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Extinct Languages
A noted linguist examines extinct languages, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the mysteries of as-yet undeciphered writings, in this scholarly work.While certain ancient languages were passed down continuously through the ages, many others were ignored for centuries. When scholars began to decipher these extinct languages in the early nineteenth century, they uncovered previously inaccessible riches of knowledge and history. Yet much work remains to be done on undeciphered scripts that continue to tantalize and perplex us today.In Extinct Languages, linguist Johannes Friedrich guides readers through the fascinating world of recovered systems of writing, including Egyptian and Hittite hieroglyphs, Babylonian cuneiform, and others. He also explains the methodology and principles behind the deciphering process that will one day crack ancient mysteries such as the Indus Valley script.
182 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1957
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 12, 2026
I didn't plan to buy this book, but it happened to jump at me as I was looking for something else. What's this? A ridiculously cheap ebook called "Extinct Languages" with beautiful rows of Egyptian hieroglyphs on the cover? Of course, I grabbed it.
I didn't plan to read it now, but here it was, staring at me from my Kindle library as I finished my previous read. As I opened it, it turned out to be relatively short (227 pages), so I decided to read it.
It soon became obvious that the book was written quite a while ago -- it was impossible not to notice this from the author's style and especially from his frequent mention of race. Examples like these two are all over the place:
The oldest identifiable inhabitants of the land were the Sumerians, an ancient civilized race of undetermined origin.
The unification of all of Babylonia was finally accomplished by Hammurabi of Babylon, an Akkadianized Amorite, the most brilliant monarch in Babylonian history, who made decisive the victory of the Semitic race over the Sumerians.
Indeed, German philologist Johannes Friedrich wrote this book 1954, and the English translation was first published in 1957. In English language Wikipedia he is referred to as "hittitologist" (a rather narrow specialization ;) ) and in German more generously as Altorientalist (alt is old, ancient).
So the book is very much a fruit of its time, which I found interesting as a historical artifact rather than annoying. It gives a wide review of extinct languages, mainly Middle Eastern and Mediterranean, and especially of the history of their decipherment. Being written by a professional Altorientalist, it often goes into more details and depth than a modern wide-audience book would. On the other hand, it is written with enough clarity and straightforwardness in order not to drive a non-specialist like me crazy.
As expected, the author begins with Egyptian hieroglyphs, the most popularized decipherment of all, about which I read more than once.
Still, it was good to be reminded about the basic principles of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing yet again:
A strong strain of conservatism was another factor that kept the Egyptians from discontinuing the use of the pictogram of a word once it had been adopted. In fact, they added phonetic signs also to word-signs which expressed words sufficiently by themselves. Thus, śḏm, “to hear,” was expressed with sufficient clarity by , the picture of an ear, but they nevertheless added the picture of an owl, denoting m, to it, making it. The word wr, “great,” was represented clearly by , the picture of a swallow, and yet the Egyptians liked to append the picture of a mouth, , representing an r, i.e.: . This was how the many pleonastic written symbols of the Egyptians came into existence. They never did get rid of this complicated mixture of different signs, in fact there were times when they just could not pile up enough pleonastic symbols to satisfy them.
Also, some of what Johannes Friedrich had to say about Champollion was either new to me or (more likely) had long vanished in the dark corners of my treacherous memory.
The man who was the first to succeed in actually deciphering the hieroglyphics was the young Frenchman Jean François Champollion (1790–1832) who, uncommonly gifted and mature at a very early age and raised as a prodigy, determined as a mere boy of eleven to become the decipherer of the hieroglyphics. But he too was unable to rid himself, for many long years, of the belief in a symbolism of those signs. But he prepared himself for his chosen life task by careful study. First of all, he learned Coptic, the language of the Christian Egyptians which is written in Greek characters, and which—as we know today—is quite unsuitable as a bridge to an understanding of the ancient tongue both because of its quite impoverished vocabulary and its strongly changed grammatical structure. Then he obtained reproductions of every accessible Egyptian inscription and papyrus, and at a cost of fifteen years of extremely tedious work, he compiled from them all the forms of the hieroglyphic signs, with their graphically simplified hieratic and demotic equivalents—but he did all this without yet daring proceed to the reading of one single character.
