Source: Wikipedia
Decipherment requires a bilingual text — the same content in a script you can read and one you cannot — and the number of such texts is very small,…
Source: Wikipedia
Most archaeological finds are objects. Something survives, it is recovered, and it can be examined, measured and displayed.
Occasionally the significant find is not an object at all but…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a grim regularity to the history of libraries. They accumulate for generations, they hold material that exists nowhere else, and then something happens to them — and…
Source: Wikipedia
Archaeology usually has the opposite problem to this one. Objects survive and their purpose is unclear because nothing organic remains around them.
Here the object survives in extraordinary condition,…
Source: Wikipedia
Writing is rarer than it looks.
Almost every script in use today descends from a small number of original inventions, spreading and adapting rather than being independently devised. Real…
Source: Wikipedia
Decipherment is a statistical exercise before it is anything else.
Every script that has been successfully read was cracked because there was enough of it. Enough text for repeated…