To me it seems like this would be similar to trying to learn to read Chinese with absolutely no access to any educational materials/teachers.
In: 5
they investigate it using historic record, example, theres this weird simbol that they name the “kakapo” symbol, the don’t know what they mean, so they start looking for it in different texts, so they find it in a plants book, then in a medicine book, so they deduce it hss something to do with a medicinal plant, but which one?, so they look where that symbol sppesrs the most and find coincidences for the plant depicted in the symbol and in a possible ilistration, snd thats how they kniw the kakapo symbol means peyote
One example is [the Rosetta Stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone). It had a text in multiple languages, therefore it was possible to decipher them from one another.
Also, some languages have continued through the centuries and evolved into other languages. For instance Latin is the precursor of modern Italian, and Ancient Greek the precursor of modern Greek.
Two ways: 1 finding cases where it’s translated into another language, that’s why the rosetta stone was such a big deal, it had several languages all saying the same thing on it, one of which was ancient greek, which we already knew so they could use that translation to work backwards.
The other way, is what another commenter said, you look at where words pop up, if you keep seeing a word show up on things at greengrocers and farms, it’s probably a plant of some kind.
And once you know a few words it starts to become possible to work out the others through context.
Find a bilingual text and work back from known languages. So the Rosetta stone had texts in koine Greek (well known), Egyptian demotic and Egyptian hieroglyphic. Champollion was confident the liturgical Coptic used in Egyptian churches was descended from the older Egyptian language, and used that a textual cues (like the enclosure of royal names in a cartouche in hieroglyphic) to start deciphering. Likewise, the Behistun inscription is in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian cuneiform. Old Persian is cognate to later forms of Persian and to related Indo-European languages (eg Sanskrit), and the formula for royal names followed a pattern (x, son of y, son of z, the Achaemenid). Scribes in Babylonia compiled word-lists giving translations from Babylonian into Sumerian or Elamite or Hittite or Hurrian, and monuments were often bi- or tri-lingual. For Mayan, Knorozov worked off the current languages plus the insight that it was syllabic. If you have no idea of the language and no bilingual text, you are stuffed – as is the case for Minoan Linear A or the Indus Valley script.
I just read “The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone” by Edward Dolnick. It was such a good book! I highly recommend it. Very easy to read and very entertaining.
It’s perfect for addressing your question.
Ancient languages are (almost always) related to modern languages. So it can be like trying to read Italian when you have a Spanish dictionary (of course this is simplified). The difficulty comes in when it’s written in a script you don’t know, but even here, you can use this idea of ‘comparing to related systems’. Ancient scripts are often related to scripts used for other languages. As an example, (variants of) cuneiform were used to write Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite (among others), and all these three were very different languages! But, if you know how to read one of the languages, you have a good idea what sounds the symbols could represent when they’re used to write one of the other languages. Sometimes there are also keys where we get a name of a famous king written in multiple languages – this is great because if we know how this name is pronounced, we immediately know a lot about the pronunciation of the symbols in each of the languages.
None of this is simple – we only have fragmentary evidence of many languages, and scripts can be devilishly complicated – for instance, Hittite used a system where each cuneiform symbol represented a single syllable. But there were several symbols representing the same syllable, and also sometimes they would use a symbol as a ‘loan’ from Akkadian or Sumerian, and it’d represent a complete word. Not to mention the fact that these languages changed over time – if you compare a text from 1600 BCe to one from 1200 BCe, they don’t write things the same, just like it’s hard for you to read books written in 1700.
Additional method, Linear B, some of it was figuring out some of the characters were pictograms some of the time. Some more from the context but a lot was statistical analysis to figure out if there was related languages that can be translated.
Great podcast on the jordan harbinger shower about this! On spotify labled “finiding the wprlds great secrets, how?” I believe it gives you a lot of wonderful insight. The chinese language actually helped a bit in deciphering egytptisn hieroglyphics
Latest Answers