Michael George Francis Ventris

Ventris, Michael George Francis (1922–56), English architect and cryptographer who deciphered (1953) Linear B, a semipictorial Minoan-Mycenaean script, and showed it to be an ancient form of Greek. Following World War II, during which he was trained as a decoder, Ventris established a Committee of Correspondents, a group of scholars worldwide. With their advice, he set about deciphering the script, discovered on a number of clay tablets at Knossos, Crete (1900–08). Ventris used statistical analysis to plot a tentative syllabary. The results were published as “Evidence for Greek Dialect in Mycenaean Archives” (1953) and are significant for proving the Greek world to be literate some 500 years before Homer.