Sentence examples for decipherment from inspiring English sources
noun
The analysis of documents written in ancient languages, where the language is unknown, or knowledge of the language has been lost.
The decipherment of their script has been the greatest achievement of recent years.
The decipherment of Linear B was a sheer triumph of methodical cryptology, again based on the correct hunch that the hidden language was Greek.
Such presence made possible the decipherment of ancient Egyptian (the Rosetta Stone of 196 bce, with hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek versions).
The recovery of Hittite was not a true decipherment because the script was a relatively common variety of syllabic cuneiform.
Serious study of Carian began only in 1980 with the initial partial decipherment of the script by Egyptologist John Ray, who found several grammatical features suggesting that Carian is related to Hittite and Luwian and is part of the Anatolian group.
The discovery and decipherment of vast numbers of cuneiform astronomical texts at the site of Babylon in the 1870s and '80s completely revolutionized the study of Babylonian astronomy.
The decipherment of the most copiously attested of the Minoan linear scripts, the so-called Linear B, by British cryptologist Michael Ventris in 1953, is a major example of the dramatic impact epigraphic discovery can have on the most varied antiquarian disciplines.
The expedition was accompanied by a team of scholars who recorded the ancient and contemporary country, issuing in 1809 28 the Description de l'Égypte, the most comprehensive study to be made before the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script.
The great German scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602 80) began his attempts at decipherment with the Coptic language and with the correct hypothesis that the hieroglyphs recorded an earlier stage of this language.
Deciphering an ancient script is like cracking a secret code from the past, and the unraveling of Linear B is widely considered one of the most challenging archaeological decipherments of all time, if not the most challenging.
But it did not hold up to closer scrutiny, and Manly eventually concluded that Newbold's "decipherments were not discoveries of secrets hidden by Roger Bacon but the products of his own intense enthusiasm and his learned and ingenious subconscious".
