Let’s say you’re travelling throughout a land filled with ancient ruins, when you stop to
look at one. You decide to go in and explore one of these ruins and in there you find something,
something interesting… a mysterious inscription. You really want to know what it means,
but even though it looks an awful lot like writing you don’t know what it says,
and you don’t even recognize the script it‘s written in, what do you do now?
Writing is arguably one of the most important inventions in the history of humanity. Even if
you have the metaphorical memory of an elephant, writing allows ideas to be stored and passed down
to readers days, months, years, even millennia into the future. But there’s a catch with writing:
those future people need to still be able to understand the symbols you wrote in the first
place. Countless geopolitical forces cause languages to shift, mutate, change writing
systems, and die off, and as a result many of the world’s writing systems have been simply forgotten
and have become unreadable to modern eyes. However, some of these scripts have been
deciphered and demystified and are now readable once again, so how do you make
an old forgotten script readable again if the last person who knew how to read it is long gone?
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Let’s go back to our intrepid explorer. Let’s say they have a bit of a thing for languages
and decides to learn a little bit more about these markings, writing down what they look
like and rushing back, excited to try to find out more about this lost ancient script. But…
it’s not quite that simple, and unbeknownst to our determined researcher, this project would in fact
end up taking more than 300 years to complete. Wait, what?
Deciphering a long forgotten writing system, especially if you don’t have any big rocks
nearby providing translations, can be extremely hard, and in some cases likely even impossible.
The Rongorongo script of Easter Island for instance is famous for having never
been deciphered, and probably won’t be for quite some time due to a variety of factors,
but it is still possible to transliterate some other scripts. Cuneiform for example, the oldest
writing system in the world, has been successfully deciphered through a long and laborious process.
So what we should really be asking is what separates the Rongorongo scripts
of the world from the cuneiform scripts of our world? Or in other words, instead of
asking how you decipher a script, maybe ask if a script is decipher*able* in the first place.
Perhaps I can better illustrate this to you with a story… Long ago (like, as long ago as a written
story can realistically go) cuneiform was likely the first form of writing ever used by humans,
used from the end of the Copper Age to fading from use in around the 1st century AD, and yet
afterwards it was completely forgotten for nearly 2 millennia. A… less long time ago, European and
Arab travelers in the 17th and 18th centuries regularly passed through the ancient Persian city
of Persepolis, where they noticed some strange inscriptions in the clay tablets, all made of
these different wedge shapes, or cunei-forms. 17th century travelers Antonio de Gouvea and Sir
Thomas Herbert, although they didn’t attempt to decipher the scripts, did discern that the script
was written from left-to-right, and represented words and syllables rather than individual sounds.
Writing systems don’t just vary in how they represent sounds, or what sounds they represent
at all, but also in how they’re structured. I’ve already talked about this in past videos so I
won’t take too long, but while we might call it de-ciphering, deciphering a writing system isn’t
like decrypting some sort of code where this letter means A, this means B, and this means C,
because a script might not have an equivalent to C, or maybe it’s an abjad that doesn’t write
vowels at all, or maybe it’s logographic like Chinese and what’s being written actually has
little relation to what’s being spoken out loud. One trick you can use to determine what kind
of a script it is though is to simply count how many unique characters you see.
If it only has a handful it’s probably an abjad, if there are a few more it’s probably an alphabet,
add some more and it could be a syllabary, and finally if it has hundreds or even thousands
of unique characters it could be a logography. There are some problems with this method though,
for one what do you count as a unique character? Are these two glyphs two different characters
or the same character written in two different ways? So it might be a good start in some cases,
but don’t expect it to get you too far. Context and quantity however
also matter. It doesn‘t help much if you just have a couple random slabs,
as is the case with Rongorongo, of which we only have a few random inscriptions,
making it extremely hard to decipher with any sort of context. When deciphering an ancient
text you kind of need as much help as you can get. For instance, a tombstone might have a
name or a set of dates or an epitaph or a warning to passers by, but probably not much else, though
this all depends on how the culture in question treated death and how important that person was.
