TERMS

Carl Blegen – American archaeologist who found the first Linear B tablets outside Knossos.
These Pylos tablets allowed contextual analysis of Linear B right before 1939.

Jean Francois Champollion - French decipherer of hieroglyphics. Champollion deciphered the

Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1823 as he was well versed in various languages, showing that Egyptian
was a mixture of phonetic signs and ideographic signs.

Ignace Gelb – Polish-American who pioneered the study of writing systems. Coined the term
grammatology in The Study of Writing and suggested that scripts evolve from logographic to
syllabaries to alphabets.

Georg Grotefend – German epigraphist who identified the proper names and titles of Persian
kinds who had caused the inscriptions to be carved, thus enabling potentially correct phonetic
values to be allocated to a third of the characters in 1810’s. Helped in the decipherment of
Persian cuneiform.

Herodotus of Helicarnassus– Greek historian from the 5th century BC who is best known for
The Histories which details the conflict between Greece and Persia and for his list of thee ‘Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World’.

Yuri Knorosov – Russian - First scholar to take De Landa “alphabet” seriously. He began the
decipherment of Maya writing in 1952. Also indicated that early Egyptian was also phonetic in
nature.

Alice Kober – American classical scholar - Contributed greatly to the understandings of the
declensions of Linear B. Her work would allow Ventris to construct a grid of syllables sharing
the same consonants and vowels. In Linear B, in the Knossos tablets, Kober identified five
groups of words, with three words in each group – later dubbed ‘Kober’s triplets’ by Ventris.
Their context in the tablets made it likely that they were nouns, maybe personal names or place
names.

Diego de Landa – author of Relacion de los Cosas de Yucatan (1565), an invaluable survey of
Mayan culture. He produced an “alphabet” of Mayan signs. This allowed decipherment in the
20th century. He discovered that the writing was basically syllabic with an admixture of pure
vowels. He tortured Mayans and faced charges from Spanish.

Manethon of Sebennyntos - A 3rd century BC Greco-Egyptian priest and historian who was the
author of Aegyptiaca (Egyptian History) – he recounts much of the tradition of Egyptian political
history (such as the division of Egyptian history into dynasties and the foundational king-list).
His findings helped Champollion decipher his hieroglyphs.

Henry Rawlinson – Furthered Grotefun’s decipherment of Old Persian and also began
decipherment of older cuneiform scripts. Documented the trilingual inscriptions of Darius I at
Behistun. The “Rosetta Stone” for cuneiform was the massive inscription of Darius cut into a
cliff in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran near the town of Behistun. Rawlinson was able to
copy the lower lines of the Old Persian inscription by standing on a narrow ledge by 1847.

Michael Ventris – Built on insights of Evans and Kober to decipher the Linear B Script as
Mycenaean Greek in 1952. Worked with Greek philogist John Chadwick for all of his
publications on the script. Ventris used his work notes that contained syllabic grids. Ventris used
many analytical techniques, besides comparison of the triplets, to extract the interrelationships of
Linear B signs. He discovered that the Linear B tablets are in Greek.

Abjad – Abjad is a writing system wherein each symbol stands for a consonant—the reader must
supply the appropriate vowel. Used by Peter Daniels to replace the common consonantary terms
referred to in the Western Semitic scripts. It is commonly referred to as Phoenician alphabet and
Arabic alphabet. This is thought to be derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Alphabet – Alphabet is a type of script. The convenience of an alphabet would surely have
assisted the process of interstate trade, polygot haggling and record-keeping. The earliest
alphabet inscriptions were seen in a sphinx.

Behistun – Inscriptions at Behistrun allowed for the translation of cuneiform. A massive

inscription by Darius in the Zagros Mountain allowed Rawlinson to decipher cuneiform by 1847.

Caylus Vase – As demonstrated by Champollion for the Journal Asiatique in Jan 1823, the
Egyptian text corresponds to Xerxes. ----

Cuneiform – Earliest known writing system in the world. It was the most significant writing
system in the Ancient Near East. Cuneiform script came from original Sumerian that was
adapted for various writing systems of the Akkadian, Eblaite, Urartic, and inspired the Ugaritic
and Old Persian alphabets. It starts with Old Akkadian from 3000 BC and has been passed down
to regions such as Achaemenid Persian, Late Babylonian, and Ugaritic.

