ConceptsDecipherment
Concept · linguistics · in 21 mysteries
Decipherment
Working out how an unread script records a language, so that its texts can be read.
Reading a script nobody can read: identifying the signs, working out whether they stand for sounds, syllables or words, finding the language underneath, and checking by reading texts that were not used to find the key. Linear B was deciphered in 1952; Linear A, the Indus script, Rongorongo, Proto-Elamite and the Phaistos Disc have not been. Each claimed reading on this site is judged by whether it reads new text, not by whether it reads the text it was built on.
Where it comes up
Glozel: the inscribed tablets of the Fradin field
The Ministry of Culture's team of 1983 to 1990, summarised in 1995 and published in full in 2023, found a medieval glassworks in the field and no prehistoric deposit, dated two inscribed tablets to the early twentieth…
Cascajal block and Isthmian writing
Justeson and Kaufman's 1993 decipherment is broadly correct; Isthmian writes an early Zoquean language.The decipherment is unproven or wrong; the corpus is too small to confirm it.A column noticed in 1995, after the decipherment, read readily with the 1993 values.Photographs of the Teotihuacan-style mask with Isthmian textKaufman and Justeson epigraphy collection (Epi-Olmec), AILLA
Copiale cipher
A long text (75,000 characters), a known cipher type (homophonic substitution) and a natural language that a language model could identify made statistical decipherment possible.
Q: Is the 2011 decipherment of the Copiale cipher correct?A long text (75,000 characters), a known cipher type (homophonic substitution) and a natural language that a…Oculist archive, Wolfenbüttel: transcription and deciphered GermanCopiale cipher: transcription, deciphered German and English translation
Linear A
Alternative value sets have been proposed only in service of particular decipherments and have not been checked against shared names.
Unread oracle bone characters
For decipherment, EVOBC provides 229,170 images along six stages from bone to clerical script so that a model can learn how forms change; a baseline predicts the modern character of a held-out read graph with 16.7…
Rohonc Codex
The decipherment is substantially correct: the codex is a Christian narrative and prayer text of the late sixteenth century in a word-sign code.
Byblos syllabary
The date is argued over: Dunand placed the texts in the nineteenth to eighteenth centuries BC from their find context, Mendenhall pushed them back to about 2400 BC, and Benjamin Sass has argued from their likeness to…
Eteocretan and Eteocypriot
The Greek alphabet needs no decipherment, and the Cypriot syllabary was deciphered by George Smith in 1871 from the Idalion bilingual, a Phoenician and Cypriot dedication of 388 BC in the British Museum, and completed…
Voynich Manuscript
EM over every segmentation of each written word learns how plaintext elements are written as glyph-chunk signs, against a fixed Latin element model; read unchanged on held-out pages, checked on a planted control and…
Dhofari script
Michael Macdonald wrote in 2000 that they had defied decipherment and might not be very informative; a 2001 decipherment by Nayeem found no support . In July 2025 Ahmad Al-Jallad published a decipherment of Script 1 .
Dorabella cipher
Viktor Wase showed that decipherment algorithms solve English and Latin substitutions as short as Dorabella and fail on Dorabella itself, and concluded it is not a monoalphabetic substitution in either language . In…
Cretan Hieroglyphic
Davis in 2024 applied the method he had used on the Phaistos Disc, comparing how the two scripts combine their shared signs within words, to ask whether they write one language; Donnelly's review found the result hard…
Cicada 3301
For Liber Primus, a published decipherment that reproduces from the page images, with the method stated and a test against random text, would settle what the book says.
Indus script
In January 2025 the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu announced a US$1 million prize for a decipherment, with a research chair in Mahadevan's name .
Easter Island moai
Rongorongo would move from pointer to question with more direct dates on the tablets and a corpus large enough to test decipherments .
Phaistos Disc
Yves Duhoux, reviewing the Greek decipherment attempts, reached the same view on different grounds: the find context, the Arkalochori parallel and the sign repertoire all point to Crete and to the Linear A world rather…
Ricky McCormick's notes
No proposed decipherment has been endorsed by the FBI, published in a peer-reviewed venue, or tied to a checkable fact about McCormick's last days. Nothing systematic has been published on the notes' statistics either.
Proto-Sinaitic and Wadi el-Hol: the first alphabet
Beyond b'lt, the phrase "to the Lady", and a few names and nouns, every full reading depends on choices that other scholars make differently; Albright's 1966 decipherment, Puech's 2024 readings of Wadi el-Hol and…
Methods that use it 1
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Decipherment [Concept CPT0DECW01ZWFP5]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW01ZWFP5
@misc{mysteriesdept_cpt0decw01zwfp5,
title = {Decipherment},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Concept, catalog key CPT0DECW01ZWFP5},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW01ZWFP5}
}