|
Maybe it's the possibility of "speaking
with the dead," of hearing the voices of long-silent
peoples and civilization. Perhaps it's the puzzle solver's
relish for the challenges posed by breaking codes. Whatever
the reasons, undeciphered ancient scripts have long tantalized
the public. Lost Languages investigates the most
famous examples, leading us back to a far-distant past obscured
by the ravages of time and haunted by code breakers hungry
for glory.
The book begins with an incisive description
of decipherment techniques and tells the stories of three
great decipherments: Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 19th century,
the Mayan glyphs of Central America, and the Linear B clay
tablets of the Minoan civilization of Crete in the 20th
century. Then it tackles the important scripts still awaiting
their decipherers.
Perhaps the greatest challenge today is
the Indus script. Found on exquisitely beautiful seal stones,
pottery, and copper tablets excavated in Pakistan and India,
it is the only writing of the four "first" civilizations
that cannot be read. Unraveled, it would not only break
the millennia-long silence of the impressive Indus Valley
civilization, it would also shed new light on the origins
of the Indo-European ancestors of the modern West.
Then there are the Etruscans, who have spellbound
the imagination ever since Renaissance times. Builders of
sensational tombs and drinkers of wine, they were the cultural
conduit through which the Greek alphabet reached Rome and
hence the rest of Europe. And yet the language spoken by
the Etruscans remains wrapped in mystery; if penetrated,
it could reveal the history of a pre-Roman society almost
as great as ancient Greece.
And on isolated Easter Island, the exotic
Rongorongo script has long been an irresistible magnet for
ambitious decipherers. Inscribed on wood with sharks' teeth
and as enigmatic as the island's arresting stone faces,
these texts are the only writing in pre-colonial Oceania.
They definitely contain a lunar calendar and may tell the
story of the origins of humankind in the Pacific Ocean.
How old is Rongorongo? No one knows for sure.
The struggle to decipher these three scripts
and six others -- including the notorious Phaistos disc
of Crete (the world's first typewritten document, dated
c. 1700 BC) and the Zapotec script of Mexico (the first
writing system in the Americas) -- is recounted with extraordinary
depth and erudition in this lavishly illustrated book. In
Lost Languages, Robinson reports from the front lines
of scholarship, where obsession, genius, occasional delusion,
and sometimes bitter rivalry are de rigueur among
the intriguing cast of modern characters who are currently
competing for the rare honor of cracking these ancient codes
-- and giving voice to forgotten worlds.
Andrew Robinson is the literary editor
of the Times Higher Education Supplement (London.
His many books include The Story of Writing: Alphabets,
Hieroglyphs and Pictograms, the award-winning Earthshock,
and The Shape of the World: The Mapping and Discovery
of the Earth, the book of a six-part television series
shown all over the world.
|