Let it be emphasized, however, in the words of Erman,** that “it was no well organized knowledge that he bequeathed to his successors at the time of his premature death (1832). He had ingeniously comprehended properly the words and sentences, but he never formulated a clear comprehension of the system of the script which he knew how to read.” A decipherer, who skips over scruples and difficulties ingeniously, and a philologist, who ponders his results carefully as he forges them into rules, are fundamentally different and must not be mistaken for each other. It should he, therefore, no surprise that Champollion’s decipherment was by no means universally accepted at first. For three more decades, even scientists were not willing to admit anything more than the fact that at best a few royal names could be deciphered, but they insisted that everything else was pure fantasy. Only in 1866 did the discovery of another bilingual inscription, the lengthy Decree of Canopus, bring scientific confirmation of a whole series of facts which Champollion had ingeniously discovered.
After Egyptian hieroglyphs, comes the juicy part -- the mysterious cuneiform writing, of which I knew close to nothing.
The cuneiform writing of the Near East is far less well known to the general public than are the hieroglyphics of Egypt. Even the people of antiquity no longer had any accurate notion of it, only very ancient Greece had known it as Assyria grammata, “Assyrian letters.”
At first the reader is presented with a brief historical and cultural overview.
the Sumerian-Babylonian religion with its ancient divine triad, Anu (god of the heavens), Enlil (god of the air and the earth) and Ea (god of the subterranean watery depths), with the goddess Ma or Ninursag, “Queen of the Gods,” as well as the younger triad, Sin (moon god), Shamash (sun god) and Adad (weather god), with the goddess Ishtar.
I've heard about Shamash the Sun God before, but I can't help being excited about him each time I see him mentioned because Shemesh is Hebrew for sun.;)
The book proceeds to tell fascinating tales about decipherment of different kinds of cuneiform writing -- it was used for many different languages, with the writing systems ranging from a combination of ideograms, syllables and determinatives(similar to the system used in Ancient Egyptian writing), to syllabic + determinatives, purely syllabic and even alphabetic.
The man who succeeded in making the Early Persian script really legible, beyond such rudimentary findings, however, was no trained Orientalist, but a young German high-school teacher, Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775–1853) of Göttingen. He was practically ignorant of Oriental languages, but he had practiced diligently the decipherment of artificially composed secret scripts. His situation was thus totally different from that of Champollion: Champollion spent fifteen years in painstaking studying and preliminary training, after which he succeeded almost despite expectations, whereas Grotefend plunged right into the project, without any great preliminary training, and without a bilingual inscription to go by, such as there were available for the study of Egyptian, and yet it took him a mere few weeks to score quite a considerable success. At any rate, however, Grotefend also had to have certain auxiliary data available, for no decipherment is feasible without some clues to go by. Also Grotefend recognized the separation mark and the three types of writing. And also he deduced that the first portion of each inscription was written in an alphabetic, not a syllabic, script because there often were as many as ten symbols between two successive separation marks, and the existence of words of ten syllables was an improbability.
The fact that Grotefend’s later activities no longer produced as happy results as his first decipherments is to be attributed not solely to his insufficient training as an Orientalist, but above all to the circumstance, emphasized by Grotefend himself, that a decipherer and an interpreter (i.e., a philologist) must not be mistaken for each other. His decipherment should have been developed and elaborated further by trained, professional Orientalists, but those were the very people who failed to give him the credit that was his due. In fact, the scientific journal of Göttingen did not even print the full report of his discovery, but merely a short item mentioning it. Only in 1815 was there published a detailed report in Heeren’s Ideen über die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Völker der alten Welt.* This is how it came about that his decipherment was given little attention and interest at first.
The difficulty was solved only when vocabularies of the ancient Babylonian savants were discovered in Nineveh, in which such ideographic methods of writing were explained. It was seen then that AN.AK was an ideographic symbol for the name of the god dNa-bi-um, SA.DU represented the word kudurru (boundary mark), SIS stood for naṣāru (to protect), the imperative form of which was uṣur, DI was the ideographic symbol for Šulmu (welfare)—thus DI-ma-nu stood for Šulmānu = gift of welcome—and BAR represented ašaridu (first). Generally speaking, without the grammatical, lexical and graphic lists prepared by the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians themselves on their language, the decipherment of the Babylonian cuneiform writing would probably have been a more laborious task than it actually was.
