Arthur James Beattie

[4] His consequent life-long interest in Natural Science resulted in his being an expert in his favorite hobby of ornithology.

[2] His scientific flair emerged once again in his analysis of the German concrete Atlantic Wall, revealing its steel reinforcement, and allowing its neutralization in Normandy.

[2] It was thanks to this analysis that the section of the wall covering the beaches in Normandy could be effectively damaged by Allied bombing raids that made possible the subsequent landings in D-Day.

[4] After the war, he worked with the Control Commission in Germany, where together Robert Birley was responsible for education reconstruction, removing any Nazi bent in the texts and in the staff at the University of Gottingen.

[1] The decipherment of Linear B in 1953 by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, who had been a student of his at Cambridge, gave rise to a controversy.

The script dated from the period from about 1450 BC when the Mycenaeans took over the Cretan palace settlements and dominated the Aegean area.

[4] He explained the reasons of his doubts and disbelief in detailed articles in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (1956) and in Mitteilungen des Instituts für Orientforschung (1958), gathering support at the same time from a number of international scholars.

[1] The premature tragic death of Ventris in a car accident certainly contributed to alienating the two opposing sides in the dispute, and eventually the supporters of the decipherment have prevailed, making the theory universally accepted and making scholars base on this a range of assumptions about the classical world.

[1] At the same time, he was president to the Scottish Hellenic Society of Edinburgh, and his close relations with Greece led this government to award him in 1966 the Royal Order of the Phoenix, with the grade of Commander.

[1] He was a hard-working and effective administrator of the faculty,[1] and thanks to his first-hand knowledge of the great sites of ancient Greece, such as Epidaurus and Delphi that he had already explored, and of Modern Greek, he was often keen to lead students trips to Sparta, home of Menelaus.