Book review from The Times Online. The image is from the article, and I find it totally fascinating - notice the representations of "white," "brown," and "black" people, and the checkered game board with a little game piece on it - looks like a little dude waving his arms in the air - being carried by the white guy (he's got the gold links dangling from his elbow).
From The Sunday Times
March 8, 2009
Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts
by Andrew Robinson
The Sunday Times review by James McConnachie
The writings left on tombs and tablets by the great civilisations of the ancient past have mostly now been read. This intriguing book on the strange art of “decipherment” focuses on those scripts that remain mysterious. It is a potent mix of academic esoterica, codecracking and controversy — the same giddy cocktail that made The Da Vinci Code such a success, but with much greater scholarship. (And splendid illustrations: the pages crawl with jaguar heads, ox’s feet and curlicues.) [Okay, quit dissing The Da Vinci Code - it got millions of people around the world reading, and wondering - quite a feat!]
Andrew Robinson begins with the stories of the three great decipherments: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B and the weird glyphs of the Maya.
Hieroglyphs famously resisted decipherment for centuries, and were cracked only after a squad of Napoleon’s troops in 1799 came across the bilingual Greek/Egyptian Rosetta stone, set into an old wall in the Egyptian desert. Linear B was discovered in the 1900s, when clay tablets etched with scratchy letters started turning up on Minoan digs. It took 50 years, though, for the 3,500-year-old alphabet to fall to the logical assault of the architect Michael Ventris, who devised a brilliant system of frequency analysis to work out which letters occurred where, and what parts of speech they might represent. Even then, the final conquest only came when Ventris began guessing at ancient Cretan place names. This “leap in the dark” paid off when he realised the underlying language was none other than Greek.
Linear B, unfortunately, turned out to do little more than list names and goods. This is the great peril of decipherment: you might spend years working out how to read a shopping list. The impact of the Mayan glyphs, Robinson shows, was very different. When they were cracked in the 1970s, they allowed a new world civilisation to speak for itself, rather than through the mouths of priests and conquistadors. The Mayan glyphs look impossibly outlandish: cartoon-like animal figures squashed into geometric shapes and piled up like totems. Their decipherment owes much to the 16th-century Franciscan friar Diego de Landa who, despite torturing Maya and immolating their “diabolical codices”, bothered to quiz a nobleman about his writing system and jotted down some phonetic equivalents in Spanish. The resulting key wasn’t entirely reliable — one transcription was revealed to be the Mayan phrase for “I don’t want to say” — but it would help unlock the script four centuries later.
The decipherment of the Mayans’ glyphs meant that their civilisation could be studied as seriously as that of ancient Egypt or Greece. Such a potential reward explains the allure of other, still undeciphered scripts; Robinson devotes a chapter each to eight of the most significant. The Nubian or “Black Pharaohs” of Kush, for instance, ruled Egypt during the 7th century BC, but the language of their texts (dubbed Meroitic, after the place of discovery) is unknown. If a modern linguistic descendant could be traced, it might not only fill a gap in the history of Egypt but could help restore to black African history the dignity of serious antiquity.
The intractability of Etruscan writings, similarly, is a matter of the unknown language, not the alphabet (the Etruscans used a variant of Greek characters). When bilingual Etruscan-Phoenician gold plaques were discovered in 1964, there was great excitement — among those who could read Phoenician, at any rate. But with awful bathos, Robinson confesses that only one identifiable Etruscan word emerged from the find: ci, meaning “three”.
Yet with ingenuity, decipherers have put even this to use. With the help of a precious set of Etruscan ivory dice, whose numbers were written out in words rather than numerals, and with the knowledge that opposite faces on ancient dice add up to seven, this gave scholars the Etruscan words for one through to six. But reading the longest Etruscan texts — including one discovered, bizarrely, printed on the linen bandages of a mummy bought in Egypt by a 19th-century Croatian tourist — is still a long way off.
To solve Etruscan or Meroitic (or Linear A or proto-Elamite) will probably require a new Rosetta stone. Lucky finds do happen, though. The hugely significant La Mojarra stela — one of only two important examples of the Isthmian script, which died out in Central America about AD500 — was stumbled upon by a group of barefoot Mexican fishermen laying log piles for a jetty.
