Glyphbreaker

... or hero. This book is on the border between very serious research and pure invention. It is exciting to read Fischer's claims, well knowing that he may be completely wrong. Just like when you read a detective novel, the reader can repeatedly ask himself: "does that argument hold?", "what if it's like this instead?" or "why didn't anyone think about that before?" No one can deny that Fischer spent a lot of energy and thought on the effort to decypher the Faistos disk, and following his thoughts is as intriguing as reading Agatha Christie. Between Fischer's sometimes questionable conclusion there are plenty of interesting facts about history, culture and language of the Antiqity. His style is easy to follow and captivating, regardless of if his result is the final truth (which he thinks himself) or just imagination (which I tend to hold).

If this book had been published as fiction, I would have given it five stars.

Fischer claims to have deciphered two of the remaining undeciphered ancient scripts. However, while he might have sacrificed a lot in his efforts, the results are not convincing. The Phaestos disk has been the subject of many decipherment attempts. The Phaestos disk homepage alone lists 39 such endeavours. Fischer's methods are more scientific than most of the others, but ultimately not much more persuasive. The glaring flaw in his method is that he does not have enough checks to eliminate bad assumptions. With a text as short as the Phaestos Disk, if you make enough assumptions you can get a legible text in whatever language you want. That is exactly what is presented in Glyphbreaker. Fischer has studied the Easter Island script extensively, and thus brings a wealth of knowledge to his discussion of that script. However, his proposal is certainly not a true decipherment and the jury remains out on its validity.

Fischer's claim that he has deciphered two scripts makes for an interesting story. The man has certainly suffered personal trials and professional disappointments which would discourage most - as he himself repeatedly lets the reader know. I cannot judge his claim concerning the Easter Island script, but his supposed decipherment of the Phaistos Disk, though it starts out with promise, finishes with unsupportable and highly speculative leaps of linguistic logic. The fact that he can only bring forth a non-specialist National Geographic editor as a supporter should make anyone wary of accepting his conclusions. His repeated comparisons of himself with Michael Ventris, the amateur who deciphered Linear B, are painfully self-serving. His story of having his decipherment rejected by John Chadwick because Chadwick wasn't open to Fischer's ground-breaking results due to old-school conservatism is a telling passage. I think Chadwick, who championed Ventris against the scholarly establishment, rejected Fischer's ideas for the simple reason that they are unconvincing.

Writing about breaking the Japanese NL military code before World War II, Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton said "...only two hundred intercepts (messages) were ever made, a totally inadequate number for the penetration of any cipher system."

I recalled this as I read "Glyph Breaker" by Steven Roger Fischer. Fischer, using but a single example (intercept) of a Minoan clay disk containing a mere 241 pictorial symbols, managed to decipher the script as an ancient call to arms. Glyph Breaker is Fischer's story of how he deciphered this and also the enigmatic Rapanui script of Easter Island, Rongorongo.

To decipher the Phiastos Disk, Fischer had to overcome a terrible problem. He knew in advance neither what the various characters on the disk represented, nor what was the underlying language. In contrast, military code breakers generally know the underlying language, even if encryption makes it unreadable. A comparable example is using Navajo as a code during WWII, a language the Japanese neither understood, identified or ever deciphered. Thus, encryption of an unknown language makes a devilish problem.

How Fischer set about deciphering the disk makes not only an interesting story in itself, but is a superb example of science in practice. He began with an internal analysis of the symbols and their order; that is, with the information content of the message. In this endeavor Fischer was lucky to have a long and complete text sequence. The 241 characters of the Phiastos Disk may not seem long, but it is longer than any comparable text in the collection of 57,000 Linear B (Mycenean) glyphs. Virtually the lot of these consisted of accounting for stores of goods, and took Michael Ventris five years to decipher. The sample texts of the as yet undeciphered Minoan Linear A script are even shorter. The entire 7,000 glyph collection of which consists of short accounting marks, dedications, and manufacturer's marks. Deciphering Linear A is like trying to reconstruct English from credit card r! eceipts and coffee cups.

Once the internal analysis yielded what it could, Fischer then placed the message in a context. This means simply a guess at the point of origin of the Phiastos Disk, but this was not easy to do. For decades scholars had argued that the disk was not a Minoan work, despite being found in a Minoan Palace. Some even speculated that the Minoans themselves were not Indo-European. Fischer guessed that the disk was indeed Minoan. Whatever language they may have spoken, Minoans would certainly reflect influences of their neighbors by making reference to local places and tribes.

Recognizing tribal and place names gave Fischer not only the essential clues for breaking the code, but also provided tests of the decipherment. This general decipher method works because the evolution and succession of languages leaves proper names recognizable. To a linguist familiar with the underlying language of a text, proper names stand out as glaring anomalies. Layton, for example, in breaking the Japanese Weh Weh code found "P" sounds appearing in un-Japanese positions in encrypted words that proved to be Palau and Ponape. In the case of the Rosetta Stone, the most famous of decipherments, the English physicist and physician Thomas (Phenomenon) Young surmised that oval enclosed sections of text were the proper names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Champollion used this as his point of departure.

Fischer is a linguist, a discipline absolutely essential for the decipherment of ancient texts or military codes. Indeed, Champollion brought to the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone a natural gift for languages. By age 16 he had mastered 6 ancient oriental languages as well as Latin and Greek. Likewise Fischer is a language connoisseur. He learned Japanese while living in Okinawa at age 11. Soon thereafter he discovered French then Russian then German and so forth. He used comparisons among some 20 languages alone to decipher the disk.

Thus, clues for decipherment come from both history and linguistic! s. Sometimes, however, the key to decipherment comes not from these typical sources, and thus lies unnoticed for generations. Rongorongo script, for instance, was sung for American ethnographers by a Rapanui steward on a stormy night in 1886. The steward fabricated some of his readings but in one instance he recreated the true structure of Rongorongo inscription. This key to later decipherment lay unrecognized for 100 years, even though later Rapanui identified this particular chant as authentic.

Fischer's insight was to recognize the structure of the authentic chant in one Rongorongo script called the Santiago Staff. Without this insight the decipherment of Rongorongo might not have happened; for Rongorongo has no related scripts, it is the only indigenous form of Polynesian writing; and the underlying language, Rapanui, is no longer spoken. None of the strategy that Fischer used to decipher the Phiastos Disk would work here. Adding to this difficulty was the encyclopedia of speculation and nonsense that grew up around Rongorongo.

Fischer also had a bit of serendipity. Among all the world's surviving examples of Rongorongo, only one, the Santiago Staff, uses the vertical dividers in the text which helped Fischer recognize the chant. Like Pasteur, Fischer sees that chance favors the prepared mind. He had thoroughly immersed himself in Polynesian culture and mindset for seven years. Indeed, he already spoke numerous Polynesian languages and had compiled a Polynesian dictionary.

Someone once described code breaking as requiring medieval patience, and I almost expected a story about decipherment to require the same to read. Fortunately Fischer is a good, albeit scholarly, writer. In Glyph Breaker he shares personal disappointments, financial hardships, and exhilarating achievements, over the fifteen years that these two decipherments required. He weaves historical detail and anecdotes into his story at appropriate places, and never dwells too long on the arcane details of breaking the codes. He offers ! humor and even plays on words to add interest. The book keeps pace to maintain a readers interest.

There is no question that the author is a genius; what else might one reasonably call a person who has broken two previously undeciphered scripts, in unknown languages?

This book is a very popularized account of what was done. Hopefully, it will stir a few people to become interested in the subject. While I'm happy to have the insights into the author's personal travails and triumphs, I could wish that there had been a bit more technical information in the book.