Edit: I mean decipher. Sorry for any misunderstanding.
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Well, usually there is a corpus of work, and a lot of ancient languages are related to modern ones, so you can start to piece together what individual words might mean and go from there.
If you are very lucky, you will have access to an out-and-out translation between a known language and unknown, an equivalent body of text in two languages. This is what happened with the famous “Rosetta Stone”, which had the same proclomation written in two forms of Ancient Egyptian as well as Ancient Greek. Scholars at the time didn’t know how to decode Ancient Egyptian, but Ancient Greek had been well-studied for centuries.
You can also “reconstruct” a language surprisingly well with the comparative method, given enough of its descendants. This is how we know the likely pronunciations of things in PIE, or Proto-indo-european, an ancient unattested language initially reconstructed from Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin. We know this works to some degree, because you can use this method on the Romance languages and get something that pretty strongly resembles Late Vulgar Latin.
It is worth noting that sometimes we don’t, though. Things like Linear A, Cypro-Minoan, the Kretan Heiroglyphs… we still don’t understand all the intricacies of the Quipu system used by the pre-conquest Inca. There are plenty of times historians and linguists DON’T figure it out, those are just less interesting stories.
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