Reading the Past : Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet

For over 5,000 years the human race has communicated by written signs as well as speech, but the art of reading signs was often lost with the passing of the civilisation which produced them. Although many ancient scripts still remain unread, great vistas of the past have been revealed in the last two centuries through the decipherment of cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs and (more recently) Linear B, enabling scholars to read the surviving evidence of monuments, tablets, seals, papyri and many other objects on which marks had been drawn or engraved. The remarkable story of their decipherment, and an introduction to the languages which emerged, is given in the first half of this book.