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Methods of Decipherment1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

I. J. Gelb  and
R. M. Whiting
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Extract

There are many stories connected with the decipherment of ancient writings and the recovery of forgotten languages, but these stories need not be retold here. Furthermore, they usually deal only with the discovery of the key, that brief moment of insight when some datum is arrived at, which when inserted causes the rest of the puzzle to fall into place. But what we are interested in here is the tremendous amount of work, routine but necessary, which precedes that moment and makes the decipherment possible, and the even more tremendous amount of work which follows that moment and results in the recovery of the language.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 107 , Issue 2 , April 1975 , pp. 95 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1975

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References

1 The London paper forms part of a larger paper entitled “Records, writing, and decipherment” which was delivered at the Symposium organized by the Center for Co-ordination of Ancient and Modern Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in March 1974. Permission was granted to publish the Michigan paper in Visible Language, VIII, 1974, 293–318, prior to the decision to publish the Michigan Symposium in Herbert H. Paper (ed.), Language and texts: The nature of linguistic evidence (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1975). Subsequently and independently, it was decided to publish the London Symposium.