Sappho, spelled (in the dialect spoken by the poet) Psappho, (born c. 610, Lesbos, Greece — died c. 570 BCE). A lyric poet greatly admired in all ages for the beauty of her writing style.
Her language contains elements from Aeolic vernacular and poetic tradition, with traces of epic vocabulary familiar to readers of Homer. She has the ability to judge critically her own ecstasies and grief, and her emotions lose nothing of their force by being recollected in tranquillity.
Excerpt from Wikipedia: Emmett L. Bennett, Jr.
Emmett Leslie Bennett, Jr. (July 12, 1918 – December 15, 2011) was an American classicist and philologist whose systematic catalog of its symbols led to the solution of the mystery of reading and interpreting Linear B, a syllabary used for writing Mycenaean Greek, a 3,300-year-old script that was used hundreds of years before the Greek alphabet was developed. Archaeologist Arthur Evans had discovered Linear B in 1900 during his excavations at Knossos on the Greek island of Crete who spent decades trying to comprehend its writings until his death in 1941. Bennett and Alice Kober cataloged the 80 symbols used in the script in his 1951 work The Pylos Tablets, which provided linguist John Chadwick and amateur scholar Michael Ventris with the vital clues needed to finally decipher Linear B in 1952.
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