5 Jun 2009
Ancient scripts
The New Scientist out now has an interesting article about eight scripts that still can’t be read . The Etruscan derived from the ancient Greek, Meroitic hieroglyphs, the earliest American scripts Olmec and Zapotec, Linear A, Rongo-rongo, Indus script, Proto-Elamite, and the script from the Phaistos disc. It says
“Writing is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science – and of course no books, newspapers or internet.”
It continues that some of “these dead scripts tantalise us. We can see that they are writing, but what do they say?” Well, xkcd knows the answer:
