Emmett L. Bennett Jr., 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, died on Dec. 15 in Madison, Wis. He was 93.

Professor Bennett was considered the father of Mycenaean epigraphy — that is, the intricate art of reading inscriptions from the Mycenaean period, as the slice of the Greek Bronze Age from about 1600 to 1200 B.C. is known. His work, which entailed analysis so minute that he could eventually distinguish the handwritings of many different Bronze Age scribes, helped open a window onto the Mycenaean world.

This was the world of which Homer would sing in his “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” a world that until Linear B was deciphered had languished in the murk of prehistory.

A Martian confronting the Roman alphabet, for instance, would need years of painstaking study just to be certain that dissimilar-looking characters like “A” and “a” are mere variations of the same letter, while similar-looking ones like “O” and “Q” are different letters altogether.

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