Source: Wikipedia
There is a particular category of historical event that is easier to document than to explain, and this is the largest example available.
For several centuries before 1200 BC,…
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 depends on context. An object in the ground is surrounded by information — what layer it sat in, what was beside it, how it was arranged, what the…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a category of problem that looks impossible from the outside and turns out to be merely extremely difficult, and decipherment sits squarely in it.
When Egyptian hieroglyphs…