Marginally archaeaology: Eight scripts that still can't be read

The source, New Scientist, and the article is complete enough to form
the basis for a school kid paper. The click sites are at the cite.


Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't be read

* 27 May 2009 by Andrew Robinson

WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps
the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there
could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no
science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet.

The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting
mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used
more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing
appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central
America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing
systems. Some, such as the one you are reading now, have remained in
use, but most have fallen into disuse.

These dead scripts tantalise us. We can see that they are writing, but
what do they say?

That is the great challenge of decipherment: to reach deep into the
past and hear the voices of the dead. When the Egyptian hieroglyphs
were deciphered in 1823, they extended the span of recorded history by
around 2000 years and allowed us to read the words of Ramses the
Great. The decipherment of the Mayan glyphs revealed that the New
World had a sophisticated, literate civilisation at the time of the
Roman empire.

So how do you decipher an unknown script? There are two minimum
requirements. First, there has to be enough material to work with.
Secondly, there must be some link to a known language. It helps
enormously if there is a bilingual inscription or identifiable proper
names - the Rosetta Stone (see image), for example, is written in both
ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek, and also contains the name of the
Ptolemy dynasty. If there is no clear link, an attempt must be made to
relate the concealed language to a known one.

Many ancient scripts have been deciphered (see "The great
decipherments" and The ancient scripts), but some significant ones
have yet to be cracked. These fall into three broad categories: a
known script writing an unknown language; an unknown script writing a
known language; and an unknown script writing an unknown language. The
first two categories are more likely to yield to decipherment; the
third - which recalls Donald Rumsfeld's infamous "unknown unknowns" -
is a much tougher proposition, though this doesn't keep people from
trying.

Most of the undeciphered scripts featured here have been partially
deciphered, and well-known researchers have claimed that they have
deciphered some much more fully. Further progress is possible for most
of them, especially if new inscriptions are discovered, which
fortunately happens fairly often.


1 Etruscan
Greek and not Greek

(known script, unknown language)

For those interested in language and writing, the Etruscans are a
fascinating and frustrating bunch. Decipherment of the Etruscan
language is like trying to learn English from reading nothing but
gravestones. The Etruscan script was written in a form of the ancient
Greek alphabet, but their language was unlike any other. So although
Etruscan sentences can easily be "read", nobody has much idea what
they mean, apart from the names of people and places, and a smattering
of vocabulary and standard phrases.

See Etruscan script on a gold plaque and an inkwell

The Etruscans were a prehistoric civilisation that arose in western
Italy - what is now Tuscany and parts of Umbria - and was absorbed
into the Roman empire by the first century BC. The Etruscans were
highly literate, leaving thousands of texts. Many Etruscan artefacts
are inscribed with the Greek alphabet, almost certainly borrowed from
Greek colonists who settled in western Italy around 775 BC.

The everyday Etruscan alphabet is different, however. Although it
strongly resembles the Greek one, it differs significantly too. The
main difference is that Etruscan letters generally point in the
opposite direction to Greek ones, because Etruscan was written from
right to left.

Researchers persisted for over a century with efforts to relate
Etruscan to other European languages - including Basque - by looking
for similarities between readable Etruscan words and words in known
languages. The attempt was hopeless. Etruscan is definitely not an
Indo-European language and is now regarded as an isolate, like Basque.

Nevertheless, some Etruscan words can be understood from their
contexts in inscriptions, such as Ruma (Rome), Clevsina (the city of
Chiusi) and Fufluns (the god Dionysus). The problem has been to find
the meanings of the many words that are not names. Perhaps 250 words
have now been generally agreed, for example ci avil (three years), and
this number is increasing as new inscriptions are discovered.

2 Meroitic hieroglyphs

voices of the black pharaohs

(known script, unknown language)

In the first millennium BC, the kingdom of Kush flourished around the
two great bends of the river Nile between Abu Simbel and Khartoum, in
what is now Sudan. The Ku*** (or Meroitic, after the capital Meroe)
civilisation was one of the most important early states of sub-Saharan
Africa.

In 712 BC, Ku*** kings conquered Egypt and were accepted as its 25th
dynasty. The "black pharaohs" ruled for nearly 70 years until war with
the Assyrians forced the Kushites back to their homeland in 656 BC.

