Cracking a hard problem took scientific method, practical craft, linguistic knowledge and a measure of luck together, not any one of them alone. It also took several people working on the same puzzle and building on one another's findings before the final leap became possible.
When the person who finds the evidence keeps it from others until they can publish their own answer, everyone else's work stalls. Here a find of over a thousand inscribed tablets sat largely closed to outside scholars for decades, and the solution came about fifty years after the discovery.
An unknown script can be broken without a side-by-side translation by charting its internal patterns before guessing any sounds or language. Spotting sets of three words that share a root but change their endings showed how the language bent its words. That structural map became the key to the decipherment.
History tends to credit whoever makes the last deductive leap and to overlook the person whose groundwork made it possible. The researcher who laid the foundation may have been close to solving the puzzle herself, and dying first erased her from the standard story. Restoring the record means spreading credit across the whole chain of contributors.
Some breakthroughs depend on someone treating slow, exacting cataloguing as a sacred duty and keeping at it through scarcity. When paper ran short she built her card files from scrap materials such as cigarette cartons and hymn sheets. That steady rigor made her the person insiders would have bet on to solve the puzzle.