The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script

How do people decipher old scripts? As a person with very badly legible handwriting I have always been interested in how scripts are deciphered. For the case of my handwriting I learned about how it is done from people who told me. Assume a letter has to be deciphered. First of all, the language I use is known to people who try to read the letter. I was told people usually start with words they can read or words which are obvious. From those, they seem to get an understanding of how characters are written. The knowledge of these characters then helps them to decipher other words and to learn more and more characters. Quite obviously, deciphering Egyptian or Maya script is somewhat different from this. Apart from the fact, that my hand writing is not nearly as beautiful as, say, old Maya script, there seems to be the language problem: The person who tries to decipher Maya script does not speak the language of the Mayas.

Or so I thought. However, after reading this book I was amazed about how similar the decipherment of my handwriting and of, say, Maya script is. As it turns out, the language of the script has to be known! That came as a surprise to me when I started to read the book. How would anybody know the language of ancient Egypt? As it turns out, in many cases, old languages survived or are the progenitors of languages known today. In the case of Egyptian, there is a language called Coptic which is still spoken today and which is very close to ancient Egyptian. In addition, the decipherment is very often made much easier by documents which contain the same text in more than one language. Pope's book explains in very nice details how the knowledge of Coptic and the existence of the so-called Rosetta Stone made the decipherement of Egyptian hieroglyphs possible. In a similar fashion, he talks about many other old scripts like Linear B, Cuneiform etc.

In my opinion, the book has a few small flaws, though. First of all, the first chapter which deals with older ideas of what Egyptian hieroglyphs might mean is incredibly boring because it is so repetitive. In addition, Pope mentions many and in fact too many contributors of the decipherement of any of the language so that the reader (or at least me) is left somewhat confused about who did what etc. But these flaws are really only minor and if I could I'd give this book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.