eli5: How did philologists (people who study ancient languages) learn to decipher ancient texts, if there was no understandable translation available upon discovery?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.