Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts

"Yes, this is a fun book. Again, I chose it because it’s very accessible. My shorthand title for this book is ‘the pantheon of decipherers’ because Robinson focuses so insistently on the impassioned geniuses at the centre of various decipherments. If you want stories about heroes, here they are. Robinson begins by outlining three successful decipherments: the decipherment of hieroglyphics, the decipherment of Linear B, the script used in the Bronze Age by the Mycenaean Greeks, and the decipherment of the Mayan glyphs. In the rest of the book Robinson goes on to talk about decipherments that haven’t been successful and scripts that haven’t yet been deciphered: Linear A, the ancient Mesoamerican script called Zapotec, and Rongorongo, the Easter Island script, just to name a few that he goes through. It’s really a book for people who love not necessarily the history of any particular decipherment, but the idea of decipherment as a code-cracking exercise. I’m one of those people. I love crossword puzzles, figuring out all the clues and getting the whole puzzle exactly right. And this is a book that very much celebrates that impulse. Often that’s the issue, that there just isn’t enough text to go on. In the successful decipherments, someone has usually figured out a phonetic key to part of the system and from there things start to fall into place. This was certainly the case with the Mayan glyphs, which were impenetrable until Yuri Knorozov, a Russian, really hit upon the phonetic backing to that script and used that to rebuild this whole set of ideas that gave rise to the decipherment of the Mayan glyphs. “I was up at 4am every morning for a good long time learning Coptic” For hieroglyphs the story is similar, as Champollion began his career by using Coptic to chip away at some of the mysteries presented by the ancient Egyptian scripts. As I said, Coptic is this late form of Egyptian, and so he canvassed Coptic sources from late antiquity, looking for Coptic words for ordinary things, like a lotus or a viper. Then he knew the sound that went with that concept and could then take that information and feed it back into what he knew about the hieroglyphic script and see if he could find correspondences that could then be enlarged upon and extended through a larger body of of inscriptions. He wound up with whole notebooks devoted to Coptic words, at times correlated to elements of the various ancient Egyptian scripts. Coptic permitted him to generate theories that he could then test on new inscriptional material. But this engagement with Coptic wasn’t the end of his investigations. Rather, it provided a point of departure for work he did some years later that led directly to the decipherment, as we discuss in our book ."