An architect with significant training in the field, who did his work in close collaboration with the professional scholar John Chadwick. Plus that script had a

An architect with significant training in the field, who did his work in close collaboration with the professional scholar John Chadwick. Plus that script had a relatively large corpus and, moreover, it encoded an earlier form of a language we already knew (and we already knew the sound values to expect from earlier Greek, like labiovelar consonants, from comparative Indo-European reconstruction). Not the case with Linear A.