[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 deciphered – because every trained Egyptologist would make the same sense of virtually every word of a given hieroglyphic inscription (though their individual translations would still differ, as do all independent translations of the same work from one language into another). At the other extreme, almost everyone agrees that the scripts of the Indus Valley civilisation and Easter Island (Rongorongo) are undeciphered – because no scholar can make sense of their inscriptions to the satisfaction of the majority of other specialists. Between these extremes lies a vast spectrum of opinion. In the case of the Maya glyphs, for example, most scholars agree that a high proportion, as much as 85 per cent, of the inscriptions can be meaningfully read, and yet there remain large numbers of individual glyphs that are contentious or obscure.
In other words, no shibboleth exists by which we judge a script to be ‘deciphered’ or ‘undeciphered’; we should instead speak of degrees of decipherment. The most useful criterion is that a proposed decipherment can generate consistent readings from new samples of the script, preferably produced by persons other than the original decipherer, so as to avoid bias. In this sense, the Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion and others; Babylonian cuneiform in the 1850s by Henry Creswicke Rawlinson and others; Linear B in 1952–1953 by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick; the Maya glyphs in the 1950s and after by Yuri Knorosov and others; and the Hittite (Luvian) hieroglyphs of Anatolia during the 20th century by a series of scholars – to name only the most important of the generally accepted decipherments.
War Classics – Inherit the truth: The Cellist of Auschwitz