The Meroitic hieroglyphs (see image) date from after this defeat: the
Ku*** pharaohs used Egyptian hieroglyphs, but from the 3rd century
BC these increasingly appeared alongside a new, indigenous script. As
in Egypt (for example, on the Rosetta Stone), there are two forms of
this script: hieroglyphic, which was used on monuments and had
essentially pictographic signs, and everyday cursive, or joined-up,
writing.

There are 23 symbols in each form of Meroitic. In that respect it
resembles a modern alphabet - unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics, which use
hundreds of symbols. Around 1911, Francis Llewellyn Griffith, an
Egyptologist at the University of Oxford, deciphered the phonetic
values of both Meroitic scripts from inscriptions that record a text
in Meroitic and Egyptian scripts.

Meroitic words can therefore be "read", like Etruscan words.
Frustratingly, however, they cannot be understood, because the
Meroitic language is unknown. Proper names can be deciphered, and a
few dozen other words, such as tenke (west) and ato (water), can be
guessed from their contexts, but that is all.

Griffith always believed that Meroitic would eventually be deciphered.
But despite decades of comparisons between Meroitic words and the
ancient and modern African languages of the region, no convincing
resemblance has yet been detected.

3 The New World

Olmec, Zapotec and Isthmian

(Olmec: unknown script, unknown language
Zapotec: unknown script, possibly known language
Isthmian: unknown script, possibly known language)

We know that the classical Mayan civilisation (around AD 250 to the
8th century) was literate, but the origins of writing in Central
America - and the New World as a whole - are murky. The region has a
number of undeciphered ancient scripts. Three have attracted
particular interest: Olmec, Zapotec and Isthmian.

The earliest American script may come from the Olmecs, the region's
most ancient civilisation, which flourished along the Gulf of Mexico
coast of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec from around 1500 to 400 BC. The
Olmecs were thought to be illiterate until the late 1990s, when an
inscribed stone block was discovered by road builders. Dated to 900
BC, the inscription is made from 62 symbols, some of which are
repeated. It is very probably writing, but without the discovery of
further inscriptions there is no certainty, and no hope of
decipherment.

The Zapotec civilisation of Oaxaca undoubtedly had writing. Some 1200
inscribed objects have been found, ranging from painted walls to pots,
bones and shells. The date of the script appears to lie somewhere
between 600 and 400 BC.

Scholars have been able to work out the Zapotec calendar and show it
to be a precursor of the Mayan one. But even though Zapotec languages
are still spoken in the area, it has proved more difficult to
reconstruct the language of the script, in part because of the
bewildering complexity of the modern Zapotecan language group.

The latest and most controversial of the three scripts is Isthmian
(see image). Even its name is not agreed: some call it "epi-Olmec". In
1902, an unusual statuette made of jade was ploughed up in a field in
the Olmec area. It represents a man dressed as a duck, and was
inscribed with about 70 unknown symbols. Deposited in the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington DC, the Tuxtla statuette was the only
example of the script until 1986, when fishermen stumbled on a second
example in a river: a 4-tonne slab of polished basalt with a much
longer inscription.

The script dates to the 2nd century AD. The most likely language is an
archaic version of Zoquean, a current language of the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec. Two linguists, John Justeson of the State University of
New York in Albany and Terrence Kaufman of the University of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have proposed a decipherment based on their
reconstruction of "pre-proto-Zoquean". Unless more inscriptions turn
up, this must remain a well-informed conjecture.

4 Linear A
a Minoan mystery

(partially known script, unknown language)

In 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans discovered not one but two
unknown scripts, both scratched on clay tablets, while digging at the
"Palace of Minos" at Knossos in Crete - the centre of the Bronze-Age
Minoan civilisation.

One of these, Linear B, was famously deciphered in 1952, making it
Europe's earliest readable writing (see "The great decipherments").
The other, Linear A, remains undeciphered.

Linear B dates from around 1450 BC. It is an archaic form of written
Greek used by Greek-speakers who conquered parts of Crete around that
time. Linear A is older, from the 18th century BC. It is the script of
the Minoan civilisation, and the only solid link we have to the lost
Minoan language.