Before the new enthusiast for decipherment thinks of “having a go” him- or herself, Robinson’s analysis of expert attempts should serve as a warning. Decipherment requires not only a rare blend of flair and diligence but a deep understanding of frequency-analysis modelling and a firm grasp of, say, Middle Nilotic of central Africa or perhaps Mixe-Zoquean from Mexico.
Not to mention an appreciation of the niceties of reverse boustrophedon.
Robinson’s technical terms, his allographs and ligatures, only occasionally risk blending into a murky hieroglyphic soup, but this is surely the most recondite of terms. It is a technique used in the Rongorongo script of Easter Island — a script as baffling as the island’s better-known giant sculptures.
For the record, boustrophedon means writing left-right and right-left on alternate lines, as if ploughing a field; reverse boustrophedon also requires the text to be flipped through 180 degrees after each line.
Robinson closes his book with the notorious Phaistos disc, a rather lovely clay artefact that today lies in Crete’s Heraklion museum in lonely splendour, the only example of a language that is otherwise totally unknown. It makes an excellent coda, as an object that has drawn the most outrageous speculations as to its use and meaning yet remains maddeningly mute. Its very silence helps explain decipherment’s appeal. It is not just about puzzle-solving or history-making, but about the beauty of writing.
Telling the story of Linear B, Robinson describes how the “mute signs” were suddenly “compelled to speak after more than three millenniums of silence”. He makes it sound as if Ventris’s solution were a spell — as if writing were some kind of magic. Which, this book elegantly reminds us, it is.
Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered ScriptsThames & Hudson £16.95 pp352
Available at the BooksFirst price of £15.26 (including p&p) on 0845 271 2135
********************************************************************
[Not mentioned: The Indus script. Of course, there is dispute as to whether it is "writing" in the usual sense of the word! And there is that elusive Southwest Script I recently posted about - until I read that article I did not know it existed. What a fascinating subject. Perhaps when I retire I shall go back to school and pursue the study of linguistics.]
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Lost Languages
Book review from The Times Online. The image is from the article, and I find it totally fascinating - notice the representations of "white," "brown," and "black" people, and the checkered game board with a little game piece on it - looks like a little dude waving his arms in the air - being carried by the white guy (he's got the gold links dangling from his elbow).
From The Sunday Times
March 8, 2009
Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts
by Andrew Robinson
The Sunday Times review by James McConnachie
The writings left on tombs and tablets by the great civilisations of the ancient past have mostly now been read. This intriguing book on the strange art of “decipherment” focuses on those scripts that remain mysterious. It is a potent mix of academic esoterica, codecracking and controversy — the same giddy cocktail that made The Da Vinci Code such a success, but with much greater scholarship. (And splendid illustrations: the pages crawl with jaguar heads, ox’s feet and curlicues.) [Okay, quit dissing The Da Vinci Code - it got millions of people around the world reading, and wondering - quite a feat!]
Andrew Robinson begins with the stories of the three great decipherments: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B and the weird glyphs of the Maya.
Hieroglyphs famously resisted decipherment for centuries, and were cracked only after a squad of Napoleon’s troops in 1799 came across the bilingual Greek/Egyptian Rosetta stone, set into an old wall in the Egyptian desert. Linear B was discovered in the 1900s, when clay tablets etched with scratchy letters started turning up on Minoan digs. It took 50 years, though, for the 3,500-year-old alphabet to fall to the logical assault of the architect Michael Ventris, who devised a brilliant system of frequency analysis to work out which letters occurred where, and what parts of speech they might represent. Even then, the final conquest only came when Ventris began guessing at ancient Cretan place names. This “leap in the dark” paid off when he realised the underlying language was none other than Greek.
