The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script [Paperback]

Maurice Pope (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1999

The desire to solve mysteries is as old as humanity and the spell of an unknown writing has always been particularly potent. This is a discussion of the contributions to the science of decipherment made by theorists such as Leibnitz and by brilliant practitioners of it from Champollion to Ventris. Maurice Pope examines the intellectual developments that lead to their outstanding achievements, and describes the process of decipherment, providing quotations from their original publications and many examples of their drawings, tables and diagrams. Among the scripts the author analyses are the Palmyra script, Sassanid Persian, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Persian cuniform, Akkadian cuneiform, the Cypriot syllabary, Hittitte hieroglyphic, the Ugaritic alphabet and Mycenaean Linear B.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A concise, well-organized study that deserves high marks. -- Library Journal

The finest work of its kind . . . a delight to read. -- Science

About the Author

Maurice Pope, formerly Professor of Classics at the University of Cape Town, has contributed numerous articles to learned journals and is author or coauthor of several books on classical subjects.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson; Revised edition (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 050028105X
• ISBN-13: 978-0500281055
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #509,533 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very nice overview of the decipherement of languages, April 27, 2000

By 

Joerg Colberg (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script (Paperback)

How do people decipher old scripts? As a person with very badly legible handwriting I have always been interested in how scripts are deciphered. For the case of my handwriting I learned about how it is done from people who told me. Assume a letter has to be deciphered. First of all, the language I use is known to people who try to read the letter. I was told people usually start with words they can read or words which are obvious. From those, they seem to get an understanding of how characters are written. The knowledge of these characters then helps them to decipher other words and to learn more and more characters. Quite obviously, deciphering Egyptian or Maya script is somewhat different from this. Apart from the fact, that my hand writing is not nearly as beautiful as, say, old Maya script, there seems to be the language problem: The person who tries to decipher Maya script does not speak the language of the Mayas.

Or so I thought. However, after reading this book I was amazed about how similar the decipherment of my handwriting and of, say, Maya script is. As it turns out, the language of the script has to be known! That came as a surprise to me when I started to read the book. How would anybody know the language of ancient Egypt? As it turns out, in many cases, old languages survived or are the progenitors of languages known today. In the case of Egyptian, there is a language called Coptic which is still spoken today and which is very close to ancient Egyptian. In addition, the decipherment is very often made much easier by documents which contain the same text in more than one language. Pope's book explains in very nice details how the knowledge of Coptic and the existence of the so-called Rosetta Stone made the decipherement of Egyptian hieroglyphs possible. In a similar fashion, he talks about many other old scripts like Linear B, Cuneiform etc.

In my opinion, the book has a few small flaws, though. First of all, the first chapter which deals with older ideas of what Egyptian hieroglyphs might mean is incredibly boring because it is so repetitive. In addition, Pope mentions many and in fact too many contributors of the decipherement of any of the language so that the reader (or at least me) is left somewhat confused about who did what etc. But these flaws are really only minor and if I could I'd give this book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Story of Decipherment, August 5, 2010

By 

David T. Melnick "BoGator68" (Tallahassee, FL, USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script (Paperback)

Thanx for the decipherment story. Specially, since it's fr/ Egypt to the Mayans...2 peoples that I am indelved in now.