tour 1 of 22
Enlightenment: Ancient Scripts
Enlightenment: Ancient Scripts
During the Enlightenment, people studied ancient scripts in
order to understand the histories of ancient and modern
civilizations.
European scholars had been collecting and studying inscriptions
and early manuscripts for several centuries. Their Enlightenment
successors built on this work. Much of their work was inspired by
the Bible as a historical source, which led to important new
research in the Near East. Attempts to prove the truth of Biblical
accounts such as that of the Tower of Babel and the destruction of
Nineveh, for instance, resulted in the discoveries of these ancient
cities. In the early nineteenth century, major breakthroughs
occurred when Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Assyrian cuneiform
were finally deciphered. Other writing systems, such as glyphs from
Central America, proved much harder to decipher.
At the same time, scholars were studying languages and texts
from living cultures in order to understand how those cultures had
developed and how different civilizations might relate to each
other.
This is one of several tours exploring the themes of the British
Museum's new gallery, Enlightenment: Discovering the World
in the Eighteenth Century.
Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund