07/10/2020

How were ancient languages discovered?

Pedra de Rosetta – Hans Hillewaert/Wikimedia Commons

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S.Paulo.

Throughout history, great civilizations have emerged, flourished, and ultimately faded away, leaving behind fascinating cultural legacies. The written legacy is especially important for the detail it can provide about the lives of these peoples, their joys and frustrations. But the secrets of many of these writings have been forgotten over the centuries, rendering their texts incomprehensible.

The German secret codes generated in World War II by machines like the Enigma were designed to be difficult to decipher.

But the enemy knew quite a bit about them, such as that they were written in German and dealt with war. This, along with other information, such as manuals captured on German submarines, was crucial in "breaking" these codes.

In the case of ancient writings, whose cultures and languages have long been lost, this information does not exist.

What do the symbols mean? Are they ideograms, representing ideas and objects, or phonetic particles, like our letters and syllables? What sounds do they have? What are the texts about? What language are they in?

To make matters worse, we typically have few texts available. This also explains why, unlike in cryptography, the computer plays a smaller role in interpreting dead writings, which remains a domain of human intellect.

The Etruscans, who preceded the Romans on the Italian peninsula, used the Greek alphabet, which we know well. We know how to "read" the words they left written. But we have no idea what they mean. And since practically everything we have in Etruscan consists of funerary inscriptions, it is likely that we will never know.

The first important case was that of the hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt, deciphered from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which contains identical texts in Egyptian and Greek—the latter being well known.

'Dictionaries' like this one are rare and insufficient: progress only occurred when J.-F. Champollion hypothesized, in 1822, that the Egyptian language was related to the Coptic language, and used his knowledge of that language to interpret the text inscribed on the Stone.

Cuneiform writing from the Middle East followed.

In 1835, H. Rawlinson found inscriptions with identical texts in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. None of them were known, but by 1849 the Persian had already been deciphered, thanks to the work of Rawlinson, E. Burnouf, and C. Lassen. Rawlinson then used this "Rosetta Stone" to decipher Babylonian and Elamite.

The discovery of the so-called Library of Ashurbanipal, the royal archive of the Assyrian empire, drew attention to Akkadian writing, a precursor to Babylonian script.

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website.