Deciphering history: Andrew Robinson looks at some linguistic puzzles still facing historians.

WRITING IS, AMONG the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest invention, since it made history possible. Yet it is a skill most writers take for granted. Looking at a page in a foreign script that is totally incomprehensible to us--perhaps Arabic or Japanese--reminds us forcibly of the nature of our achievement.

An extinct script, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Babylonian cuneiform or the glyphs of the ancient Maya of Central America, may strike us as little short of miraculous and bizarrely different from our own alphabetic scripts. We want to know what kind of ...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.