Decipherment
Although humans have been writing for at least
5,000 years, many scripts have stopped being used and as use of
them has died away, so has the knowledge enabling us to read them.
This has resulted in many ancient writing systems - and some more
recent ones – either being lost to us completely, or for hundreds
and in some cases, thousands of years.
Hieroglyphs
Knowledge of how to read and write Egyptian
hieroglyphs had been lost for hundreds of years when scholars in
Europe from the Renaissance on attempted to decipher them. It was
thought they would reveal the mystical wisdom of ancient
Egyptian priests.
The Rosetta Stone, a stela found in Egypt in
1799 by soldiers from Napoleon’s army, was the key to deciphering
hieroglyphs. The stone is inscribed with a decree passed by a
council of priests that affirms the royal cult of the 13-year-old
Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. The
inscription is written in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly
decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and
Greek (the language of the administration).
Being bilingual, the
Rosetta Stone sparked huge excitement among scholars attempting to
crack the code of hieroglyphs. A lot of work was done and some
hugely inaccurate translations made, but the major steps were taken
towards a decipherment by English physicist, Thomas Young
(1773-1829).
Young discovered that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta
Stone wrote the sounds of names, including Ptolemy. However, he
believed the script only used sound, or phonetic, signs in special
case
s, such as foreign names and was mostly
symbolic.
French scholar Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) took the
next step. He studied a number of new inscriptions that came to
light and recorded names that he was able to identify as
representing sounds. From there he was able to prove that
hieroglyphs were not simply pictures, but recorded the sound of the
Egyptian language. By cracking this code Champollion made it
possible to reveal the history and culture of ancient Egypt.
Cuneiform
The decipherment of cuneiform began in the eighteenth century as
European scholars searched for proof of the places and events
recorded in the Bible. Travellers, antiquaries and some of the
earliest archaeologists visited the ancient Near East where they
uncovered great cities such as Nineveh. They brought back a range
of artefacts, including thousands of clay tablets covered in
cuneiform.
Scholars began the incredibly difficult job of trying to
decipher these strange signs representing languages no-one had
heard for thousands of years. Gradually the cuneiform signs
representing these different languages were deciphered thanks to
the work of a number of dedicated people.
Confirmation that they had succeeded came
in 1857. The Royal Asiatic Society sent copies of a newly
found clay record of the military and hunting achievements of
King Tiglath-pileser I (reigned 1114-1076 BC) to four scholars,
Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, Edward Hincks, Julius Oppert and William
H. Fox Talbot. They each worked independently and returned
translations that broadly agreed with each other.
This was accepted as proof that cuneiform had
been successfully deciphered, but there are still elements that we
don’t completely understand and the study continues. What we have
been able to read, however, has opened up the ancient world of
Mesopotamia. It has not only revealed information about trade,
building and government, but also great works of literature,
history and everyday life in the region.
Mayan glyphs
Despite being first identified as a writing system in
the nineteenth century, it took until the
mid-twentieth century to decipher Maya hieroglyphs.
In the 1950s it was discovered that the script combined signs
representing whole words with signs representing syllables. Certain
glyphs were recognized as naming specific people and cities (known
as Name Glyphs and Emblem Glyphs respectively). However, only
around 85% of known Maya glyphs can now be read.
Stories yet to be told
Other ancient scripts yet to be fully
deciphered include that of the Indus Valley civilisation, which
flourished in modern northwest India and Pakistan from around 2600
to 1900 BC. Among its achievements is a script that appears on seal
stones, pottery, copper tablets, bronze implements and ivory and
bon
e rods.
Around 400 different signs have been
catalogued so far, but after more than 80 years of study, the
script has not been successfully deciphered and neither has the
language it represents.
The rongorongo script, believed to
have developed on Easter Island in Polynesia, has also not been
deciphered. A number of scholars have tried to decipher it but
no-one has been completely successful.
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