Forgotten Scripts

Fülszöveg

published by Penguin Books
'A remarkably clear exposition of the history of decipherment and an account of the people involved' - David Holloway in the Daily Telegraph Professor Cyrus Gordon has himself made considerable contributions to the decipherment of ancient scripts. Here he combines professional sympathy with a readable style to describe the tortuous efforts of his predecessors in an exacting field. His account covers not only the prodigious genius of Champollion, who deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone; Grotefend's partial solution of Old Persian cuneiform and Henry Rawlinson's adventurous translation of the vast inscription on the rock-face at Behistun; and Ventris's decipherment of the Cretan Linear B; but also the inspired insights and obstinate errors of many other scholars struggling with texts in Sumerian, Hittite, Ugaritic and other ancient languages.
The frustrations of tackling an unknown language in an unknown script, the formidable... Tovább

Fülszöveg

published by Penguin Books
'A remarkably clear exposition of the history of decipherment and an account of the people involved' - David Holloway in the Daily Telegraph Professor Cyrus Gordon has himself made considerable contributions to the decipherment of ancient scripts. Here he combines professional sympathy with a readable style to describe the tortuous efforts of his predecessors in an exacting field. His account covers not only the prodigious genius of Champollion, who deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone; Grotefend's partial solution of Old Persian cuneiform and Henry Rawlinson's adventurous translation of the vast inscription on the rock-face at Behistun; and Ventris's decipherment of the Cretan Linear B; but also the inspired insights and obstinate errors of many other scholars struggling with texts in Sumerian, Hittite, Ugaritic and other ancient languages.
The frustrations of tackling an unknown language in an unknown script, the formidable requirements in knowledge, the importance of informed guesswork and intellectual flexibility are made very clear in this history of a pursuit which, in less than two centuries, has pushed the frontier of history back by two millennia. The cover, designed by Germano Facetti, shows, from top to bottom, Etruscan, Punic, Linear Class B, Linear Class A, Hittite hieroglyphic, Old Persian cuneiform, Egyptian demotic and Egyptian hieroglyphic scripts. Vissza