Conder's decipherment was based on a comparison of the Hittite characters with the Sumerian pictographs on the one hand and the syllabary which was used by Greeks in Cyprus, Caria, and Lydia on the other.
Conder published The Hittites and Their Language, a work in which he presented still another decipherment of the inscriptions.
It is too soon to pronounce a final verdict, but it looks as though Thompson had materially advanced the decipherment of Hittite.
The task of learning to read the inscriptions of Babylonia and Assyria was much more difficult than the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, for no such simple key as the Rosetta Stone was at hand.
In 1909 Ferdinand Bork returned to the problem of the language of Mitanni, and published a pretty complete decipherment of the Mitannian tablets in the El-Amarna letters.
Mr. Thompson was a member of the British expedition which excavated Carchemish, and gained the idea which gave him the starting-point for his decipherment from an inscription excavated by that expedition.
The decipherment of the Persian had, however, taught the sound of many cuneiform signs.
These may afford the key to the decipherment of both Lydian and Etruscan.
This system of decipherment has attracted no adherents because it is based on a fallacious inference.
The decipherment is as yet but partially accomplished.
The first step towards the decipherment of the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone was made in 1819 by Dr.
And this has been effected by a process identical in the two cases, the decipherment of an unknown language in inscriptions on ancient monuments.
The story of the decipherment of the various characters and of the recovery of the early language of Egypt is one of the most wonderful triumphs of scholarship.
Great libraries, made of brick tablets, have been discovered buried under the ruins of the cities, and the gradual decipherment and arrangement of this old literature is proceeding as fast as able and devoted workers can overtake it.
Such being the case, the value of the document for the decipherment of the Egyptian inscriptions was at once perceived, and scholars immediately set to work on the task of deciphering the unknown script.
The decipherment of these symbols is in part made possible by the aid of a knowledge of modern survivals, and when interpreted rightly they open a view of ancient Tusayan myths, and in some cases of prehistoric practices.
While my attempt at decipherment is not regarded as final, it is hoped that it may at least reveal the important place which the feather plays in Tusayan ceramic decoration.
I utilized to the best of my abilities the progress which till then had been made in the decipherment of the Cypriote inscriptions found in Cyprus.
The decipherment of the inscriptions will probably go far to determine the curious question of the use of the terra-cotta whorls, found in such numbers in all the four pre-Hellenic strata of remains at Hissarlik.
I used as a key for my decipherment of the Hissarlik inscriptions the phonetic values which Mr. George Smith and Dr.
His unfinished posthumous Essay on the Deciphermentof the Cyprian Inscriptions forms the landmark of the state of enquiry in the year in which Dr.
The deciphermentof the cuneiform texts put an end to all such speculations.
Until the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, he was known only from the book of Daniel (v.
With just enough of cosmogony in common to make decipherment not despairable this world is yet so different from the one he personally knows as to whet curiosity at every turn.
At its best, the camera is hopelessly behind the eye when it comes to the decipherment of planetary detail.
Similar decipherment has befallen all the other patches of blue-green in the northern hemisphere; these having shown themselves first circumscribed and then traversed by canals.
Thanks, however, to the discovery and decipherment of the ancient monuments of Babylonia and Assyria, of Egypt and of Palestine, all this is now changed.
It is only since the discovery and decipherment of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna that the story of Melchizedek has been illustrated and explained.
It was natural, therefore, at the beginning of hieroglyphic decipherment that the Greek accounts should be accepted in full, and that Ramses II.
It is one of the many gains that the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions has brought to the student of the Old Testament, and it makes us understand the story of Abraham's migration in a way that was never possible before.
It is not perfect, but enough has survived to suffice for decipherment of the general tenor of the inscriptions.
Sir Henry Rawlinson's deciphermentof the great inscription of Behistun did perhaps more than aught else to open the long-closed door to the secret of Mesopotamian culture.
Palæography, or the decipherment of documents, and Epigraphy, or the decipherment of inscriptions, have been indispensable keys to the history of the alphabet.
Statue from Palenque] Time and fanaticism have made sad havoc with the manuscripts, and no satisfactory key to their deciphermenthas been found, only a few words here and there being interpreted.
Although the Rosetta Stone was the base of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the success following Champollion's labours is largely due to the discovery of a small obelisk in the island of Philæ.
Wallis Budge speaks as "the immortal discoverer of a correct system of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics," was born in 1790.
The condition of the papyri made the unrolling and decipherment of them a very tedious operation, and the work is not even yet completed.