Back to our story, in 1767 Carsten Niebuhr brought copies of the inscriptions he found
back with him to Europe, where he identified three different versions of cuneiform,
Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite, finding Old Persian to be the easiest. He identified 42
different symbols in the script, suggesting that it was likely alphabetic in some form. In 1798
Oluf Gerhard Tychsen studied Niebuhr’s findings, noting that this slanted wedge must have been a
sort of divider between words, and also noted this frequently recurring series of seven characters.
Where he fell short however was attributing the inscriptions to kings from the Parthian Empire,
instead of the earlier Achaemenid Empire as Bishop Friedrich Münter posited (which is a historical
difference of about 500 years… basically he was thinking of the wrong names). Improving
on Tychsen’s work, Münter-- noticing how often the word appeared at the beginning of a sentence,
and how little it changed despite how often it appeared-- suggested that it must an honorific
of some kind referring to a king, or a king of kings. He guessed that the word would have
been pronounced KH-SHA-A-YA-TH-I-YA, a word relating to words like the Sanskrit kṣatra,
meaning “power” or “command”, as in the Hindu ruler caste known as the Kshatriya (I’m sorry,
it’s been several years and I still get a kick out of seeing words and languages related to
each-other in this way). Georg Friedrich Grotefend also noted that the full sequence
(if later inscriptions were to be trusted) should go king’s name, plus “great king, king of kings”,
plus the king’s father. Noting that one of the kings’ fathers did not have the title ‘king’,
Grotefend correctly guessed that this one sentence would have referred to King Darius
I and his non-king father Hystaspes-- or Dâryavuš and his father Vishtaspa. As such,
he was able to translate this sentence as, "Darius the Great King, King of Kings, King of countries,
son of Hystaspes, an Achaemenian, who built this Palace", and from there also found names like
Xerxes, and Cyrus, and Cambyses, all without actually knowing the Persian language himself.
With more contributions from various other French and German philologists, Old Persian
cuneiform had been deciphered, revealing itself to be semi-syllabary. Though the academic community
was at first skeptical of Grotefend’s findings, however in 1823 the bilingual Caylus vase,
which had been dedicated to Xerxes I in both Old Persian cuneiform and the also recently deciphered
Egyptian hieroglyphs, gave them the chance to confirm what Grotefend had essentially found
through guesswork. Unsurprisingly, these findings also helped decipher Elamite and
Akkadian cuneiform-- despite these languages using the script as a syllabary or a logography,
or even both at the same time-- largely with help from the trilingual Behistun Inscription.
Despite how hard it was to gather enough samples of cuneiform-- with some tablets
fragmented and spread across multiple continents,
or having been dug up illegally so that they couldn’t be properly cataloged--
deciphering the different forms of cuneiform has given us a treasure trove of knowledge
of some of our earliest civilizations, including a 4,500-year old version of the Biblical Flood,
describing Noah as a Sumerian named Utnapishtim. --But that was all after several decades of pure
hard work by multiple explorers and linguists, it wasn’t like one day any one of them had a
sudden epiphany like… *toaster pops* Oh my god it’s so clear now! I know everything!
Now, owing to their extremely long history and widespread use across Mesopotamia, even
going into modern-day Turkey and Iran, cuneiform inscriptions are not exactly rare to come by,
especially in context, which isn’t exactly a luxury we have with all undeciphered scripts.
So what other scripts are there still to decipher? Well, if you really want to have a crack at it,
there’s Vinča/Old European, Indus/Harappa script, Proto-Elamite, Old Elamite, Linear A,
the Phaistos Disk, the Voynich Manuscript, Rohonc Codex, and of course Rongorongo.
Just, please note that not all of these scripts will be quite so friendly to being deciphered.
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