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Michael Ventris
Michael George Francis Ventris, (; 12 July 1922 – 6 September 1956) was an English architect, classicist and philologist who deciphered Linear B, the ancient Mycenaean Greek script. A student of languages, Ventris had pursued decipherment as a personal vocation since his adolescence. After creating a new field of study, Ventris died in a car crash a few weeks before the publication of ''Documents in Mycenaean Greek'', written with John Chadwick. Early life and education Ventris was born into a traditional army family. His grandfather, Francis Ventris, was a major-general and Commander of British Forces in China. His father, Edward Francis Vereker Ventris, was a lieutenant-colonel in the Indian Army, who retired early due to ill health. Edward Ventris married Anna Dorothea Janasz (Dora), who was from a wealthy Jewish and Polish paternal background. Michael Ventris was their only child. The family moved to Switzerland for eight years, seeking a healthy environment for Co ...
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Linear B
Linear B was a syllabic script used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended from the older Linear A, an undeciphered earlier script used for writing the Minoan language, as is the later Cypriot syllabary, which also recorded Greek. Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Kydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae, disappeared with the fall of Mycenaean civilization during the Late Bronze Age collapse. The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages, provides no evidence of the use of writing. Linear B, deciphered by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris—based on the research of American classicist Alice Kober—is the only Bronze Age Aegean script to have been deciphered. Linear B consists of around 87 syllabic signs and over 100 ideographic signs. These ideograms or "signifyin ...
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Order Of The British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established on 4 June 1917 by King George V and comprises five classes across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two of which make the recipient either a knight if male or dame if female. There is also the related British Empire Medal, whose recipients are affiliated with, but not members of, the order. Recommendations for appointments to the Order of the British Empire were originally made on the nomination of the United Kingdom, the self-governing Dominions of the Empire (later Commonwealth) and the Viceroy of India. Nominations continue today from Commonwealth countries that participate in recommending British honours. Most Commonwealth countries ceased recommendations for appointments to the Order of the British Empire when they ...
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Alice Kober
Alice Elizabeth Kober (December 23, 1906 – May 16, 1950) was an American classicist best known for her work on the decipherment of Linear B. Educated at Hunter College and Columbia University, Kober taught classics at Brooklyn College from 1930 until her death. In the 1940s, she published three major papers on the script, demonstrating evidence of inflection; her discovery allowed for the deduction of phonetic relationships between different signs without assigning them phonetic values, and would be a key step in the eventual decipherment of the script. Early life and education Alice Elizabeth Kober was born in New York on December 23, 1906 to the Hungarian immigrants Franz and Katharina Kober. The family lived in Yorkville, Manhattan, and Franz worked as a furniture upholsterer and later an apartment superintendent. She had one brother, William, two years younger. Kober studied at Hunter College High School, and in 1924 won a $100-per-year scholarship. She went on t ...
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Stowe School - Geograph
Stowe may refer to: Places United Kingdom *Stowe, Buckinghamshire, a civil parish and former village **Stowe House **Stowe School *Stowe, Cornwall, in Kilkhampton parish * Stowe, Herefordshire, in the List of places in Herefordshire * Stowe, Lincolnshire, a hamlet in Barholm and Stowe parish *Stowe, Shropshire, a small village and civil parish *Stowe-by-Chartley, Staffordshire, a village and civil parish * Stowe Pool, a reservoir in Lichfield, Staffordshire *Stowe, a corner of the Silverstone Circuit United States *Stowe Township, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania *Stowe, Pennsylvania, a census-designated place *Stowe, Vermont, a town ** Stowe Mountain Resort ski area **Stowe Recreation Path * Lake Stowe, Vermont *Stowe, West Virginia, an unincorporated community Elsewhere *Stowe, Alberta, Canada *Stowe, Dominica People *Barry Stowe (born 1957), American businessman *Calvin Ellis Stowe (1802–1886), American biblical scholar, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe *Dorothy Stowe (1920– ...
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Adolf Erman
Johann Peter Adolf Erman (; 31 October 185426 June 1937) was a renowned German Egyptologist and lexicographer. Life Born in Berlin, he was the son of Georg Adolf Erman and grandson of Paul Erman and Friedrich Bessel. Educated at Leipzig and Berlin, he became associate professor of Egyptology at the University of Berlin in 1883 and full professor in 1892. In 1885 he was appointed director of the Egyptian department at the royal museum. In 1934 he was excluded from the faculty of the university because he was, according to the Nazi ideology, one quarter Jewish. As his family had converted to Protestantism in 1902, he and his family were not persecuted by the Nazis, but they all lost their positions. Erman and his school at Berlin had the difficult task of recovering the grammar of the Egyptian language and spent thirty years of special study on it. The greater part of Egyptian texts after the Middle Kingdom having been written in what was even then practically a dead language, a ...