Of course, investigators less close to the subject still maintained an attitude of scepticism about polyphony and ideography, not known to them from the more familiar systems of writing, and consequently they still distrusted the new science. In order to settle the question of the reliability of the decipherment, the Royal Asiatic Society of London therefore resorted to a special expedient: In 1857, Rawlinson, Hincks, Fox Talbot and Oppert happened to be in London at the same time. All the four scholars were given a copy of a longer text which had just been discovered, with the request that they work on it independently from each other. Their letters were then opened in a formal meeting, and the Society was able to find with satisfaction that all the four solutions agreed in all their essential points. Thus the young science of Assyriology could now truly be said to stand on a firm foundation.
Many more extinct languages and their decipherments are discussed: from Etruscan to Proto-sinaitic. Needless to say, I have many more fascinating quotes to share, ad nauseam. I'll make them available as visible highlights (thank you for this cool feature, Kindle;)).
Then follows the chapter about the general methodology of decipherment, and after so many previous stories of specific decipherments, it all comes together quite well:
1)you are lucky if you can start from a bilingual or trilingual text, especially if these other languages
are already known; count the different symbols to establish if this is a syllabic, alphabetical or ideogramic writing system or a combination of those
2)look for names of people and geographical places; use your knowledge of everything from Latin and Greek to Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew etc.
3)use all kinds of available artifacts: mummy wrappings; clay tables; papyrus scrolls; tombstones; monuments; walls; tools; coins -- the more the merrier; the best, of course, is when you have dictionaries/grammars/textbooks written by the ancients themselves, but more often than not you have so little to go by that torn pieces one mummy's wrappings would be your best source (Etruscan)
4)work painstakingly and you might get lucky
5)sometimes you might even get it right!
And the very last chapter is about still undeciphered (in 1954) languages:
Our survey thus concludes, seemingly unsatisfactorily, with a series of unanswered questions and fanciful conjectures. In my opinion, however, it would not have been right for me to present only the great accomplishments of decipherment and to disregard the still unsolved problems. It is always good to see not only the seemingly momentous achievements, but also the limitations of knowledge. After all, there still remains the hope that one day also these limitations will be overcome and the solution of the seemingly insoluble problems will be achieved.
The undeciphered languages chapter made me wonder if my memory wasn't playing tricks on me: it mentioned both Linear A and Linear B as undeciphered, while it seemed to me that one of them had been cracked. And sure enough, Linear B deserved a special Appendix:
While the original German edition of this book was on the press, a very important accomplishment was made in the study of the writing of ancient Crete. Unless all appearances are deceptive, Michael Ventris, a young British architect, succeeded in deciphering the Cretan script known as Linear Class B. (cf. p. 164). We have learned, to our great surprise, that the language of these texts is an archaic form of the Achaean dialect of the Greek language, which thus was used not only in Pylos and Mycenae in Greece proper in the 13th century B.C., but also in Knossos, on the island of Crete, as far back as about 1400 B.C.
To summarize: in spite of being written in 1954, if you find ancient languages and their writing systems fascinating, this book is a treat.
Read in 2024.
I didn't plan to read it now, but here it was, staring at me from my Kindle library as I finished my previous read. As I opened it, it turned out to be relatively short (227 pages), so I decided to read it.
It soon became obvious that the book was written quite a while ago -- it was impossible not to notice this from the author's style and especially from his frequent mention of race. Examples like these two are all over the place:
The oldest identifiable inhabitants of the land were the Sumerians, an ancient civilized race of undetermined origin.
The unification of all of Babylonia was finally accomplished by Hammurabi of Babylon, an Akkadianized Amorite, the most brilliant monarch in Babylonian history, who made decisive the victory of the Semitic race over the Sumerians.
Indeed, German philologist Johannes Friedrich wrote this book 1954, and the English translation was first published in 1957. In English language Wikipedia he is referred to as "hittitologist" (a rather narrow specialization ;) ) and in German more generously as Altorientalist (alt is old, ancient).
