By Maurice Pope
The need to unravel mysteries is as previous as humanity and the spell of an unknown writing has regularly been fairly powerful. it is a dialogue of the contributions to the technological know-how of decipherment made through theorists corresponding to Leibnitz and by means of outstanding practitioners of it from Champollion to Ventris. Maurice Pope examines the highbrow advancements that result in their striking achievements, and describes the method of decipherment, delivering quotations from their unique courses and plenty of examples in their drawings, tables and diagrams. one of the scripts the writer analyses are the Palmyra script, Sassanid Persian, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Persian cuniform, Akkadian cuneiform, the Cypriot syllabary, Hittitte hieroglyphic, the Ugaritic alphabet and Mycenaean Linear B.
Reviews:
A concise, well-organized examine that merits excessive marks.
-- Library Journal
The most interesting paintings of its variety . . . a satisfaction to learn.
-- technological know-how
Read or Download The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script PDF
Best egypt books
Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution
Five a long time after Nasser and the unfastened officials overthrew the British-backed monarchy in a dramatic coup d'état, the way forward for Egypt grows extra doubtful by means of the day. John Bradley examines the junctions of Egyptian politics and society as they slowly fall apart lower than the dual pressures of a ruthless army dictatorship at domestic and a incorrect center East coverage in Washington. within Egypt is a tour-de-force of the main brutal Arab country the place torture and corruption are endemic--but person who can also be a key U. S. all and a historical nearby trendsetter. This uniquely insightful booklet brings to shiny existence Egypt's competing identities and political tendencies, because the Mubarak dynasty struggles to solve a succession difficulty and the disciplined Islamists wait patiently within the wings for an opportunity to grab power.
Someone switched over the pdf to epub entire with TOC. It's approximately retail caliber.
Proof collide with fiction within the pulse-pounding sequel to the hugely praised The Alexander Cipher, that includes archaeologist Daniel Knox.
THE EXODUS QUEST
On the path of the misplaced useless Sea Scrolls, archaeologist Daniel Knox stumbles upon a robbery in development at an historic temple close to Alexandria. Then a senior Egyptian archaeologist is violently killed, and the finger of suspicion issues at Knox himself. so as to add to his mounting concerns, his accomplice Gaille Bonnard is abducted whereas displaying a tv group round the ruins of Amarna. She manages to smuggle out a message, pleading with Knox to rescue her, yet he's locked in a police phone on suspicion of homicide countless numbers of miles away. His in simple terms desire of clearing his identify and saving Gaille is to crack one of many maximum unsolved mysteries of the traditional global. .. ahead of it's too overdue.
Sarcophagus texts are frequently thought of the most important expression of center country faith. yet have been those texts relatively written for the good thing about each one person? This quantity demonstrates that the "users" of Sarcophagus texts didn't characterize the inhabitants as a complete, yet basically particular assorted teams.
"The highbrow historical past of historical Egypt" – as soon as wrote Jan Assmann – "can hardly ever be stated to became a part of our cultural reminiscence. it's a topic of fascination, no longer of knowing. " This fascination all started whilst historic Greek travelers began vacationing Egypt, and keeps unto today, in general as a scholarly look for the oldest roots of our cultural reminiscence.
- Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity
- Thutmose III: A New Biography
- The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period
- Egypt in Late Antiquity
Extra info for The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script
Example text
Bude ii 3 74) , not being wise after the event. Indeed his last threat is an understatement. For though the ancient Egyptian language survived into Christian times and became the official language of the Egyptian Church, after the A rab conquest it began to lose ground to Arabic, and by the time of the European Renaissance it was dying fast. In 1 677 Vansleb claimed to have met the last sur viving speaker of the language in a village in Upper Egypt. The claim was premature, but only slightly. As a spoken language Coptic was soon to die out.
Penoik mcrasdhi m:ciphnah mp h oou Ouoh Ch3 ncrcronl1ln cbol mp hrxdhi hon n te nchoebol nn:l:: . crcouon ntaneroou Ouoh mpcrcmcn choun cpirafmos Alia nahmcn cbolhapipeth6ou. thought, owing to the discovery, made in 1 9 3 8, of Obicini's manuscript notes in the Vatican Library (van Lantschoot, 1 948) . The credit for the rescue of Coptic is therefore to be shared, but the important thing is that it was rescued. Its inclusion in books of more general appeal, such as Chamberlayne's edition of the Lord's Pra yer in 1 52 different languages in 1 7 1 5 brought the existence of Coptic to the notice of a much wider public, and Coptic studies made steady progress during the eighteenth century, one of the landmarks being the printing of Lacroze's Dictionary in Oxford in 1 77 5 .
As a spoken language Coptic was soon to die out. The memory of it was, however, rescued in Europe just in time. There were occasional people in Rome who were aware of its existence. ) , Leonard A bela, a Maltese who became Bishop o f Sidon and died i n Rome i n 1 605, could speak it. I n 1 6 1 0 a ten-language Polyglot Bible, to include Coptic, was planned in Rome, but never executed. The two earliest European collectors of Coptic manuscripts were the Italian traveller Pietro della Valle, who went himself to the Middle East and who brought back as well as Coptic manu scripts the first copy of a cuneiform inscription (see page 86), and a Frenchman, Peiresc, who sent an agent, Theophilus Minuti, to the Middle East in 1 629 to hunt for manuscripts and other anti quities and purchase them on his behalf Minuti returned in 1 630 with a hoard of one Samaritan, two Syriac, several A rabic manu scripts, as well as Coptic ones, coins, and two mummies.