In philology and linguistics, decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of the symbols found in extinct languages and/or alphabets.Trask, R.L (2000). The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, p. 82 ("The process of determining the relation between an extinct and unknown writing system and the language it represents. Strictly, decipherment is the elucidation of the script—that is, determining the values of the written characters") Decipherment is possible with respect to languages and scripts. One can also study or try to decipher how spoken languages that no longer exist were once pronounced, or how living languages used to be pronounced in prior eras.
Maurice Pope wrote that "Decipherments are by far the most glamorous achievements of scholarship… It is also a key to further knowledge, opening a treasure-vault of history through which for countless centuries no human mind has wandered." Pope described the three most famous as the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts, the decipherment of cuneiform and the decipherment of Linear B. A notable decipherment in recent years is that of the Linear Elamite script, in 2022. Today, at least a dozen languages remain undeciphered.
Historically speaking, decipherments do not come suddenly through single individuals who "crack" ancient scripts. Instead, they emerge from the incremental progress brought about by a broader community of researchers.
Decipherment should not be confused with cryptanalysis, which aims to decipher special written codes or ciphers used in intentionally concealed secret communication (especially during war). It should also not be confused with determining the meaning of ambiguous text in a known language (interpretation).
History Interest in ancient scripts and dead languages began to arise by the Renaissance, if not earlier. Extensive information began to be collected about these scripts in the 16th and 17th centuries, and a typology of writing was established in the 17th century. The first serious decipherments, however, did not take place until the 18th century. In 1754, Swinton and Barthélemy independently deciphered the Aramaic script as represented in Palmyrene inscriptions, the first "dead" language to be deciphered.
Between 1787-91, Silvestre de Sacy deciphered the Pahlavi scripts, which was the script used in Ancient Persia to write down the Middle Iranian language used in the Sasanian empire. Both decipherments relied on bilingual texts where Greek was included as the second script. It was also in the 18th century when the methodological framework for deciphering scripts and languages began to be established. For example, in 1714, Leibniz advocated that parallel content in bilingual inscriptions could be specified by correlating where personal names occur in both inscriptions.
By the 19th century, the prerequisites for decipherment began to become widely available. These included extensive knowledge about the scripts themselves, adequate editions of known texts from that script, philological skills, and the ability to reconstruct linguistic forms from the limited available evidence. The 19th century saw two major successes in decipherment: that of Egyptian hieroglyphic and cuneiform.
Timeline of decipherments Script decipheredName of scholarDateStaveless Runes (disputed as "decipherment")Magnus Celsius1674Cipher runes (disputed as "decipherment")Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík1740sPalmyrene alphabet (described as the first "dead" language decipherment)Jean-Jacques Barthélemy1754Phoenician alphabetJean-Jacques Barthélemy1758Pahlavi scriptAntoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy1791Demotic scriptThomas Young1816Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Decipherment)Jean-François Champollion1822Old Persian Cuneiform (Decipherment)Georg Friedrich Grotefend, Eugène Burnouf, and Henry Rawlinson1823Brahmi, KharosthiJames Prinsep1837Nabataean scriptEduard Friedrich Ferdinand Beer1840Libyco-Berber script (almost fully)Louis Félicien de Saulcy1843Mesopotamian CuneiformEdward Hincks1857Cypriot syllabaryGeorge Smith and Samuel Birch, et al.1871Old TurkicVilhelm Thomsen1893Oracle Bone scriptWáng Yìróng, Liú È, Sūn Yíràng, et al. 1899Safaitic scriptEnno Littmann1901Hittite CuneiformBedřich Hrozný1915Northeastern Iberian scriptManuel Gómez-Moreno1922Ugaritic alphabetHans Bauer and Édouard Paul Dhorme"Anatomy of a Decipherment", http://images.library.wisc.edu/WI/EFacs/transactions/WT1966/reference/wi.wt1966.adcorre.pdf "1930Tangut scriptAleksei Ivanovich Ivanov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky, et al.1930sLinear BMichael Ventris, John Chadwick, and Alice Kober1952MayaYuri Knorozov and Tatiana Proskouriakoff, et al. 1950s"Enlarged opening script" of Ravenna (variant of the Latin alphabet)Jan-Olof Tjäder1955Caucasian Albanian alphabetZaza Alexidze2001Linear ElamiteFrançois Desset2022
Undeciphered scripts Rongorongo (Decipherment of rongorongo) Indus script Cretan hieroglyphs Byblos syllabary Linear A Cypro-Minoan syllabary Espanca Numidian language Unnamed languages Phaistos Disc Rohonc Codex Voynich Manuscript
Categories Gelb and Whiting classify the four situations of an undeciphered language and how difficult decipherment will be in each of them:
