Lost Languages: The enigma of the world’s undeciphered scripts by Andrew Robinson, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0071357432 Reviewed by Ross Anderson
MOST of us think of cryptanalysis as the preserve of the information security engineer. But it is also sometimes used for a very different application – archaeology.
Most will have heard of Jean-François Champollion’s solution of hieroglyphic writing, and many will be aware of Michael Ventris’s unravelling of the Linear B scripts used by the Minoans of ancient Crete. But these are only two tales out of many. We can now read several other Near Eastern scripts, and progress with Mayan writing since the 1970s has revealed that…
