An architect with no linguistics training deciphered a lost Bronze Age script

Linear B, used in Bronze Age Greece around 1450-1200 BC, resisted decipherment for 50 years after its 1900 discovery. Building on classicist Alice Kober's grid analysis of the signs, architect Michael Ventris cracked it in 1952 and announced on BBC radio that the script recorded an archaic form of Greek, five centuries older than Homer, not the unrelated language most scholars had assumed.

— Michael Ventris & John Chadwick, Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives — Journal of Hellenic Studies, 73, 1953