![]() And this is a book that very much celebrates that impulse.” Read more. I love crossword puzzles, figuring out all the clues and getting the whole puzzle exactly right. In Lost Languages, Andrew Robinson reports from the front lines of the global efforts now under way to crack the Meroitic hieroglyphs of ancient Nubia, the Etruscan alphabet, the Indus Valley Sealstones, the Zapotec scriptthe earliest in the Americasand five other major 'lost languages. It’s really a book for people who love not necessarily the history of any particular decipherment, but the idea of decipherment as a code-cracking exercise. Andrew Robinson has now followed up his beautifully illustrated The Story of Writing with a highly appropriate sequel-Lost Languages, on undeciphered. In the rest of the book Robinson goes on to talk about decipherments that haven’t been successful and scripts that haven’t yet been deciphered: Linear A, the ancient Mesoamerican script called Zapotec, and Rongorongo, the Easter Island script, just to name a few that he goes through. Robinson begins by outlining three successful decipherments: the decipherment of hieroglyphics, the decipherment of Linear B, the script used in the Bronze Age by the Mycenaean Greeks, and the decipherment of the Mayan glyphs. ![]() If you want stories about heroes, here they are. ![]() “My shorthand title for this book is ‘the pantheon of decipherers’ because Robinson focuses so insistently on the impassioned geniuses at the centre of various decipherments.
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