Sidenote: Discovery and decipherment of the South Arabic inscriptions.
We have not offered Shapira Pentateuchs, or seals of David in square Hebrew, but the drier records of decipherment and measurement.
The Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions, New York, 1902.
As yet, however, very little progress has been made toward the decipherment of this new form of writing.
Before the decipherment of the cuneiform texts our knowledge of its history, however, was scanty and questionable.
Layard at Nineveh opened up a new world, coinciding as they did with the successful decipherment of the cuneiform system of writing.
Naturally words of Assyrian origin, like Rab-shakeh and Tartan, have first received their explanation from thedecipherment of the Assyrian inscriptions.
Among the many wonderful achievements of the present century there is none more wonderful than the recovery and decipherment of the monuments of ancient Nineveh.
And it is a point of the utmost importance for the decipherment of the Maya glyphs, to note as has been stated before, that their syntax of combination must follow that of the spoken language, which we know.
And a few points of decipherment won and safely fixed by the researchers, from Brasseur, de Rosny, Pousse, Brinton and others a generation ago, to Messrs.
Although Mai was not as successful in textual criticism as in the decipherment of manuscripts, he will always be remembered as a laborious and persevering pioneer, by whose efforts many ancient writings have been rescued from oblivion.
In India proper the decipherment of early Indian inscriptions was facilitated to a very great extent by the data found only in the Mahavamsa.
Oppert has given an interesting account of the mode of deciphermentin the Introduction and in Chapter 1.
Further explorations and the decipherment of the texts will one day solve the problem.
Among those Assyrian syllabaries which have been so helpful in the decipherment of the wedges, there is one tablet where the primitive form of each symbol is placed opposite the group of strokes which had the same value in after ages.
The decipherment of the Kharoshthi alphabet was a more difficult and a longer task: it was virtually finished, some twenty years later, by the united efforts of C.
The real work of decipherment was reserved for Champollion, who, born at Grenoble, in 1790, was but nine years old when the famous stone was discovered which later on was to yield to him the long lost language of the hieroglyphs.
The immediate inferences were that these three inscriptions were but different forms of the same decree, and that in the Greek would be found some clew for the decipherment of the others.
In the year 1802, Grotefend, then a young student in the University of Bonn, announced to his colleagues his success in the decipherment of a trilingual inscription copied by Niebuhr from the ruins of a royal palace at Persepolis.
In consequence, the absurd conceptions read into these characters, led all who attempted the decipherment of these far away from the truth.
It will be remembered that those who before Champollion had undertaken thedecipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, had based their efforts on the theory that these signs were mainly ideographic.
It might be supposed that with this clew the work of decipherment would be readily accomplished.
Of this Persian cuneiform, which has furnished the key to the decipherment of all cuneiform, the fullest vocabulary has been found in the Behistun inscriptions.
In the narrative given of the decipherment of cuneiform writing reference was made to the three distinct combinations of the arrow-headed or wedge-shaped characters in the trilingual inscriptions at first deciphered.
Since the death of Champollion the work of deciphermenthas progressed steadily on until the life, the literature and the language of the old Egyptians are open pages which all may read.
It was some time after the decipherment of the Persian version of the cuneiform texts before these facts became fully understood.
THE other event referred to, which was to open to scholars another field of research, in interest and importance equal to the Egyptian discoveries, was the work of Grotefend, early in the century, in the decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions.
He lived to congratulate Grotefend upon his achievements in the decipherment of cuneiform and died shortly after, in 1808, at the advanced age of seventy-seven.
It will thus be seen that when the decipherment of the Assyrian cuneiform was first attempted, scholars could not for a time master the curious complications they found.
The decipherment of the Assyrian texts brought with it the decipherment of the Sumerian texts.
But it was only after the decipherment of the Persian texts that it was found that the three systems of writing embodied three separate languages, and belonged to three separate countries.
The deciphermentof the cuneiform texts has been one of the scientific triumphs of the present century.
Hincks, of Dublin, had already (in 1846) given the last touch to the decipherment of the Old Persian alphabet by the discovery that the consonants composing it contained inherent vowels.
The decipherment of the third system of writing long seemed to baffle the inquirer.
If the method of decipherment were right, it was necessary to assume that the same character could have more than one phonetic value.
From this time forward the work of decipherment went on apace.
With Niebuhr's publication the work of decipherment became possible.
It was clear, however, that with more materials and perseverance such efforts after decipherment must eventually succeed.
By such labours after forty years the results attained by Champollion in decipherment were entirely superseded.
