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

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.