "vital role in deciphering Linear B, the Bronze Age Aegean script that defied solution for more than 50 years after it was unearthed on clay tablets in 1900, has died," according to the New York Times.

Linear B consists of around 87 syllabic signs and a large repertory of ideographic signs. These ideograms or "signifying" signs stand for objects or commodities, but do not have phonetic value and are never used as word signs in writing a sentence. Tablets were dug up in Knossos, Cydonia,Pylos, Thebes, and Mycenae and are believed to be of the world of which "Homer would sing in his "Iliad" and "Odyssey."

Bennett, and others, including the incredible 'amateur' Michal Ventris, of whom a movie should be made, deciphered the script in the 1950's, without the aid of computers.

"Anyone who's looked at a piece of indeciperable handwriting realizes how difficult it is as opposed to looking at a piece of text with the same message in printed form," said Andrew Robinson, the author of many books about archaelogical decipherment, in a telephone interview with the Times.