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Gstaad
Gstaad ( ; ) is a town in the German-speaking section of the Canton of Bern in southwestern Switzerland. It is part of the municipality of Saanen and is known as a major ski resort and a popular destination amongst high society and the international jet set. The winter campus of the Institut Le Rosey is located in Gstaad. Gstaad has a population of about 9,200 and is located above sea level. History During the Middle Ages it was part of the district of Saanen (Gessenay) belonging to the Savoyard county of Gruyère. The town core developed at the fork in the trails into the Valais and Vaud. It had an inn, a warehouse for storing trade goods and oxen to help pull wagons over the alpine passes by the 13th-14th centuries. The St. Nicholas chapel was built in the town in 1402, while the murals are from the second half of the 15th century. The town was dominated by cattle farming and agriculture until the great fire of 1898. It was then rebuilt to support the growing tourism indu ...
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Commander British Forces In Hong Kong
The Commander British Forces in Hong Kong (CBF) was a senior British Army officer who acted as Military Advisor to the Governor of Hong Kong and was in charge of the Hong Kong British Forces. The officeholder of this post concurrently assumed the office of the Lieutenant Governor of Hong Kong before the abolition of the position. Structure The Governor of Hong Kong, being a representative of the British sovereign, was the Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces and Vice Admiral in the Crown colony (then British Dependent Territories). The Governor was advised by the Commander British Forces in Hong Kong (CBF) on all military actions. During the 1980s and 1990s, the CBF was normally a career Major General or Lieutenant General from the British Army. Until 1966, the CBF was an ex officio member of the Legislative Council. Commanders Commanders have included: ;Commander British Forces in Hong Kong *1843–1848 Major-General George d'Aguilar *1848–1851 Major-General William ...
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Mycenaean Greek
Mycenaean Greek is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, on the Greek mainland and Crete in Mycenaean Greece (16th to 12th centuries BC), before the hypothesised Dorian invasion, often cited as the ''terminus ad quem'' for the introduction of the Greek language to Greece. The language is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script first attested on Crete before the 14th century BC. Most inscriptions are on clay tablets found in Knossos, in central Crete, as well as in Pylos, in the southwest of the Peloponnese. Other tablets have been found at Mycenae itself, Tiryns and Thebes and at Chania, in Western Crete. The language is named after Mycenae, one of the major centres of Mycenaean Greece. The tablets long remained undeciphered, and many languages were suggested for them, until Michael Ventris, building on the extensive work of Alice Kober, deciphered the script in 1952. The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories. No prose narrative s ...
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Decipherment
In philology, decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of texts written in ancient or obscure languages or scripts. Decipherment in cryptography refers to decryption. The term is used sardonically in everyday language to describe attempts to read poor handwriting. In genetics, decipherment is the successful attempt to understand DNA, which is viewed metaphorically as a text containing word-like units.Snustad, D. Peter, et al. (2016). ''Principles of Genetics''. Wiley, p.302 Throughout science the term decipherment is synonymous with the understanding of biological and chemical phenomena. Ancient languages In a few cases, a multilingual artifact has been necessary to facilitate decipherment, the Rosetta Stone being the classic example. Statistical techniques provide another pathway to decipherment, as does the analysis of modern languages derived from ancient languages in which undeciphered texts are written. Archaeological and historical information is helpful in verifying h ...
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Philology
Philology () is the study of language in oral and writing, written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. In older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative linguistics, comparative and historical linguistics. Classical philology studies classical languages. Classical philology principally originated from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the fourth century BC, continued by Greeks and Romans throughout the Roman Empire, Roman/Byzantine Empire. It was eventually resumed by European scholars of the Renaissance humanism, Renaissance, where it was s ...
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Classics
Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature and their related original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics also includes Greco-Roman philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, art, mythology and society as secondary subjects. In Western civilization, the study of the Greek and Roman classics was traditionally considered to be the foundation of the humanities, and has, therefore, traditionally been the cornerstone of a typical elite European education. Etymology The word ''classics'' is derived from the Latin adjective '' classicus'', meaning "belonging to the highest class of citizens." The word was originally used to describe the members of the Patricians, the highest class in ancient Rome. By the 2nd century AD the word was used in literary criticism to describe writers of the highest quality. For example, Aulus Gellius, in his ''Att ...
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