Of course this does not give us a decipherment; rather it narrows down the potential decipherments.
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The decipherment claims listed are categorized into linguistic decipherments, identifying the language of the inscription, and non-linguistic decipherments. A purely logographical reading is not linguistic in the strict sense: while it may reveal the meaning of the inscription, it will not allow for the identification of the underlying language.
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Many people have claimed to have deciphered the Phaistos Disc. The claims may be categorized into linguistic decipherments, identifying the language of the inscription, and non-linguistic decipherments. A purely ideographical reading is semantic but not linguistic in the strict sense: while it may reveal the meaning of the inscription, it would not allow us to identify the underlying language. A large part of the claims are clearly pseudoscientific, if not bordering on the esoteric.
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During Gallup's time at Riverbank she published many books containing decipherments of purported hidden messages in the work of Bacon and other writers. Her decipherments "discovered" that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth, heir to the throne, and the author of the works of Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, and Robert Burton. Gallup also published the play The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn which was supposed to have been hidden in cipher-form in Bacon/Shakespeare's works.Elizabeth Gallup, Concerning the bi- literal cypher of Francis Bacon discovered in his works, Howard publishing co.
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11), who writes: "His decipherments now seem somewhat negligible, his photographs and drawings well below the standards of achieved by Maudslay and Maler." See also summation by Coe (1992, pp.128–129). yet he is still regarded as an important contributor to the field.
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Witzel published Michael Witzel publications list Harvard University website articles criticizing what he calls "spurious interpretations" of Vedic textspeople.fas.harvard.edu, Autochthonous Aryans and decipherments of Indus inscriptions such as that of N.S. Rajaram.flonnet.com , pdf flonnet.com Rama's Realm: Indocentric Rewritings of Early South Asian Archaeology and History.
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Young's claims that the new decipherments were merely a corroboration of his own method, meant that Champollion would have to publish more of his data to make clear the degree to which his own progress built on a systematicity that was not found in Young's work. He realized that he would have to make it apparent to all that his was a total system of decipherment, whereas Young had merely deciphered a few words. Over the next year he published a series of booklets about the Egyptian gods, including some decipherments of their names. Building on his progress, Champollion now began to study other texts in addition to the Rosetta stone, studying a series of much older inscriptions from Abu Simbel.
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In a few cases, a multilingual artifact has been necessary to facilitate decipherment, the Rosetta Stone being the classic example. Statistical techniques provide another pathway to decipherment, as does the analysis of modern languages derived from ancient languages in which undeciphered texts are written. Archaeological and historical information is helpful in verifying hypothesized decipherments.
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Among the Hurrian texts from Ugarit are the oldest known instances of written music, dating from c. 1400 BCE.A reconstruction by Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin of the only substantially complete hymn may be heard at the Urkesh webpage, though this is only one of at least five "rival decipherments of the notation, each yielding entirely different results". West 1994, 161.
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His attempted decipherments were based on ideographic rather than linguistic principles, and he was a staunch critic of all attempts to propose phonetic readings. In his later years, he resisted the notion that the glyphs have a phonetic component, as put forward by Russian linguist Yuri Knorozov. Thompson forcefully criticised Knorozov's research, which discouraged the majority of the field from taking the latter's work seriously.John Ferguson Harris, Stephen K. Stearns. 1997.
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The project ended with his death in 1924. Nothing was found. The American art collector Walter Conrad Arensberg (1878–1954) believed that Bacon had concealed messages in a variety of ciphers, relating to a secret history of the time and the esoteric secrets of the Rosicrucians, in the Shakespearean works. He published a variety of decipherments between 1922 and 1930, concluding finally that, although he had failed to find them, there certainly were concealed messages.
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American Oriental Society, 1950. Through deductions, Grotefend was able to figure out the cuneiform characters that are part of Darius, Darius's father Hystaspes, and Darius's son Xerxes. Grotefend's contribution to Old Persian is unique in that he did not have comparisons between Old Persian and known languages, as opposed to the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Rosetta Stone. All his decipherments were done by comparing the texts with known history.
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They also located the tomb of Ramesses the Great, but it was badly looted. It was here that Champollion first received news of Young's campaign to vindicate himself as the decipherer of the hieroglyphs and to discredit Champollion's decipherments. He received this news only a few days after Young's death in London. The expedition arrived back in Cairo in late September 1829 where the expedition bought 10,000 francs worth of antiquities, a budget extended to them by minister Rochefoucauld.
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His grammar of Ancient Egyptian was published posthumously. During his life as well as long after his death intense discussions over the merits of his decipherment were carried out among Egyptologists. Some faulted him for not having given sufficient credit to the early discoveries of Young, accusing him of plagiarism, and others long disputed the accuracy of his decipherments. But subsequent findings and confirmations of his readings by scholars building on his results gradually led to general acceptance of his work.
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American Oriental Society, 1950. This, related to the known chronology of the Achaemenid and the relative sizes of each royal names, allowed Grotefend to figure out the cuneiform characters that are part of Darius, Darius's father Hystaspes, and Darius's son Xerxes. Grotefend's contribution to Old Persian is unique in that he did not have comparisons between Old Persian and known languages, as opposed to the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Rosetta Stone. All his decipherments were done by comparing the texts with known history.
