Lost languages: how to decipher undeciphered scripts

[Michael] Ventris was able to discover among the bewildering variety of the mysterious signs, patterns and regularities which betrayed the underlying structure. It is this quality, the power of seeing order in apparent confusion, that has marked the work of all great men.John Chadwick,The Decipherment of Linear B, 1958 In ordinary conversation, to decipher someone’s ‘indecipherable’ handwriting means to make sense of the meaning; it does not imply that one can read every single word. In its more technical sense, as applied to ancient scripts, ‘deciphered’ means different things to different scholars. At one extreme, everyone agrees that the Egyptian hieroglyphs have been deciphe