Decipherment Explained

In philology, decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of texts written in ancient or obscure languages or scripts.^[1]

Ancient languages

In a few cases, a multilingual artifact has been necessary to facilitate decipherment, the Rosetta Stone being the classic example. Statistical techniques provide another pathway to decipherment, as does the analysis of modern languages derived from ancient languages in which undeciphered texts are written. Archaeological and historical information is helpful in verifying hypothesized decipherments.

Decipherers

Name of scholar	Script deciphered	Date
Magnus Celsius	Staveless Runes	1674
Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík	Cipher runes	1740s
Jean-Jacques Barthélemy	Palmyrene alphabet	1754
Jean-Jacques Barthélemy	Phoenician alphabet	1758
Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy	Pahlavi script	1791
Jean-François Champollion	Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Decipherment)	1822
Georg Friedrich Grotefend, Eugène Burnouf, and Henry Rawlinson	Old Persian Cuneiform (Decipherment)	1823
Thomas Young	Demotic script
Manuel Gómez-Moreno	Northeastern Iberian script
James Prinsep	Brahmi, Kharosthi
Edward Hincks	Mesopotamian Cuneiform
Bedřich Hrozný	Hittite Cuneiform
Vilhelm Thomsen	Old Turkic
George Smith and Samuel Birch, et al.^[2]	Cypriot syllabary
Hans Bauer and Édouard Paul Dhorme^[3]	Ugaritic alphabet
Wáng Yìróng, Liú È, Sūn Yíràng, et al.	Oracle Bone script
Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky, et al.	Tangut script
Michael Ventris, John Chadwick, and Alice Kober	Linear B
Yuri Knorozov and Tatiana Proskouriakoff, et al.	Maya
Louis Félicien de Saulcy	Libyco-Berber script (almost fully)
Jan-Olof Tjäder	"Enlarged opening script" of Ravenna (variant of the Latin alphabet)
Zaza Alexidze	Caucasian Albanian alphabet
François Desset^[4]	Linear Elamite

See also

Deciphered scripts

• Cuneiform
• Egyptian hieroglyphs
• Kharoshthi
• Linear B
• Mayan
• Staveless Runes
• Cypriot Syllabary

Undeciphered scripts

• Rongorongo (Decipherment of rongorongo)
• Indus script
• Cretan hieroglyphs
• Byblos syllabary
• Linear A
• Linear Elamite
• Cypro-Minoan syllabary
• Espanca
• Numidian language

Undeciphered texts

• Phaistos Disc
• Rohonc Codex
• Voynich Manuscript

Notes and References

1. Trask, R.L (2000). The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, p. 82 ("The process of determining the relation between an extinct and unknown writing system and the language it represents. Strictly, decipherment is the elucidation of the script—that is, determining the values of the written characters")
2. Web site: Cypro-Syllabic.
3. "Anatomy of a Decipherment", http://images.library.wisc.edu/WI/EFacs/transactions/WT1966/reference/wi.wt1966.adcorre.pdf"
4. Web site: Breaking the Code (Francois Desset, Padua) - YouTube. https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211211/gGrDXbPaYyE. 2021-12-11 . live. 2021-01-04. www.youtube.com.