The Knossos tablets

1920 – 1998

John Chadwick (21 May 1920 – 24 November 1998) was an English linguist and classical scholar most famous for his role in deciphering Linear B, along with Michael Ventris. He was born in East Sheen, Richmond-upon-Thames, and educated at St Paul's School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and he served as an officer the Royal Navy's Special Branch during the Second World War. After the war he was on the staff of the Oxford Classical Dictionary before beginning a Classics lectureship at Cambridge in 1952. That year he began working with Ventris on the progressive decipherment of Linear B, the two writing Documents in Mycenean Greek in 1956 following a controversial first paper three y…