Lost in Translation The Strange Story of Ancient Scripts and the People Who Cracked Them

Rajesh Rao is a computer scientist, and a particular kind of message keeps turning up in his inbox. The senders write to say they have cracked an ancient script that has puzzled scholars for generations. Many of them are engineers. They are confident, sometimes triumphant, and almost always wrong.

Rao has spent years studying the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley, so he is an obvious person to write to. What interests me about those emails is the question they raise. Anyone can look at a row of strange symbols and announce what they mean. What separates a decipherment from a very elaborate guess?

The history of this subject gives some answers. Over about two centuries, a handful of people took scripts that nobody alive could read and made them speak again. Some were professors. One was a pharaoh-obsessed prodigy who learned a dozen languages as a teenager. One was an architect who did codebreaking as a hobby. One was a classics teacher who cut her index cards from cigarette cartons. Their methods differed, but all of them worked within the same discipline. A reading counts only when it keeps working on new material. A clever idea that explains a few signs does not meet that standard.

Let's begin with the most famous case, a slab of dark stone with three kinds of writing on it.