So the book is very much a fruit of its time, which I found interesting as a historical artifact rather than annoying. It gives a wide review of extinct languages, mainly Middle Eastern and Mediterranean, and especially of the history of their decipherment. Being written by a professional Altorientalist, it often goes into more details and depth than a modern wide-audience book would. On the other hand, it is written with enough clarity and straightforwardness in order not to drive a non-specialist like me crazy.
As expected, the author begins with Egyptian hieroglyphs, the most popularized decipherment of all, about which I read more than once.
Still, it was good to be reminded about the basic principles of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing yet again:
A strong strain of conservatism was another factor that kept the Egyptians from discontinuing the use of the pictogram of a word once it had been adopted. In fact, they added phonetic signs also to word-signs which expressed words sufficiently by themselves. Thus, śḏm, “to hear,” was expressed with sufficient clarity by , the picture of an ear, but they nevertheless added the picture of an owl, denoting m, to it, making it. The word wr, “great,” was represented clearly by , the picture of a swallow, and yet the Egyptians liked to append the picture of a mouth, , representing an r, i.e.: . This was how the many pleonastic written symbols of the Egyptians came into existence. They never did get rid of this complicated mixture of different signs, in fact there were times when they just could not pile up enough pleonastic symbols to satisfy them.
Also, some of what Johannes Friedrich had to say about Champollion was either new to me or (more likely) had long vanished in the dark corners of my treacherous memory.
The man who was the first to succeed in actually deciphering the hieroglyphics was the young Frenchman Jean François Champollion (1790–1832) who, uncommonly gifted and mature at a very early age and raised as a prodigy, determined as a mere boy of eleven to become the decipherer of the hieroglyphics. But he too was unable to rid himself, for many long years, of the belief in a symbolism of those signs. But he prepared himself for his chosen life task by careful study. First of all, he learned Coptic, the language of the Christian Egyptians which is written in Greek characters, and which—as we know today—is quite unsuitable as a bridge to an understanding of the ancient tongue both because of its quite impoverished vocabulary and its strongly changed grammatical structure. Then he obtained reproductions of every accessible Egyptian inscription and papyrus, and at a cost of fifteen years of extremely tedious work, he compiled from them all the forms of the hieroglyphic signs, with their graphically simplified hieratic and demotic equivalents—but he did all this without yet daring proceed to the reading of one single character.
Let it be emphasized, however, in the words of Erman,** that “it was no well organized knowledge that he bequeathed to his successors at the time of his premature death (1832). He had ingeniously comprehended properly the words and sentences, but he never formulated a clear comprehension of the system of the script which he knew how to read.” A decipherer, who skips over scruples and difficulties ingeniously, and a philologist, who ponders his results carefully as he forges them into rules, are fundamentally different and must not be mistaken for each other. It should he, therefore, no surprise that Champollion’s decipherment was by no means universally accepted at first. For three more decades, even scientists were not willing to admit anything more than the fact that at best a few royal names could be deciphered, but they insisted that everything else was pure fantasy. Only in 1866 did the discovery of another bilingual inscription, the lengthy Decree of Canopus, bring scientific confirmation of a whole series of facts which Champollion had ingeniously discovered.
After Egyptian hieroglyphs, comes the juicy part -- the mysterious cuneiform writing, of which I knew close to nothing.
The cuneiform writing of the Near East is far less well known to the general public than are the hieroglyphics of Egypt. Even the people of antiquity no longer had any accurate notion of it, only very ancient Greece had known it as Assyria grammata, “Assyrian letters.”
At first the reader is presented with a brief historical and cultural overview.
the Sumerian-Babylonian religion with its ancient divine triad, Anu (god of the heavens), Enlil (god of the air and the earth) and Ea (god of the subterranean watery depths), with the goddess Ma or Ninursag, “Queen of the Gods,” as well as the younger triad, Sin (moon god), Shamash (sun god) and Adad (weather god), with the goddess Ishtar.
I've heard about Shamash the Sun God before, but I can't help being excited about him each time I see him mentioned because Shemesh is Hebrew for sun.;)
The book proceeds to tell fascinating tales about decipherment of different kinds of cuneiform writing -- it was used for many different languages, with the writing systems ranging from a combination of ideograms, syllables and determinatives(similar to the system used in Ancient Egyptian writing), to syllabic + determinatives, purely syllabic and even alphabetic.
The man who succeeded in making the Early Persian script really legible, beyond such rudimentary findings, however, was no trained Orientalist, but a young German high-school teacher, Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775–1853) of Göttingen. He was practically ignorant of Oriental languages, but he had practiced diligently the decipherment of artificially composed secret scripts. His situation was thus totally different from that of Champollion: Champollion spent fifteen years in painstaking studying and preliminary training, after which he succeeded almost despite expectations, whereas Grotefend plunged right into the project, without any great preliminary training, and without a bilingual inscription to go by, such as there were available for the study of Egyptian, and yet it took him a mere few weeks to score quite a considerable success. At any rate, however, Grotefend also had to have certain auxiliary data available, for no decipherment is feasible without some clues to go by. Also Grotefend recognized the separation mark and the three types of writing. And also he deduced that the first portion of each inscription was written in an alphabetic, not a syllabic, script because there often were as many as ten symbols between two successive separation marks, and the existence of words of ten syllables was an improbability.
The fact that Grotefend’s later activities no longer produced as happy results as his first decipherments is to be attributed not solely to his insufficient training as an Orientalist, but above all to the circumstance, emphasized by Grotefend himself, that a decipherer and an interpreter (i.e., a philologist) must not be mistaken for each other. His decipherment should have been developed and elaborated further by trained, professional Orientalists, but those were the very people who failed to give him the credit that was his due. In fact, the scientific journal of Göttingen did not even print the full report of his discovery, but merely a short item mentioning it. Only in 1815 was there published a detailed report in Heeren’s Ideen über die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Völker der alten Welt.* This is how it came about that his decipherment was given little attention and interest at first.
The difficulty was solved only when vocabularies of the ancient Babylonian savants were discovered in Nineveh, in which such ideographic methods of writing were explained. It was seen then that AN.AK was an ideographic symbol for the name of the god dNa-bi-um, SA.DU represented the word kudurru (boundary mark), SIS stood for naṣāru (to protect), the imperative form of which was uṣur, DI was the ideographic symbol for Šulmu (welfare)—thus DI-ma-nu stood for Šulmānu = gift of welcome—and BAR represented ašaridu (first). Generally speaking, without the grammatical, lexical and graphic lists prepared by the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians themselves on their language, the decipherment of the Babylonian cuneiform writing would probably have been a more laborious task than it actually was.
Of course, investigators less close to the subject still maintained an attitude of scepticism about polyphony and ideography, not known to them from the more familiar systems of writing, and consequently they still distrusted the new science. In order to settle the question of the reliability of the decipherment, the Royal Asiatic Society of London therefore resorted to a special expedient: In 1857, Rawlinson, Hincks, Fox Talbot and Oppert happened to be in London at the same time. All the four scholars were given a copy of a longer text which had just been discovered, with the request that they work on it independently from each other. Their letters were then opened in a formal meeting, and the Society was able to find with satisfaction that all the four solutions agreed in all their essential points. Thus the young science of Assyriology could now truly be said to stand on a firm foundation.
Many more extinct languages and their decipherments are discussed: from Etruscan to Proto-sinaitic. Needless to say, I have many more fascinating quotes to share, ad nauseam. I'll make them available as visible highlights (thank you for this cool feature, Kindle;)).
Then follows the chapter about the general methodology of decipherment, and after so many previous stories of specific decipherments, it all comes together quite well:
1)you are lucky if you can start from a bilingual or trilingual text, especially if these other languages
are already known; count the different symbols to establish if this is a syllabic, alphabetical or ideogramic writing system or a combination of those
2)look for names of people and geographical places; use your knowledge of everything from Latin and Greek to Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew etc.
3)use all kinds of available artifacts: mummy wrappings; clay tables; papyrus scrolls; tombstones; monuments; walls; tools; coins -- the more the merrier; the best, of course, is when you have dictionaries/grammars/textbooks written by the ancients themselves, but more often than not you have so little to go by that torn pieces one mummy's wrappings would be your best source (Etruscan)
4)work painstakingly and you might get lucky
5)sometimes you might even get it right!