Linear B, unfortunately, turned out to do little more than list names and goods. This is the great peril of decipherment: you might spend years working out how to read a shopping list. The impact of the Mayan glyphs, Robinson shows, was very different. When they were cracked in the 1970s, they allowed a new world civilisation to speak for itself, rather than through the mouths of priests and conquistadors. The Mayan glyphs look impossibly outlandish: cartoon-like animal figures squashed into geometric shapes and piled up like totems. Their decipherment owes much to the 16th-century Franciscan friar Diego de Landa who, despite torturing Maya and immolating their “diabolical codices”, bothered to quiz a nobleman about his writing system and jotted down some phonetic equivalents in Spanish. The resulting key wasn’t entirely reliable — one transcription was revealed to be the Mayan phrase for “I don’t want to say” — but it would help unlock the script four centuries later.
The decipherment of the Mayans’ glyphs meant that their civilisation could be studied as seriously as that of ancient Egypt or Greece. Such a potential reward explains the allure of other, still undeciphered scripts; Robinson devotes a chapter each to eight of the most significant. The Nubian or “Black Pharaohs” of Kush, for instance, ruled Egypt during the 7th century BC, but the language of their texts (dubbed Meroitic, after the place of discovery) is unknown. If a modern linguistic descendant could be traced, it might not only fill a gap in the history of Egypt but could help restore to black African history the dignity of serious antiquity.
The intractability of Etruscan writings, similarly, is a matter of the unknown language, not the alphabet (the Etruscans used a variant of Greek characters). When bilingual Etruscan-Phoenician gold plaques were discovered in 1964, there was great excitement — among those who could read Phoenician, at any rate. But with awful bathos, Robinson confesses that only one identifiable Etruscan word emerged from the find: ci, meaning “three”.
Yet with ingenuity, decipherers have put even this to use. With the help of a precious set of Etruscan ivory dice, whose numbers were written out in words rather than numerals, and with the knowledge that opposite faces on ancient dice add up to seven, this gave scholars the Etruscan words for one through to six. But reading the longest Etruscan texts — including one discovered, bizarrely, printed on the linen bandages of a mummy bought in Egypt by a 19th-century Croatian tourist — is still a long way off.
To solve Etruscan or Meroitic (or Linear A or proto-Elamite) will probably require a new Rosetta stone. Lucky finds do happen, though. The hugely significant La Mojarra stela — one of only two important examples of the Isthmian script, which died out in Central America about AD500 — was stumbled upon by a group of barefoot Mexican fishermen laying log piles for a jetty.
Before the new enthusiast for decipherment thinks of “having a go” him- or herself, Robinson’s analysis of expert attempts should serve as a warning. Decipherment requires not only a rare blend of flair and diligence but a deep understanding of frequency-analysis modelling and a firm grasp of, say, Middle Nilotic of central Africa or perhaps Mixe-Zoquean from Mexico.
Not to mention an appreciation of the niceties of reverse boustrophedon.
Robinson’s technical terms, his allographs and ligatures, only occasionally risk blending into a murky hieroglyphic soup, but this is surely the most recondite of terms. It is a technique used in the Rongorongo script of Easter Island — a script as baffling as the island’s better-known giant sculptures.
For the record, boustrophedon means writing left-right and right-left on alternate lines, as if ploughing a field; reverse boustrophedon also requires the text to be flipped through 180 degrees after each line.
Robinson closes his book with the notorious Phaistos disc, a rather lovely clay artefact that today lies in Crete’s Heraklion museum in lonely splendour, the only example of a language that is otherwise totally unknown. It makes an excellent coda, as an object that has drawn the most outrageous speculations as to its use and meaning yet remains maddeningly mute. Its very silence helps explain decipherment’s appeal. It is not just about puzzle-solving or history-making, but about the beauty of writing.
Telling the story of Linear B, Robinson describes how the “mute signs” were suddenly “compelled to speak after more than three millenniums of silence”. He makes it sound as if Ventris’s solution were a spell — as if writing were some kind of magic. Which, this book elegantly reminds us, it is.
Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered ScriptsThames & Hudson £16.95 pp352
Available at the BooksFirst price of £15.26 (including p&p) on 0845 271 2135
********************************************************************
[Not mentioned: The Indus script. Of course, there is dispute as to whether it is "writing" in the usual sense of the word! And there is that elusive Southwest Script I recently posted about - until I read that article I did not know it existed. What a fascinating subject. Perhaps when I retire I shall go back to school and pursue the study of linguistics.]
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