How archaeologists decipher languages that don’t exist anymore?
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Very poorly. It’s best when you have a text with some similar words or a text which is understood because the same story has been passed down orally along with the text. From this you might be able to identify certain things. Like a kings name for example. Then you can assume the word for king if it always comes before that name. You can take letters and apply them to other words and you start to get an alphabet. Then words and so on.
Often this is impossible because the ancient language you are trying to decipher was only from a small area a few thousand years ago. Maybe only ten thousand people could speak it and it could have been a secondary language. If the people died out or were taken over by a larger community a new language would be adapted. Give it a few generations and no one has any idea what they hell their ancestors wrote.
Add to the fact people didn’t travel as far in the past and rarely learned other languages beyond conversational outside of a few professions/classes. A lot gets lost quickly. Anything written down was also written by an educated person who were far fewer in the past. If only a hundred people in your city could write and the Mongols strolled through any tablets would just be gibberish.
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