And the very last chapter is about still undeciphered (in 1954) languages:
Our survey thus concludes, seemingly unsatisfactorily, with a series of unanswered questions and fanciful conjectures. In my opinion, however, it would not have been right for me to present only the great accomplishments of decipherment and to disregard the still unsolved problems. It is always good to see not only the seemingly momentous achievements, but also the limitations of knowledge. After all, there still remains the hope that one day also these limitations will be overcome and the solution of the seemingly insoluble problems will be achieved.
The undeciphered languages chapter made me wonder if my memory wasn't playing tricks on me: it mentioned both Linear A and Linear B as undeciphered, while it seemed to me that one of them had been cracked. And sure enough, Linear B deserved a special Appendix:
While the original German edition of this book was on the press, a very important accomplishment was made in the study of the writing of ancient Crete. Unless all appearances are deceptive, Michael Ventris, a young British architect, succeeded in deciphering the Cretan script known as Linear Class B. (cf. p. 164). We have learned, to our great surprise, that the language of these texts is an archaic form of the Achaean dialect of the Greek language, which thus was used not only in Pylos and Mycenae in Greece proper in the 13th century B.C., but also in Knossos, on the island of Crete, as far back as about 1400 B.C.
To summarize: in spite of being written in 1954, if you find ancient languages and their writing systems fascinating, this book is a treat.
Read in 2024.
February 23, 2019
خیلی جذاب بود؛ خیلی زیاد.
March 18, 2019
This book was very helpful for my studies. It's simple to understand and very informative.
Not only the author gives information about languages but also their history and deciphering process.
Since it's also supported with pictures, you don't have to look up every time which makes the reading experience even more enjoyable.
I would definitely recommend this book if you're interested in Linguistics or Ancient History in general.
Not only the author gives information about languages but also their history and deciphering process.
Since it's also supported with pictures, you don't have to look up every time which makes the reading experience even more enjoyable.
I would definitely recommend this book if you're interested in Linguistics or Ancient History in general.
July 24, 2018
This version of Extinct Languages that I have found was printed before the advent of the International Standard Book Number. Thus I searched for it through the name of the author. However, that is neither here nor there. The book itself was originally in German and was translated to English by Frank Gaynor. The book manages a scholarly approach to its subject. If that would dissuade you from reading it, I can’t really blame you.
I picked up this book because as I was wandering through the stacks and shelves of the library I frequent I realized that I had not chosen many books from the 400s section of the Library. This is pretty understandable though, there aren’t many books in that section at all. I was somewhat disappointed.
In any case, the book itself is fascinating. It addresses the history of the places where the writing originated and how that writing was deciphered if that is applicable. The book contains samples of the writings and a translation of what it says, also breaking down the transliteration of the script. Although there are many ancient scripts that have been translated and understood, there are still some writings that we cannot or have not yet managed to decipher. There are two that I know of off the top of my head.
In any case, the book is separated roughly into chapters. The first section deals with the “Three Great Decipherments in the Study of the Ancient Orient.” This covers the Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Cuneiform Writing of Mesopotamia, and the Hittite Hieroglyphics. The second section deals with “Other Scripts of the Old World.” This includes Etruscan Writings, Phrygian Writings, and so on. The third section contains a general methodology to translate these scripts. Finally, the fourth section contains information on the unsolved scripts that we know of. For example, the script and writings of the Indus Valley Civilization are still unsolved. This is mostly due to the brevity of the signs, and the lack of samples.
All in all, while the book wasn’t particularly entertaining, it was quite informative. It put forth the ideas and successes of translating these ancient, extinct texts and languages in a scholarly and professional manner.
I picked up this book because as I was wandering through the stacks and shelves of the library I frequent I realized that I had not chosen many books from the 400s section of the Library. This is pretty understandable though, there aren’t many books in that section at all. I was somewhat disappointed.
