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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Translators have been a thing ever since the origin of trade. If you were engaging in commerce with people who spoke a different language than you did, you needed a way to communicate. Many of the translators wrote translations down, or wrote documents in two languages for various purposes and those documents allow for a foundation to build modern translations.
For example, if a man who speaks greek is selling to a man who speaks latin, the manifest of the shipment will likely need the name of the goods written in _both_ languages so both men understand what is being traded. If you speak greek but not latin, reading that document will help you learn a few latin words.
Take for example the famous Rosetta Stone. It was a written decree from the Egyptian priests that was deemed so important that it was written identically in _three_ languages on the stone. One of those languages was ancient hieroglyphics which we could not read, but another was ancient greek which we _could_ read. That document allowed us to determine what the hieroglyphics at the top said and gave us the beginnings of translation.
From there, you just begin filling in the rest from context clues and other historical documents.
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