For instance hieroglyphs or other symbol based languages. How did we find out what those symbols mean, when we’ve got nothing to compare them to?
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First of all, it’s important to distinguish between languages and writing systems. Many languages don’t have a writing system, and some have more than one.
For writing systems to be deciphered, you really do need something to compare them to – either a similar writing system, or contextual clues that can tell you what some of the text means. For example, take Linear B. People could tell from its overall structure, comparing it to other known writing systems, that each letter represented a specific syllable. Then they noticed that some words seemed to be specific to tablets from certain locations. They then started making educated guesses that these words represented known place names. When they made the correct guesses, everything else started falling into place like in one of those codeword puzzles, as many of the other words became recognisable as known Ancient Greek words.
In contrast, a similar writing system from the same region, called Linear A, is still completely undeciphered.
If you don’t have a writing system, the main thing you can do is called comparative reconstruction, where you compare languages that are both descended from the same ancient language, notice things they have in common and reconstruct a rough estimate of what the ancient language must have been like. For example, there is a large class of languages, mostly from Europe and India, called the Indo-European languages (including English, French, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Bengali, etc.), which have so many similarities that they evidently have a common origin. Linguists have been able to look at the differences and similarities between these languages to piece together a very rough approximation of an ancient language called Proto-Indo-European, even though no writing has survived from this language and nobody is even exactly sure where its speakers lived.
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