The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script

by Maurice Pope

Speculation about Egyptian hieroglyphs began in the Renaissance; though sometimes fantastic, much of it was fascinating and fruitful. During the next two centuries European travelers in the Near East came home with increasingly accurate copies of the strange inscriptions to be found there. The great age of decipherment dawned in the mid-eighteenth century, at the time of the Enlightenment, with the Abbe Barthelemy's solution of the Palmyra script. The author discusses the contributions to the science of decipherment made by theorists and practitioners, examining the intellectual developments that led to their outstanding achievements. He explains the process of decipherment largely from the point of view of the practitioners themselves, but in a way that laypeople can follow. Among the scripts analyzed are the Palmyra script, Sassanid Persian, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Persian cuneiform, Akkadian cuneiform, the Cypriot syllabary, Hittite hieroglyphs, the Ugaritic alphabet, and Mycenaean Linear B. For this revised edition, the text has been brought up to date and a new section added on the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs.

Genres: History, Language, Linguistics, Nonfiction, Archaeology, Anthropology, Science

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[Hadley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Limited in that most the scripts discussed are from the Mediterranean or Middle East, and in that all but one of the decipherers covered are Western European men, but that was to be expected and this is an extremely through look at a series of complicated stories, vividly painting a picture of incremental discoveries and changes in intellectual climate that made them possible.

[Naessens · Rating 2 out of 5]

My rating may seem severe, but this is because the book does not tackle with the subjects I expected.
I wished the author had spent more time explaining how the alphabet are deciphered, how the language is translated and so on. This is only the case when he writes on Champollion's work and, as far as Aegean and Anatolian writing are concerned, with the work of Kober and Ventris. The rest of the chapter are mainly historical discoveries and failed attempt to recognize sign in scripts.
Furthermore, I find the style writing of Maurice Pope difficult to read. There are a lot of anecdotes, historical digressions, references to people or events that make it difficult to follow the progress of the decipherment. As a result, I often found myself lost at the end of a chapter wondering what has exactly been deciphered for this particular alphabet.
In this respect, the conclusion was one of the most interesting and well-written part : it recaps the difficulties in deciphering an unknown language, the necessary steps to identify, then decipher a new writing form that has proven the most effective thorugh history for the decipherment of different scripts.
I strongly recommend to read first the glossary of technical terms at the end of the book before reading the main chapters in order to facilitate one's understanding of the author's explanation.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a relatively interesting book, and I'm glad I read it, but it runs into several problems that make me think it's not necessarily worth it for many audiences.

(1) Despite the updates to the second edition, mostly in the form of a short postscript describing the decipherment of Carian (a Greek-like alphabet used for an Anatolian language) and of Mayan glyphs, which postdated its original publication, it is still fundamentally a book from 1975 and is outdated on many issues, including the increasingly strong evidence that the Semitic abjad is descended from Egyptian hieroglyphics.

(2) The book feels very unbalanced, with very long sections devoted to Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Aegean scripts (the latter more understandable given Maurice Pope's background as a linguist whose research focus was the Aegean scripts), and an unsatisfyingly-short description of the decipherment of cuneiform scripts. The Egyptian section, in particular, felt a bit wasted, since two-thirds of it (a quarter of the whole book) was devoted to describing how confused Renaissance and many Enlightenment scholars were about the nature of hieroglyphics, and their often-bizarre theories on its nature.

(3) Pope seems a bit confused about who his audience is and what they can be expected to know. This is fundamentally, mostly a popular history, which is fair enough, but he seems to assume his audience knows a lot more about how many of these scripts work, and doesn't bother to explain things that definitely should be explained about that in the context of explaining how they were deciphered.

[Paul Quick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decipherment versus Decryption of a script where the script is a foreign language fragment written in its natural manner or in a secretive manner. The author does a great job of describing the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics, Persian/Sumerian Cuneiform, Luvian (Hittite), Aegean (some still not translated like Linear A) but he hand-waves the translation of Mayan and kind of ignores Indus Valley, Chinese, Etruscan, Basque language efforts. He does not discuss any of languages of the people of Eo in ancient Vietnam. Good book and maybe one of the best yet written of its type but a better book should be written by some giant of this field. I heartedly recommend reading this book if your interest is in philology.

[Ian Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview for the interested general reader.

[Ramiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, a bit less about cuneiform and only a passing mention of the Maya.

[Mark A.]

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[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pope went into some detail about the way the various scripts were first broken-- usually by means of peoples' names, though in the case of Mayan it was the number system and months of the year, I think. It's kind of miraculous that heiroglyphics were understandable at all, given that the same symbol could be used as a syllable, a consonant, or a meaning, without any mark to show how it was being used.

[Victor Sonkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book, in scope, material, and tone. Tells every story with as much reverence and solemnity as it should be told, and never errs on this side of friendly coziness. A bit difficult, maybe, for those without any special interest in linguistic phenomena, but that's their personal deal. Its author's personal thoughts and feelings, expressed in lapidary notes, are especially endearing.

[Emily Cannings]

I really enjoyed this book it is something I am using for an essay for my degree. My interest was interest in the Egyptian hieroglyphic part and gave a great chronology of the history of hieroglyphics.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just re-read a chapter from what must be an older version of this book, - nothing about Maya and stopping at Linear A and B, ahead of an upcoming trip to Crete. Ever hopeful that further Linear A texts might be discovered.