Type O: known writing and known language. Although decipherment in this case is trivial, useful information can be gleaned when a known language is written in an alphabet other than the one it is commonly written in. Studying the writing of the Phoenician or Sumerian languages in the Greek alphabet allows information about pronunciation and vocalization to be gleaned that cannot be obtained when studying the expression of these languages in their normal writing system. Type I: unknown writing and known language. Deciphered languages in this category include Phoenician, Ugaritic, Cypriot, and Linear B. In this situation, alphabetic systems are the easiest to decipher, followed by syllabic languages, and finally the most difficult being logo-syllabic. Type II: known writing and unknown language. An example is Linear A. Strictly speaking, this situation is not one of decipherment but of linguistic analysis. Decipherment in this category is considered extremely difficult to achieve on the basis of internal information only. Type III: unknown writing and unknown language. Examples include the Archanes script and the Archanes formula, Phaistos disk, Cretan hieroglyphs, and Cypro-Minoan syllabary. When this situation occurs in an isolated culture and without the availability of outside information, decipherment is typically considered impossible.
Methods There is no single recipe or linear method for decipherment, however: instead, philologists and linguists must rely on a set of heuristic devices that have been established. Broadly, it is important to be familiar with the relevant texts where the script or language occurs in, access to accurate drawings or photographs of these texts, information about their relative chronology, and background information on where the texts occur in (their geography, perhaps being found in the context of a funerary monument, etc).
These methods can be divided into approaches utilizing external or internal information.
External information Many successful decipherments have proceeded from the discovery of external information, a common example being through the use of multilingual inscriptions, such as the Rosetta Stone (with the same text in three scripts: Demotic, hieroglyphic, and Greek) that enabled the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic. In principle, multilingual text may be insufficient for a decipherment as translation is not a linear and reversible process, but instead represents an encoding of the message in a different symbolic system. Translating a text from one language into a second, and then from the second language back into the first, rarely reproduces exactly the original writing. Likewise, unless a significant number of words are contained in the multilingual text, limited information can be gleaned from it.
Internal information Internal approaches are multi-step: one must first ensure that the writing they are looking at represents real writing, as opposed to a grouping of pictorial representations or a modern-day forgery without further meaning. This is commonly approached with methods from the field of grammatology. Prior to decipherment of meaning, one can then determine the number of distinct graphemes (which, in turn, allows one to tell if the writing system is alphabetic, syllabic, or logo-syllabic; this is because such writing systems typically do not overlap in the number of graphemes they use), the sequence of writing (whether it be from left to right, right to left, top to bottom, etc.), and the determination of whether individual words are properly segmented when the alphabet is written (such as with the use of a space or a different special mark) or not. If a repetitive schematic arrangement can be identified, this can help in decipherment. For example, if the last line of a text has a small number, it can be reasonably guessed to be referring to the date, where one of the words means "year" and, sometimes, a royal name also appears. Another case is when the text contains many small numbers, followed by a word, followed by a larger number; here, the word likely means "total" or "sum". After one has exhausted the information that can be inferentially derived from probable content, they must transition to the systematic application of statistical tools. These include methods concerning the frequency of appearance of each symbol, the order in which these symbols typically appear, whether some symbols appear at the beginning or end of words, etc. There are situations where orthographic features of a language make it difficult if not impossible to decipher specific features (especially without certain outside information), such as when an alphabet does not express double consonants. Additional, and more complex methods, also exist. Eventually, the application of such statistical methods becomes exceedingly laborious, in which computers might be used to apply them automatically.
Computational approaches Computational approaches towards the decipherment of unknown languages began to appear in the late 1990s. Typically, there are two types of computational approaches used in language decipherment: approaches meant to produce translations in known languages, and approaches used to detect new information that might enable future efforts at translation. The second approach is more common, and includes things such as the detection of cognates or related words, discovery of the closest known language, word alignments, and more.
Artificial intelligence In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on methods utilizing artificial intelligence for the decipherment of lost languages, especially through natural language processing (NLP) methods. Proof-of-concept methods have independently re-deciphered Ugaritic and Linear B using data from similar languages, in this case Hebrew and Ancient Greek.
Large language models