Ex. The Iliad was said to have been written in around 7 BC before the creation of the modern Latin alphabet. How did we, for example, decipher and give the word “Trojans” to name the people who were fighting off the Greek armies? Is it just some word we made up and then assigned?
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Well in most cases with ancient languages there isn’t very much deciphering really necessary. The Iliad was written before the development of the modern Latin alphabet, but there were earlier alphabets available at the time. The Romans knew how to spell “Troia” in Latin and knew how to pronounce it, because many of them knew how to spell and pronounce “Τροία” in greek. And the Greeks knew that that city had been called such likely because that’s what the local people called it – there are Hittite records of a settlement called “truwisa”. And if the scribes who were copying *The Iliad* were ever unsure of how to pronounce Troia, they could consult a Greek grammar book, which had been around then for centuries.
So what that example illustrates is that there really just has been a continuity of knowledge going back all the way. The (maybe slightly boring) answer that for most stuff, no deciphering or assigning of names was ever necessary, people have just known the whole time
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