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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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.
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