Cypriot – A script used in Cyprus used between the 7th and 2nd century BC for writing local
Greek dialect on monuments and in the recording of legends on coins. Cypriot appeared in
bilingual inscriptions. The sounds of the Cypriot script could be deciphered because the sounds
of the Greek alphabetic signs were known. Evans hoped that the known sounds of the Cypriot
script could help decipher the unknown sounds of the Linear B script.

Maya Glyphs –The Maya had number systems and their glyphs were filled with calendar dates
and numbers. The Dresden codex is filled with dates and depictions of the Maya goddesses and
gods. Glyphs were a mixture of phonographic and logographic elements. Knorosov first
published in the 1950s the important mayan decipherment. There are a large number of variant
signs for a single sound and some syllabic signs can also act as logograms. The earliest known
writing dates to 250 BC. Decipherment of the Maya glyphs were helped by Mayans living today.

Pylos –Large bay in Southern Greece. Location where Mycenaean. Linear B tablets were found
in these palaces. Bronze age Pylos was excavated by Blegen between 1939 and 1952.
Rosetta Stone – Rock discovered by the Napoleonic army in 1798 from Egypt that contained
three parallel texts: one in Greek, one in demotic, and the other in Egyptian hieroglyphs.
- Demotic: Ancient script for everyday writing.
- Discovered that hieroglyphs were not merely ideographs but also but heavily
phonetic.
- Champollion in 1822 did a lot of the deciphering.

Type III –Script wherein the language and the script are unknown.

(see Daniels)

Ugaritic – From Ugarit, on the northern coast of Syria, we have hard evidence of the existence
of the alphabet by the 14th century BC. The city of Ugarit was big into trade. They utilized
cuneiform. They invented a set of cuneiform signs, some 30 in all, that bore little resemblance to
other systems. It is a combination of logosyllabic, phonetic, and alphabetic sounds. Over 1000
tablets in Ugaritic cuneiform have been discovered since 1929 including administrative texts –
commercial correspondence, tax accounts, and other governmental business records.

Allograph—Allographs are two different signs that represent the same sound or phoneme, with
a modern example being f and gh both representing the phoneme /f/.

Biscript – Two writing systems on one thing (e.g. Rosetta stone)

Cognate – a word that is related to another word in another language. Significance: it allows us
to understand how languages transformed. Example: “Pater” in Latin and “Father” in English.

Decipherment – Connecting signs to an underlying language.

Logograph – a written sign that stands for a single morpheme. Ex. Sumerian. E.g. ka-na-ha-na
(pretend as if there are 4 signs that represent these sounds). (e.g. Chinese)
Rebus principle -- In linguistics, the Rebus Principle means using existing symbols, such as
pictograms, purely for their sounds regardless of their meaning, to represent new words. Many
ancient writing systems used the Rebus principle to represent abstract words, which otherwise
would be hard to be represented by pictograms. An example that illustrates the Rebus principle is
the representation of the sentence “I can see you” by using the pictographs of “eye—can—sea—
ewe.” Some linguists believe that Chinese developed its writing system according to the rebus
principle,[2] and Egyptian hieroglyphs sometimes used a similar system. A famous rebus statue
of Ramses II uses three hieroglyphs to compose his name: Horus (as Ra), for Ra; the child, mes;
and the sedge plant (stalk held in left hand), su; the name Ra-mes-su is then formed.

Phoneme – Smallest unit of distinguishable speech. Significance: The putting together or

phonemes allows us to construct words and phrases. Example: In the word “bin”, “b” is a
phoneme.

Phonetic sign - Morse code, siren, special language for phonetic communication etc. with a
specific meaning that we can understand by hearing it. E.g. “ta”

Pictograph – a representation of an object through a picture/drawing. Nothing is meant by the

drawing except for what the picture itself describes.

Semantic sign – Sign that indicates what type of symbol comes after. It is believed that they
were not pronounced.

Writing - Speech in visible form, put in such a way that the reader can reconstruct the vocal
message. Significance: It is important in making the transition from barbarianism to civilization.
Improves both memory and knowledge.

Linear B: Linear B is a script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Gree