Reviews

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Nothing is so romantic as the decipherment of an unknown script. We moderns are justly proud to have discovered the infinitesimally small world of quarks and the egregiously large world of the general theory of relativity. But the discovery of the human past over the last 200 years has taught us more about who we are and where we come from. Decipherment has made this possible, and there is no better book on the subject than Maurice Pope’s revised edition of a study first published in 1975.

This is the story of men of extraordinary intellectual qualities who allowed their sense of method to triumph over what they “knew” to be true. As a scientific undertaking, decipherment depends on little-known general laws that govern language and writing, as well as on hard-won facts wrested from intractable material. Nonetheless, a surprising moral of this history (Pope calls it an “embarrassing” moral) is how often false suppositions have led to important new facts. We might call this the Columbus Principle: Would-be decipherers make certain assumptions with the hope of discovering facts that support them; often, however, they come across other, extremely unwieldy facts that require a revision of their initial premises—and sometimes lead to a whole new body of truths. This courage to err, along with the willingness to revise, is a distinct virtue possessed by almost all of the clear-eyed heroes of our story.

So it was with one of the most dazzling intellectual achievements of the 19th century: Jean-François Champollion’s 1822 decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. The key to hieroglyphic writing had been lost in the fourth century A.D. But according to ancient Greek tradition and a strange monograph called Hieroglyphica—attributed to Horapollo (Horus/Apollo), perhaps of the fifth century A.D.—the hieroglyphs represented Platonic Ideas: those eternal, trans-material verities that cast only uncertain shadows in our dim sublunar realm. Champollion himself embraced Horapollo’s explanation that the Egyptian signs were Platonic allegories. Working from this (false) assumption, he was able to isolate a type of sign then unknown in any other form of writing. This kind of sign, called a determinative, is not spoken; it simply indicates the class of objects to which another sign, attached to the determinative, belongs. (For example, the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah [1213–1203 B.C.] erected a stela in which he says he conquered “Israel”; attached to the sign for Israel is a determinative indicating that Israel is a people, not a place.)

The Rosetta Stone commemorates benefactions by Ptolemy V (205–180 B.C.) to Egyptian temples. The text was inscribed in three scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic (an Egyptian cursive script) and Greek (which could be read). Believing that the hieroglyphs were Platonic allegories, Champollion worked exclusively with the demotic text, which he took to be a phonetic system independent of the 059hieroglyphs (in fact, they encode the same language). The script is so difficult that even today probably not more than a dozen people can read it.

But Champollion went beyond the Rosetta Stone. He compared hieroglyphic signs within cartouches on the Rosetta Stone—signs that he guessed (correctly) contain the names of kings—with signs in cartouches from another stone called the Bankes Stone, which had the name of Cleopatra. Because the name “Ptolemy”—isolated by using the Rosetta Stone’s Greek text—and the name “Cleopatra” contain common sounds, Champollion was able to establish the phonetic values of a few signs. Pope rightly emphasizes the importance of Champollion’s method: Virtually all decipherments have depended on the astute use of proper names, either names in texts written in two languages (biscripts) or names guessed from the context of finds. This offers, for Pope, a model of how one should go about deciphering an unknown writing.

Another lesson Champollion teaches: The relation between writing and speech is difficult, even treacherous. Script and speech are separate symbol systems; although they constantly refer to one another, they are not the same thing. Consider Chinese, for example. Many think that Chinese writing and Chinese speech are the same thing, but Chinese can be—and has been—written in the Roman alphabet.

The differences between language and script are well demonstrated in the form of writing called cuneiform, or “wedge-shaped” writing, made by impressing the point of a stylus in leather-hard clay. Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics, never used outside the Nile Valley, cuneiform was used over vast parts of the ancient world to record many different languages.

Persian cuneiform, the first cuneiform script to be deciphered, was widely known in the West at least by the 17th century, when the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle brought back transcriptions from the capital of the Achaemenid kings at Persepolis in southern Iran. Yet the writing was not deciphered until the mid-19th century—and not in a stroke, but in three stages by the German schoolteacher Georg Friedrich Grotefend, the Danish scholar Rasmus Christian Rask and, best known of all, the Englishman Henry Creswicke Rawlinson. Major-General Rawlinson, who worked for the British East Indian company, had himself suspended from a 100-foot rope to make a copy of a trilingual inscription of Darius the Great (522–486 B.C.) on a mountain face at Behistun. The inscription records Darius’s deeds in Persian cuneiform, Elamite cuneiform (a still undeciphered language) and Babylonian cuneiform.