In any case, the book itself is fascinating. It addresses the history of the places where the writing originated and how that writing was deciphered if that is applicable. The book contains samples of the writings and a translation of what it says, also breaking down the transliteration of the script. Although there are many ancient scripts that have been translated and understood, there are still some writings that we cannot or have not yet managed to decipher. There are two that I know of off the top of my head.
In any case, the book is separated roughly into chapters. The first section deals with the “Three Great Decipherments in the Study of the Ancient Orient.” This covers the Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Cuneiform Writing of Mesopotamia, and the Hittite Hieroglyphics. The second section deals with “Other Scripts of the Old World.” This includes Etruscan Writings, Phrygian Writings, and so on. The third section contains a general methodology to translate these scripts. Finally, the fourth section contains information on the unsolved scripts that we know of. For example, the script and writings of the Indus Valley Civilization are still unsolved. This is mostly due to the brevity of the signs, and the lack of samples.
All in all, while the book wasn’t particularly entertaining, it was quite informative. It put forth the ideas and successes of translating these ancient, extinct texts and languages in a scholarly and professional manner.
March 24, 2023
Some interesting facts in this book, but bloody hell is it presented in a dry way, or what? There are any number of repetitions of concepts and points, pages of dull description and word-by-word dissection of sentences. This is an academic text and should be advertised as such. One star each for interesting facts and the brevity of the book.
June 20, 2020
Dense but readable, this book explores the history of deciphering extinct languages in the Middle East, beginning with the Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform writing. He explores work on Early Persian cuneiform, and that of Neo-Elamite, Babylonian, and Sumerian, Hittite and others. He introduces the reader to Hurrian, Urartaean, and Ugaritic. Less time is spent on other languages still undeciphered at the time of publication (1957), including the Lycian, Lydian, Side, and Numidian languages and script. He explores the work on Etruscan and other languages of ancient Italy and Phrygian. The undeciphered scripts and the challenges they pose are Sinaitic, Cretan-Minoan, Carian, and the Indus Valley script. The Cretan script known as Linear Class B was deciphered while the book was going to print, and an Appendix describes this work.
I hadn't heard about half of these scripts and languages, so the author's exploration of their origins when known and other details was very interesting. Translated from the German, the text is sometimes awkward for contemporary readers. If you're looking for an overview now outdated in some respects but still clear on the process of decipherment and the structure of hieroglyphics and cuneiform, this is a good introduction to how ancient languages are explored and opened up.
I hadn't heard about half of these scripts and languages, so the author's exploration of their origins when known and other details was very interesting. Translated from the German, the text is sometimes awkward for contemporary readers. If you're looking for an overview now outdated in some respects but still clear on the process of decipherment and the structure of hieroglyphics and cuneiform, this is a good introduction to how ancient languages are explored and opened up.
March 3, 2024
The book is composed of 18 chapters.The last three are on Iznik,Bursa and Edirne while the first 15 are on beauties of Istanbul.
Chapters are on city walls of Istanbul, Early and Late era Byzantium churches.Seperate chapters are devoted to Hagia Spohia,Chora Church and Topkapi Palace.Mentions the Ottoman era churches and ends with seperate chapters for Pera,Uskudar and Bogazici.
The books gives detailed descriptions and maps of places also very useful history information is presented regarding those places.
Chapters are on city walls of Istanbul, Early and Late era Byzantium churches.Seperate chapters are devoted to Hagia Spohia,Chora Church and Topkapi Palace.Mentions the Ottoman era churches and ends with seperate chapters for Pera,Uskudar and Bogazici.
The books gives detailed descriptions and maps of places also very useful history information is presented regarding those places.
Read
May 27, 2024I can’t say whether this was a good book. I had difficulty understanding a lot of it.
January 7, 2013
The book presents the history of the decipherement of some ancient scripts, with particular emphasis on the egyptian hyerogliphic, cuneiform and hittite scripts. The book features samples from various ancient languages and pictures of the original documents. It is written in a way that can be of interest both for a linguist and for a non-specialist.
October 27, 2019
Most books are rated related to their usefulness and contributions to my research.
Overall, a good book for the researcher and enthusiast.
Read for personal research
- found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
Overall, a good book for the researcher and enthusiast.
Read for personal research
- found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
October 2, 2021
An excellent guide
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews