How did people manage to decipher/translate writings from long lost age? For example, text from Mesopotamian era or Ancient Egypt.
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For Egypt, scholars used the [Rosetta Stone.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone)
>The Rosetta Stone is a stele composed of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. The decree has only minor differences between the three versions, making the Rosetta Stone key to deciphering the Egyptian scripts.
If no translation exists, they basically can’t. For a long time, Egyptian hieroglyphics were indecipherable to modern people. But then some archaeologists got lucky and found the Rosetta Stone, which was an ancient tablet that contained a piece of text repeated in three different languages. Archaeologists understood two of the languages, and the third was Egyptian hieroglyphs, so this was the *key* for them to finally discover what a ton of those hieroglyphs actually mean, because they finally had an already-translated text to show them.
But if no such translation exists for an ancient language, then we’re usually out of luck. For example, the Indus Valley Civilization 4,000 years ago had a writing system, but modern scientists have not really been able to crack it, it’s still a mystery what the various writings and inscriptions say.
The easiest way is to find the same thing written in two different languages. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a common one because of how old it is.
The Rosetta stone was a document that was written in Greek, Hieroglyphics, and Egyptian (the language of the commoners) and we had only deciphered Greek at the time, so it allowed us to unlock the other languages.
Some languages we still haven’t deciphered. Linear A (an ancient Greek language) hasn’t been deciphered because we haven’t found enough of it. Linear B (the successor to Linear A after the Greek dark age) has been deciphered because we have so much more of it and other things to compare it to.
I have always wondered if people ever just declare they’ve deciphered it and then just make up the results. Lol
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