DeciphermentPETER T. DANIELS

Decipherment is interpreting unknown

characters of a script to yield texts that can be

interpreted as a known or hitherto unknown

language.

Theoretical preliminaries to decipherment

were laid out by none other than the philoso-

pher GottfriedWilhelm Leibniz in 1714, but the

one pretheoretic essential is accurate reproduc-

tions of unfamiliar inscriptions. In a few lucky

cases, ancient scribes created bilingual texts, in

which content is duplicated or paraphrased

in known and unidentified languages; more

often, scholars must seek a virtual bilingual,

some content – usually personal or place

names – that can plausibly be identified within

the text on external grounds. The two deci-

pherments of Greek-language scripts exem-

plify the two types.

The Cypriote script was identified from

numismatic examples in 1852, and an inscrip-

tion in Phoenician and “Cypriote” was found in

1869. Upon its publication in 1872, George

Smith correlated names and the repeated word

“king” in the Phoenician with sequences in the

Cypriote. He came to the important conclusion

that the script was a syllabary and guessed that

the language was Greek, but was unable to iden-

tifymost of the characters. It wasMoriz Schmidt

in 1874 who persevered and established correct

readings for almost all the characters, confirmed

the identity of the language, and, more impor-

tantly, read the other known texts using the

script (a criterion rendering most unlikely the

acceptance of any interpretation of the Phaistos

Disk, so long as it remains unique).

Linear B was discovered around the turn

of the twentieth century in Crete andmainland

Greece, but the texts (assumed to record a

language of pre-Greek inhabitants) went

largely unpublished for a long time; by 1945

Alice Kober could draw up tables that appeared

to show inflectional suffixes on a variety of

words, and upon her death Michael Ventris

systematized the increasing amount of mate-

rial, charting characters that appeared to begin

with the same consonant and end with differ-

ent vowels and vice versa, in “Work Notes”

circulated to scholars in 1951–2. He noticed

that certain character-sequences seemed to

occur only on tablets that came from specific

places and attempted to fit them to appropri-

ate toponyms from classical sources and mod-

ern gazetteers. This approach proved to yield

consistent readings. He then rather hesitantly

made an attempt to read the texts in Greek

using the values he had arrived at – and

found that he was looking at an early form of

Greek.

Other scripts deciphered using bilinguals

include the very first, Palmyrene (a form of

Aramaic), by Jean-Jacques Barthelemy in

1754; Egyptian hieroglyphs (the Rosetta

Stone does not itself bear enough information

for decipherment) by Jean-Francois Champol-

lion in 1822, building on an insight from

Thomas Young; andMesopotamian cuneiform

by Edward Hincks between 1846 and 1852.

Other scripts deciphered using virtual bilin-

guals include Persian cuneiform, by Georg

Friedrich Grotefend in 1802 (apparently

replicated independently by Henry Creswicke

Rawlinson in 1835–46); Ugaritic, indepen-

dently by Charles Virolleaud, Hans Bauer,

and Edouard Dhorme in 1930, each taking a

different approach; and Luwian hieroglyphs

(with contributions by many scholars

beginning about 1931).

SEE ALSO: Alphabets and scripts, ancient Near

East; Cuneiform; Hieroglyphs; Linear B.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Daniels, P. T. (1994) “Edward Hincks’s

decipherment of Mesopotamian cuneiform.”

In K. J. Cathcart, ed., The Edward Hincks

Bicentenary Lectures: 30–57. Dublin.

Daniels, P. T. (1995) “The decipherment of Near

Eastern scripts.” In J. M. Sasson et al., eds.,

The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, First Edition. Edited by Roger S. Bagnall, Kai Brodersen, Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine,

and Sabine R. Huebner, print pages 1949–1950.

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

DOI: 10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah01043

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Civilizations of the ancient Near East, vol. 1:

81–93. New York.

Daniels, P. T. (1996). “Methods of decipherment.”

In P. T. Daniels and W. Bright, eds., The world’s

writing systems: 141–59. New York.

Daniels, P. T. (2008) [Online: print version to

appear] “Rawlinson, Henry. II.

Contributions to Assyriology and Iranian studies.”

Encyclopedia Iranica. Available from http://www.

iranica.com/newsite/articles/unicode/ot_grp14/

ot_rawlinson_ ii_20081215.html.

Pope, M. (1999) The story of decipherment: from

Egyptian hieroglyphs to Maya script, rev. ed.

London.

Robinson, A. (2002) Lost languages: the enigma of

the world’s undeciphered scripts. New York.

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