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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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.
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