Books about Decipherment from Amazon.com

The languages of the ancient world and the mysterious scripts, long undeciphered, in which they were encoded have represented one of the most intriguing problems of classical archaeology in modern times. This celebrated account of the decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris was written by his close collaborator in the momentous discovery. In revealing the secrets of Linear B it offers a valuable survey of late Minoan and Myceanean archaeology, uncovering fascinating details of the religion and economic history of an ancient civilisation..
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Speculation about Egyptian hieroglyphs began in the Renaissance; though sometimes fantastic, much of it was fascinating and fruitful During the next two centuries European travelers in the Near East came home with increasingly accurate copies of the strange inscriptions to be found there. The great age of decipherment dawned in the mid-eighteenth century, at the time of the Enlightenment, with the Abb Barthlemy's solution of the Palmyra script. The author discusses the contributions to the science of decipherment made by theorists and practitioners, examining the intellectual developments that led to their outstanding achievements. He explains the process of decipherment largely from the point of view of the practitioners themselves, but in a way that laypeople can follow. Among the scripts analyzed are the Palmyra script, Sassanid Persian, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Persian cuneiform, Akkadian cuneiform, the Cypriot syllabary, Hittite hieroglyphs, the Ugaritic alphabet, and Mycenaean Linear B. For this revised edition, the text has been brought up to date and a new section added on the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs..
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In a thought-provoking analysis of prehistoric art, astronomy, archaeology and the history of civilization, Stars, Stones and Scholars presents the decipherment of the megaliths (standing stones) by Andis Kaulins, Lecturer at the University of Trier in Germany. Stars, Stones and Scholars shows that ancient megalithic sites are remnants of ancient local, regional and worldwide Neolithic surveys of the Earth by astronomy. Circa 40 photographs, 240 drawings and 80 maps show how megaliths were carved and "sculpted" with figures and cupmarks (holes in the stones) to represent stars and constellations, long before the modern astrological Zodiac was known. Megalithic sites from England (Stonehenge), Wales (Paviland), Scotland (Clava Cairns), Ireland (Newgrange, Knowth), Germany (Externsteine), Benelux (Weris), France (Carnac), Italy (La Spezia), Malta (Tarxien), Greece, Turkey (Anatolia), Scandinavia (Tanum), the Baltic, Russia, the Near East, the Far East (China and Japan), Africa, Central and South America (Tikal, Maya, Aztecs), Oceania (Hawaii), The USA (Cahokia, Miami Circle, Clovis) and Canada (Peterborough Petroglyphs) are included in this fascinating book- which , as it is corroborated over time by the research of others- will become a landmark of human literature..
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The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing is an important story of intellectual discovery and a tale of code breaking comparable to the interpreting of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the decoding of cuneiform.

Using classic articles taken from publications unavailable to most readers, accounts by Spaniards who witnessed the writing of the glyphs and research by twentieth-century scholars--from Tatiana Proskouriakoff to Michael Coe--this book provides a history of the interpretation of Maya hieroglyphs. Introductory essays offer the historical context and describe the personalities and theories of the many authors who contributed to the understanding of these ancient glyphs.

More than two hundred line drawings illustrate the text and serve as an introduction to decipherment. This landmark work in Maya studies is the first book to examine the centuries of thought behind the decoding of Maya hieroglyphs..
Price: $59.61 [Notify me when price goes down.]