Unfortunately for decipherers, we have much less Linear A than Linear
B - around 1500 texts, mostly from Crete but also from other Aegean
islands, mainland Greece, Turkey and Israel. The majority of the
inscriptions are short or damaged.

The symbols of Linear A (see image) strongly resemble those of Linear
B, but this does not mean that a Linear A symbol necessarily has the
same sound as a similar Linear B symbol, because Minoan and Greek were
different. You can read Linear A using Linear B sounds - but because
no one knows Minoan, we cannot be sure if the words are correct. What
can be deduced from such substitutions, however, is that the language
of Linear A is not Greek.
We can read Linear A out loud - but since nobody knows Minoan, we
cannot be sure if the words are correct

5 Rongo-rongo

the chant of Easter Island

(unknown script, probably known language)

Easter Island is a place of intrigue and mystery, and its indigenous
script rongo-rongo is no exception.

Rongo-rongo (see image) means "chants" in Rapanui, the language of
Easter Island. Although the language of rongo-rongo is probably
similar to Rapanui, the script is complex and baffling. There are only
25 inscriptions, some quite long, and all written on driftwood.

Its age is puzzling. Local legend has it that the writing was brought
to the island by boat when Easter Island was settled from Polynesia;
the date is unknown, but could have been as early as AD 300. However,
the first Europeans to land, a Dutch fleet in 1722, saw no evidence of
rongo-rongo. When two Spanish ships arrived in 1770 and made a
"treaty" claiming Easter Island for Spain, the islanders "signed" the
treaty - but their signatures do not resemble rongo-rongo.
Local legend has it that the script was brought by boat when the
island was settled from Polynesia

Captain James Cook, landing in 1774, saw no writing. The first
confirmed sighting of rongo-rongo was by a French missionary in 1864,
who noted that knowledge of the signs was dying out. Despite efforts
by the bishop of Tahiti in the 1870s, no islanders could be found to
read the writing. Since then scholars have been at odds on how to
interpret it.

Not surprisingly, rongo-rongo has been a powerful kook attractor. One
popular, but absurd, idea relates rongo-rongo to the Indus script
simply because some of the signs are alike.

One thing is beyond dispute: the direction of reading is unusual,
though not unique. To read a rongo-rongo tablet, you start at the
bottom left-hand corner and read along the line. Then you turn the
tablet by 180 degrees and begin reading the next line up, again from
left to right. At the end of that line, you repeat the 180-degree
turn, and so on. This is known as reverse boustrophedon
("boustrophedon" is ancient Greek for "as the ox turns" when
ploughing).

6 Indus script
sign of the unicorn

(unknown script, possibly known language)

The remains of the Indus valley civilisation cover an area of Pakistan
and north-west India about a quarter the size of Europe. At its peak,
between 2500 and 1900 BC, its major cities were comparable with those
of contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The exquisitely carved script of this civilisation is known from about
5000 inscriptions, many of them on stones found scattered in the
houses and streets of its ruined cities. A frequent motif on the seals
is a one-horned quadruped like a unicorn (a creature, legend has it,
from India) (see image). The texts are tantalisingly brief. The
average length is just five signs, the longest only 20. A few
researchers have questioned if they really are writing, but the
majority reckon they are.

The texts are tantalisingly brief, with an average length of just five
signs

The language of the Indus civilisation may have died out altogether,
though some speculate that it relates to the Dravidian languages now
spoken only in southern India and in Baluchistan, not far from the
Indus valley, where the Dravidian language is known as Brahui. If the
Dravidian hypothesis is correct, it might be possible to match words
from the old form of Tamil, a Dravidian language spoken in Tamil Nadu,
with the Indus signs.

For example, a very common sign is the fish (see below). The Old Tamil
word for fish is min. But min has another meaning too - "star" or
"planet". Perhaps the fish sign stands for an astral word - a bit like
using a pictogram of the sun in a puzzle to mean "son".

Attractive as such speculation is, we are still a long way from
deciphering the Indus script. More than 100 decipherments of the
script have been published since its discovery in the 1920s, some by
respected archaeologists, but they differ widely, often wildly.