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Except in the cramped section, when there are overstrikes, the inner symbol overlies the outer symbol. Jean Faucounau has proposed a reconstruction of the scribe's movements, which would also require an inward direction; Yves Duhoux says that any outward reading may be discarded. Despite this consensus, there are still a few such attempted decipherments (See Phaistos Disc decipherment claims). In addition to the question of the directionality of the text on the disc itself, different viewpoints are held as to how the Phaistos Disc characters should be displayed when transcribed into text.
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It came to a point that B-Dienst believed if the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park could read Enigma, they would have extensively improved their own codes and cyphers during the course of the war. :The measures so far taken would not be satisfactory (German: Nicht Genüge Tun) given an English discovery of German decipherments. Since British code upgrades had been intermittent, B-Dienst believed that Naval Enigma was not being read. Not even the introduction of Naval Cypher No. 5 with the Stencil Subtractor system could change their mind.
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This hiatus in activity at Tikal was long unexplained until later epigraphic decipherments identified that the period was prompted by Tikal's comprehensive defeat at the hands of Calakmul and the Caracol polity in AD 562, a defeat that seems to have resulted in the capture and sacrifice of the king of Tikal.Webster 2002, p.262. The badly eroded Altar 21 at Caracol described how Tikal suffered this disastrous defeat in a major war in April 562.Historical Dictionary of Mesoamerica by Walter Robert Thurmond Witschey and Clifford T. Brown, p. 313.
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Duchesne-Guillemin's reconstruction may be heard at the Urkesh webpage, though this is only one of at least five "rival decipherments of the notation, each yielding entirely different results".M[artin] L[itchfield] West, "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts", Music and Letters 75, no. 2 (May 1994): 161–79, citation on 161. In addition to West and Duchesne-Guillemin ("Les problèmes de la notation hourrite", Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale 69, no. 2 (1975): 159–73; "Sur la restitution de la musique hourrite", Revue de Musicologie 66, no.
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While further discussion of the books by Catholics was officially forbidden, some Spanish scholars continued to maintain the authenticity of the texts through till the 19th century. The Lead Books were kept in the Vatican, but eventually returned to the Abbey of the Sacromonte in the year 2000. The Church authorities in Granada continue to forbid scholarly access however, on the grounds that the official prohibition remains in force. Current studies depend on the various (often partial and highly contradictory) transcripts and translations made at the time of the books' discovery, and on some independent decipherments produced by Vatican Arabists.
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By 1851, Hincks and Rawlinson could read 200 Akkadian signs. They were soon joined by two other decipherers: young German-born scholar Julius Oppert, and versatile British Orientalist William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1857, the four men met in London and took part in a famous experiment to test the accuracy of their decipherments. Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, gave each of them a copy of a recently discovered inscription from the reign of the Assyrian emperor Tiglath-Pileser I. A jury of experts was impaneled to examine the resulting translations and assess their accuracy.
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Indus script refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Indus Valley Civilization (which spanned modern-day Pakistan and North India) used between 2600 and 1900 BC. In spite of many attempts at decipherments and claims, it is as yet undeciphered. The term 'Indus script' is mainly applied to that used in the mature Harappan phase, which perhaps evolved from a few signs found in early Harappa after 3500 BC,Whitehouse, David (1999). "'Earliest writing' found" BBC and was followed by the mature Harappan script. The script is written from right to left,(Lal 1966) and sometimes follows a boustrophedonic style.
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Linguists are doubtful whether the inscription is sufficiently long to be unambiguously interpreted. It is possible that one of these decipherments is correct, and that, without further material in the same script, we will never know which. Mainstream consensus tends towards the assumption of a syllabic script, possibly mixed with ideogram, like the known scripts of the epoch (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Anatolian hieroglyphs, Linear B). Some approaches attempt to establish a connection with known scripts, either the roughly contemporary Cretan hieroglyphs or Linear A native to Crete, or Egyptian or Anatolian hieroglyphics. Solutions postulating an independent Aegean script have also been proposed.
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Niebuhr's first book, Beschreibung von Arabien, was published in Copenhagen in 1772, the Danish government providing subsidies for the engraving and printing of its numerous illustrations. This was followed in 1774 and 1778 by the first two volumes of Niebuhr's Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegender Ländern. These works (particularly the one published in 1778), and most specifically the accurate copies of the cuneiform inscriptions found at Persepolis, were to prove to be extremely important to the decipherment of cuneiform writing. Before Niebuhr's publication, cuneiform inscriptions were often thought to be merely decorations and embellishments, and no accurate decipherments or translations had been made up to that point.
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It contained his entire theory and method, including classifications of signs and their decipherments, and also a grammar including how to decline nouns and conjugate verbs. But it was marred by the still tentative nature of many readings, and Champollion's conviction that the hieroglyphs could be read directly in Coptic, whereas in fact they represented a much older stage of the language which differs in many ways from Coptic. Jacques's son, Aimé-Louis (1812–94), wrote a biography of the two brothers, and he and his sister Zoë Champollion were both interviewed by Hermine Hartleben, whose major biography of Champollion was published in 1906. Champollion's decipherment remained controversial even after his death.
