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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