7 Proto-Elamite

oldest undeciphered writing

(partially known script, unknown language)

Proto-Elamite is the world's oldest undeciphered script - assuming
that it really is a fully developed writing system, which is by no
means certain. It was used for perhaps 150 years from around 3050 BC
in Elam, the biblical name for an area that corresponds roughly to
today's oilfields of western Iran. It is almost as old as the oldest
writing of all, the earliest cuneiform from Mesopotamia. Little is
known about the people who wrote the script.

Proto-Elamite preceded a partially deciphered script, Linear Elamite,
used in the same area 750 years later. Linear Elamite in turn preceded
a third script, a cuneiform that the Elamites used for many centuries
starting in the 13th century BC. Elamite cuneiform was deciphered in
the 19th century.

So there are three Elamite scripts, each separated by about 800 years
and with no texts to fill the gaps: no Chaucer or Shakespeare to link
Anglo-Saxon with modern English, as it were.

The relationship between Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite is
controversial. The discoverer of Proto-Elamite in the early 20th
century was convinced that the two scripts wrote the same language.
Later scholars agreed. But since the 1980s, specialists have become
increasingly persuaded that there is no evidence for a shared language
and culture. They have worked out Proto-Elamite arithmetic in
impressive detail, but the language of the inscriptions is still
completely unknown.

8 Phaistos disc

oldest printing, or hoax?

(unknown script, unknown language)

The notoriously solitary Phaistos disc from Crete appears to be the
world's oldest "printed" document. The disc, about 15 centimetres in
diameter, occupies pride of place at the Heraklion Museum in Crete.
Some say it should not be regarded as an undeciphered script because
it is in fact a hoax - the Piltdown Man of ancient writing.

However, most authorities have treated it as genuine since its
discovery by Italian archaeologists in 1908 at ancient Phaistos, in an
archaeological context suggesting a date of about 1700 BC. Few
scholars, however, have been intrepid enough to propose a
decipherment.

The disc (see image) is made of baked clay and has inscriptions on
both sides consisting of a spiral of symbols impressed into the wet
clay with a set of stamps. The 241 or 242 symbols (one is obliterated)
were made by 45 different stamps. This is about all that can be stated
without fear of overstepping the evidence.

But why should anyone have bothered to produce a set of 45 stamps,
rather than "writing" the signs afresh? If it was to mass-produce
documents, why have no others been found? And why are the symbols
unlike any of the signs of the other Cretan scripts?

One idea is that the disc was imported, possibly from Anatolia (one
symbol resembles an Anatolian rock tomb). If so, the disc's language
may be some unknowable non-Cretan tongue. Unless more of the script is
found, however, the Phaistos disc must remain a perplexing riddle.
Profile

Andrew Robinson is the author of Lost Languages: The enigma of the
world's undeciphered scripts (Thames & Hudson) and Writing and Script:
A very short introduction (to be published by Oxford University Press
in August). He is a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge
The great decipherments

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHS

WHEN? 1823

WHO? French orientalist Jean-François Champollion

HOW? By starting with the bilingual Rosetta Stone, partly deciphered
by the physicist Thomas Young, and applying his profound knowledge of
ancient Egypt and the Coptic language, which is similar to ancient
Egyptian

BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM

WHEN? 1850s

WHO? British Assyriologist Henry Creswicke Rawlinson and Irish
clergyman Edward Hincks

HOW? Using Darius the Great's trilingual cuneiform inscription at
Behistun in western Persia, written in Old Persian, Babylonian and
Elamite cuneiform. Two decades of concentrated study may have helped
too

LINEAR B

WHEN? 1952

WHO? British architect and amateur classicist Michael Ventris

HOW? Years of slog, assisted by an architect's analytical thinking
plus a flash of insight that the language of Linear B was Greek even
in the absence of a bilingual inscription

MAYAN GLYPHS

WHEN? 1952

WHO? Soviet linguist Yuri Knorosov

HOW? By matching the signs in a flawed Mayan-Spanish "alphabet"
recorded by a Spanish inquisitor in 16th-century Mexico with signs in
ancient Mayan manuscripts, and then matching the words they apparently
spelt with words listed in recent Mayan dictionaries




http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227106.000-decoding-antiquity-eight-scripts-that-still-cant-be-read.html
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