Question

Passage:
For decades following Sir Arthur Evans's 1900 excavations at the palace of Knossos on Crete, the decipherment of the Bronze Age clay tablets inscribed in the script known as Linear B remained one of archaeology's most intractable puzzles. Evans organized the Aegean writing systems chronologically into Cretan Hieroglyphs, Linear A, and Linear B. However, his unyielding conviction that the tablets recorded an indigenous, non-Greek Minoan language long constrained scholarly inquiry, as prospective decipherers operated under the assumption that Hellenic dialects were historically precluded from Bronze Age Crete.

Substantial progress toward decipherment required shifting away from speculative linguistic comparisons toward rigorous internal structural analysis. In the 1940s, the classicist Alice Kober made a pivotal breakthrough by demonstrating that Linear B encoded an inflected language. Kober meticulously analyzed recurrent sequences of characters across hundreds of tablet inscriptions, isolating recurring three-word patterns—subsequently known as "Kober's triplets." These groups exhibited identical root signs alongside regular terminal variations, which reflected grammatical case endings. Crucially, Kober achieved this morphological demonstration purely through distributional analysis, deliberately refraining from assigning speculative phonetic values to individual symbols.

Building directly upon Kober's methodology, the paleographer Emmett Bennett established the essential empirical foundation for decipherment. Bennett undertook an exhaustive classification of the inscribed signs, distinguishing purely phonographic syllabograms from numerical indicators and semantic ideograms. By systematizing sign variants and eliminating spurious duplicates, Bennett published a standardized signary that established the definitive repertoire of eighty-seven distinct phonetic signs, providing researchers with an objective corpus.

The ultimate decipherment was achieved in 1952 by the architect and amateur linguist Michael Ventris. Adopting Kober's principle that shared consonants and vowels could be mapped systematically, Ventris constructed an elaborate syllabic grid that arranged signs into intersecting rows and columns. Ventris's decisive breakthrough occurred when he tested the phonetic values of sign groups representing geographical place names on Crete, such as Knossos, Amnisos, and Tylissos. Substituting these values into the grid yielded words whose grammatical structure and vocabulary unmistakably corresponded to an archaic dialect of Greek, definitively disproving Evans's long-standing Minoan hypothesis.

Based on the explicit details provided in the passage, match each researcher or scholar with their specific contribution or claim regarding the Linear B script.