How do people decipher text
Since ancient languages are luckily most of the time not encrypted scientists can use symbols or chains of symbols which occur frequently in many texts to try to decipher its meaning. As /u/Neo63 stated frequency analysis is a major part of decryption. Scientists thought for a century that hieroglyphics are ideograms though later research showed that they are mainly phonograms) mixed with few ideograms.ĭeciphering ancient languages can be seen as a type of cryptoanalysis as in 'I have a bunch of symbols and I want to know their meaning'. This example is also great to elaborate the difficulties with deciphering ancient languages: Just because you know the translation, you cannot read the unknown text. Second: I know that this is already marked as answered, but I wanted to share my knowledge from this book which is awesome btw :) I'm taking a class on the History of Science right now (from the Babylonians and Ancient Egyptians up to the 17th century), so we learned a lot about how knowledge got passed along.įirst: English is not my first language. Some things may have been lost for a while, like how we needed the Rosetta Stone to understand Ancient Egyptian. Later on those Arabic translations were translated into Latin.
A lot of Ancient Greek texts actually came to us through the Arabic translation movement. Things got translated over and over again to newer languages.
#How do people decipher text how to
New civilizations were interested in reading what was written by slightly older civilizations that weren't so old everyone forgot how to read them. This sort of thing could be applied to all kinds of writing. For example, the Ancient Greeks used Babylonian star charts, but they translated them to Greek. Slightly newer civilizations made use of these same astronomical charts. Specifically, the Sumerian number system was used in astronomy a lot.