Emmett Leslie Bennett

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Emmett Leslie Bennett, Jr. (born July 12, 1918 in St Paul , Minnesota , † December 15, 2011 in Madison , Wisconsin ) was an American classical scholar and mycenaeologist .

Life

The son of Emmett Bennett Sr. and Mary Buzzelle Bennett grew up in Ohio . He studied Classics at the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Cincinnati . He obtained his BA there in 1939 and the MA in 1941. He then began to study for a doctorate. One of his teachers was the archaeologist Carl Blegen , who discovered a series of clay tablets inscribed in Linear B during the excavations in Pylos in 1939 . During World War II , from 1942 to 1945, Bennett worked as a cryptologist decoding encrypted Japanese messages for the War Department in Washington, DC , even though he did not speak Japanese . After the Second World War he returned to his university and continued his studies. Blegen commissioned his pupil to decipher, index and publish the Linear B tablets. Together with Alice Kober , he compiled a catalog of the 80 characters that were known at that time in the Linear B script discovered by Arthur Evans in 1900, but not decoded. In 1947 he was charged with a dissertation on The Minoan Linear Script from Pylos doctorate . In the same year he got a job at Yale University , in 1958 he moved to the University of Texas at Austin , in 1959 to the University of Wisconsin – Madison , where he stayed for almost three decades until he retired in 1988. From 1978 to 1988 he was Moses Slaughter Professor of Classics there .

The deciphering, indexing, and publication of the Linear B script would become Bennett's life's work. Basic results are the authoritative, albeit in the meantime by John Chadwick and other revised editions of the Linear B tablets from Pylos, Mycenae and Knossos . In the course of deciphering, Bennett developed such a knowledge of the characters that he could easily read the handwriting of the individual scribes could distinguish. The preparatory work by Emmett Bennett and Alice Kober finally enabled Michael Ventris , with whom Bennett worked for the last two years before his death, and John Chadwick in 1952 to decipher the script. At the Wingspread Conference 1961, the so-called Wingspread Convention was adopted for the representation and designation of the meanwhile approximately 200 characters, which mainly goes back to Bennett; it was eventually taken over by the Comité International Permanent des Études Mycéniennes (CIPEM).

In 1957, Bennett founded the monthly periodical Nestor , which collects bibliographical information and mishaps, initially on mycenaeology , then also on the prehistory and early history of the Aegean , on the Homeric Society and on Indo-European Linguistics , and which he published himself until 1978. He was also a member of the editorial board of the specialist body Kadmos. Journal of pre- and early Greek epigraphy .

Bennett was an honorary member of the Archaeological Society in Athens . The Republic of Greece awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of Honor ( Τάγμα της Τιμής ) in 1991 . Bennett received the 2001 Gold Medal of the Archaeological Institute of America for outstanding contributions in the field of archeology , that is, for his work on cataloging the Linear B texts and for his contributions to the development of mycenaean research .

One of his students is Thomas G. Palaima , director of the Department of Classics at the University of Texas , through whose programs in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory Bennett's estate was acquired, cataloged, categorized and made available to the public through a website.

Fonts (selection)

Text editions

  • The Pylos Tablets. A Preliminary Transcription. Princeton UP, Princeton 1951.
    • The Pylos Tablets. Texts of the inscriptions found 1939-1954. Princeton UP, Princeton 1956. - Review by: Leonard Robert Palmer , in: Gnomon 29, 1957, 113-117.
    • with Jean-Pierre Olivier : The Pylos Tablets Transcribed. Vol. 1: Text and notes ; vol. 2: Hands, concordances, indices . Ed. dell'Ateneo, Roma vol. 1: 1973, vol. 2: 1976.
  • The Mycenae Tablets. With an Introduction by Alan B. Wace . In: Proceedings of the American Philological Society 97.4, 1953, 422-470, ( online ).
    • The Mycenae Tablets II. With an Introduction by Alan B. Wace and Elizabeth B. Wace . Translations and Commentary by John Chadwick. In: Transactions of the American Philological Society 48.1, 1958. - Review by: Leonard Robert Palmer, in: Gnomon 31, 1959, 429-433.
  • with John Chadwick, Michael Ventris: The Knossos Tablets. A revised transliteration of all the texts in Mycenaean Greek recoverable from Evans' excavations of 1900-1904 based on independent examination. London 1956 (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplementary Papers, 2) - Review by: Leonard Robert Palmer, in: Gnomon 29, 1957, 113–117.
    • with John Chadwick, Michael Ventris: The Knossos Tablets. A revised transliteration of all the texts in Mycenaean Greek recoverable from Evans' excavations of 1900-1904 based on independent examination. Second edition with corrections and additions by John Chadwick with the assistance of Fred W. Householder Jr. London 1959 (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement no. 7) - Review by: Joshua Whatmough, in: Classical Philology 57, 1962 , 244-246.

Further mycenological publications

  • The Minoan Linear Script from Pylos. Ph.D. thesis, University of Cincinnati 1947.
  • A Minoan Linear B index. New Haven 1953. - Review by: Michael Ventris, in: The Antiquaries Journal 35, 1955, 95.
  • (Ed.): Mycenaean studies. Proceedings of the Third International Colloquium for Mycenaean Studies held at "Wingspread," September 4-8, 1961. University of Wisconsin Press, Minnesota 1964 - reviewed by Leonard R. Palmer, in: Language 41, 1965, 312-329, ( online ).

Others

  • Paul MacKendrick (Ed.): The Speeches of Cicero: Context, Law, Rhetoric. With the technical assistance of Emmett L. Bennett. Duckworth, London 1995. - Review by: Christopher P. Craig, in: Vergilius 41, 1995, 145-149.

literature

  • Jean-Pierre Olivier , Thomas G. Palaima (ed.): Text, Tablets and Scribes. Studies in Mycenaean epigraphy and economy offered to Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca 1988 (Suplementos a Minos, 10). - (Festschrift, contains a curriculum vitae).
  • Gabriele Graefen, Konrad Ehlich, Florian Coulmas (Eds.): A Bibliography on Writing and Written Language. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1996, 163-165, online . - (List of publications by Bennett)
  • Thomas G. Palaima: Scribes, scribal hands and palaeography. In: Yves Duhoux , Anna Morpurgo Davies (Eds.): A Companion to Linear B. Mycenaean Greek texts and their world. Volume 2. Peeters, Louvain-La-Neuve, Walpole, MA 2011 (Bibliothèque des Cahiers de l'Institut de Linguistique de Louvain, 127), Chapter 12, pp. 3–136, ( online ( Memento from October 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive )) (PDF) - (On the significance of Bennett's palaeographic findings)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bennett, Emmett Leslie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bennett, Emmett Leslie Junior (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American classical philologist and mycenaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH St Paul , Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH December 15, 2011
Place of death Madison , Wisconsin