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Young was further disheartened because Champollion at no point recognized his work as having provided the platform from which decipherment had finally been reached. He grew increasingly angry with Champollion, and shared his feelings with his friends who encouraged him to rebut with a new publication. When by a stroke of luck a Greek translation of a well-known demotic papyrus came into his possession later that year, he did not share that important finding with Champollion. In an anonymous review of the lettre Young attributed the discovery of the hieratic as a form of hieroglyphs to de Sacy and described Champollion's decipherments merely as an extension of Åkerblad and Young's work.
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The recognition of the principles behind graphic variation and structure helped lead to a number of breakthroughs. Stuart proposed the decipherments of many new syllables and logograms in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn provided a more firm basis for a new wave of linguistic analyses of Maya texts during the 1990s and early 2000s. Stuart has also contributed a number of studies of Maya art, history and religion, especially at the sites of Copán, Palenque, Tikal, La Corona, San Bartolo and Xultun. in the late 1990s he produced a new interpretation of the history surrounding the Teotihuacan's "arrival" to the Maya area in 378 CE, proposing this was a military overthrow of the local Tikal king, and the establishment of a new political order.
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Due to the lack of an accessible rongorongo corpus for comparison, it was not apparent that several of the rongorongo glyphs illustrated in Hevesy's publications were spurious.Fischer 1997a:147 ff Despite the fact that both scripts were undeciphered (as they are to this day), separated by half the world and half of history ( and 4000 years), and had no known intermediate stages, Hevesy's ideas were taken seriously enough in academic circles to prompt a 1934 Franco- Belgian expedition to Easter Island led by Lavachery and Métraux to debunk them (Métraux 1939). The Indus Valley connection was published as late as 1938 in such respected anthropological journals as Man. At least a score of decipherments have been claimed since then, none of which have been accepted by other rongorongo epigraphers.
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Other early supporters of the phonetic approach championed by Knorozov included Michael D. Coe and David Kelley, and whilst initially they were in a clear minority, more and more supporters came to this view as further evidence and research progressed. Through the rest of the decade and into the next, Proskouriakoff and others continued to develop the theme, and using Knorozov's results and other approaches began to piece together some decipherments of the script. A major breakthrough came during the first round table or Mesa Redonda conference at the Maya site of Palenque in 1973, when using the syllabic approach those present (mostly) deciphered what turned out to be a list of former rulers of that particular Maya city-state. Subsequent decades saw many further such advances, to the point now where quite a significant portion of the surviving inscriptions can be read.
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The disc was discovered in 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in the Minoan palace-site of Phaistos, and features 241 tokens, comprising 45 distinct signs, which were apparently made by pressing hieroglyphic "seals" into a disc of soft clay, in a clockwise sequence spiraling toward the center of the disk. The Phaistos Disc captured the imagination of amateur and professional archaeologists, and many attempts have been made to decipher the code behind the disc's signs. While it is not clear that it is a script, most attempted decipherments assume that it is; most additionally assume a syllabary, others an alphabet or logography. Attempts at decipherment are generally thought to be unlikely to succeed unless more examples of the signs are found, as it is generally agreed that there is not enough context available for a meaningful analysis.
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Kaufman and John Justeson also claim to have deciphered a substantial part of the text written in Isthmian script (called also by them and some others 'Epi-Olmec') which appears on La Mojarra Stela 1, based upon their deciphering of the text as representing an archaic Mixe–Zoquean language. Both of these claims have been criticized: Michael D. Coe and David Stuart argue that the surviving corpus of the few known examples of Isthmian inscriptions is insufficient to securely ground any proposed decipherment. Their attempt to apply Kaufman's and Justeson's decipherments to other extant Isthmian material failed to produce any meaningful results. Wichmann (1995) criticizes certain proposed Mixe–Zoquean loans into other Mesoamerican languages as being only Zoquean, not Mixean, which would put the period of borrowing much later than the Proto-Mixe Zoquean time-frame in which the Olmec culture was at its height.
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Modern research into the Tangut languages began in the late 19th century and early 20th century when S. W. Bushell, Gabriel Devéria, and Georges Morisse separately published decipherments of a number of Tangut characters found on Western Xia coins, in a Chinese-Tangut bilingual inscription on a stele at Wuwei, Gansu, and in a copy of the Tangut translation of the Lotus Sutra. The majority of extant Tangut texts were excavated at Khara-Khoto in 1909 by Pyotr Kozlov, and the script was identified as that of the Tangut state of Xixia. Such scholars as Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov, Ishihama Juntaro (石濱純太郎), Berthold Laufer, Luo Fuchang (羅福萇), Luo Fucheng (羅福成), and Wang Jingru (王靜如) have contributed to research on the Tangut language. The most significant contribution was made by the Russian scholar Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky (1892–1937), who compiled the first Tangut Dictionary and reconstructed the meaning of a number of Tangut grammatical particles, thus making it possible to actually read and understand Tangut texts.
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