Records, Writing, and Decipherment

Abstract

Written records together with material remains derived from excavations form the main bases for our understanding of past civilizations and their underlying language systems. There is no systematic treatment of written records, and little attention has been paid to the interrelationship between ancient writing and language. Full systems of writing express language at two levels—morphological and phonetic—which give rise to three basic writing systems types—logo-syllabic, syllabic, and alphabetic. Four categories of decipherment—based on our relative knowledge of the writing system and the language—are discussed: known writing/known language; unknown writing/known language; known writing/unknown language; and unknown writing/unknown language. From a cryptanalytic point of view there are two general decipherment methods: 1) utilization of external information to determine probable contents (e.g., bilingual texts,) and 2) internal information from an analysis of the text itself (structure and typology). The assumption of the underlying language is critical for deciphering procedures and provides the test of successful decipherment.