forced a vast revision of settled scholarly understanding of the development of the Greek world. Mycenaean Greek - Michael Ventris and John Chadwick: Documents in Mycenaean Greek. The discovery that an early form of Greek had been spoken and written on Crete and elsewhere from about 1400 to 1150 B.C. Bellerophon tablets from the Mycenaean world A tale of seven bronze. Chadwickstudied Greek and other languages at Cambridge, and worked as a lowly assistant lexicographer for the Oxford Latin Dictionary before becoming a classics lecturer at Cambridge in 1952. Chadwick published their findings, they were widely derided by scholars who felt it was impossible that there had been a Greek-speaking people on Crete hundreds of years before the rise of the Greek city states. Chadwick and his colleague, Michael Ventris, announced that they had unlocked the secrets to a puzzle that had confounded scholars for more than half a century, and determined that Linear B was a style of Greek used 500 years before the age of Homer. In an era in which astronauts spend weeks in space and sheep are cloned, it is hard to imagine the excitement - or the controversy - the two men created in 1953. Chadwick was 78 and a longtime resident of Cambridge. John Chadwick, a self-effacing linguist who played a critical role in deciphering the ancient Greek writings known as Linear B, then spent the rest of his life deflecting credit to his collaborator, died in England on Nov.
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