Persian cuneiform turned out to be relatively simple. This Indo-European language is a syllabary; that is, most of its signs stand for a consonant plus a vowel. It has a small number of signs, and it is used exclusively to record the Persian language.

Babylonian logosyllabic cuneiform writing, by contrast, has 300 to 400 signs, only some of which have phonetic value and many more have more than one value. From this great family of cuneiform writings (not languages), which goes back to late-fourth-millennium B.C. Sumer and is the world’s oldest known writing tradition, descended the undeciphered Elamite scripts, Babylonian cuneiform, Assyrian cuneiform, Hurrian cuneiform and Hittite cuneiform. Because Persian cuneiform was structurally unrelated to Babylonian cuneiform, a second decipherment was required, facilitated by the proper names on the Behistun inscription and some other material. Again, Rawlinson’s work was decisive in the decipherment, which he more or less completed by 1855.

A third form of cuneiform was used by the Semitic peoples who lived in the Levant in Bronze Age Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Destroyed about 1200 B.C., Ugarit has delivered up a bewildering array of scripts and languages, including a previously unknown form of cuneiform now usually called the “Ugaritic alphabet.” Deciphered nearly simultaneously by three scholars, it proved to be the earliest known example of a family of scripts known as West Semitic, which includes Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and modern Arabic.^a

The most famous of all modern decipherments, and a near rival to Champollion’s achievement, was 060Michael Ventris’s decipherment of Linear B, a script found at Knossos on Crete and at certain sites on the Greek mainland, notably Pylos. Linear B was first discovered by Sir Arthur Evans around 1900. Evans hoped that he himself might break the code and thus did not allow publication of the Knossos tablets—delaying progress for 50 years. Not until Carl Blegen’s excavations at Pylos, just before the Second World War, did a second substantial corpus of Linear B tablets appear. When these tablets were meticulously published by the American scholar Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. in 1951, the scholarly world at last had a clear picture of what signs, and how many, made up the Linear B signary.

The story of Michael Ventris’s decipherment, following up on critical work by the American Alice Kober (the only woman who figures importantly in Pope’s history), was told in John Chadwick’s The Decipherment of Linear B, published in 1958. (As a young student, I hitchhiked through Norway with this book in my backpack—what a thrilling story it told!) Unlike most earlier decipherments, Ventris did not have a biscript. Nor did he know what language Linear B encoded (he thought it was Etruscan). Guessing that the language was a syllabary because of the number of its signs, he made a grid with vowels across the top and consonants down the edge, then assigned hypothetical vowels and consonants to various signs. Ventris then filled out this model through other shrewd guesses and logical leaps—and it worked, yielding a number of recognizable place-names, which led to other words and then to a veritable semantic rainstorm. To everyone’s astonishment, Linear B recorded Greek, not Etruscan, proving against all historical wisdom at the time that Greeks lived in Knossos when it was burned in 1400 B.C., and that Greeks had built the Mycenaean civilization on the mainland.

The years since Pope’s first edition was published (1975) have produced new decipherments, which he covers in postscripts. The most spectacular development is the partial decipherment of Maya glyphs, which we now know are a form of writing. Although still poorly understood, the Maya glyphs are sui generis, not connected to any Western (or Eastern) writing system. In the coming years, perhaps, the Maya decipherment 061may reveal new universals, new secrets about the nature of writing similar to the laws ordering other aspects of our mysterious world. Pope’s book is a superb place to begin the journey.

Nothing is so romantic as the decipherment of an unknown script. We moderns are justly proud to have discovered the infinitesimally small world of quarks and the egregiously large world of the general theory of relativity. But the discovery of the human past over the last 200 years has taught us more about who we are and where we come from. Decipherment has made this possible, and there is no better book on the subject than Maurice Pope’s revised edition of a study first published in 1975. This is the story of men of extraordinary intellectual qualities who allowed […]