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Jean-François Champollion
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Champollion used his knowledge of Coptic to connect the signs on monuments to an Egyptian language he could study. His work took him beyond the royal names that had provided an initial foothold. The important leap was seeing how sound signs and signs for meaning could work together in the same script.
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Thomas Young (scientist)
Born
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Young used the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone to test a specific guess about an oval enclosure called a cartouche. He worked out that it held the name Ptolemy. A name in a language he could read gave him a way to check the sound values of signs in a script he couldn't yet read.
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Alice Kober
Linear B
Kober grouped sign sequences that shared a stem and ended differently. That told her the language used changing endings before anyone could reliably say what those sequences meant. Her work gave later researchers patterns to test without having to guess the language first.
More about Alice Kober4
Michael Ventris
Born
Linear B
Ventris tested whether some sign groups on the tablets from Crete were local place names. Those readings helped him test the idea that the tablets recorded an early form of Greek. The suggestion mattered because it could be tried against other inscriptions, where a convenient guess about one name would have been little help.
More about Michael Ventris5
John Chadwick
Born
Linear B
Chadwick brought his knowledge of Greek to the collaboration after Ventris announced the breakthrough. Their joint publication set out how the tablets fit the Greek reading. His role shows the difference between proposing a way to read the signs and showing what their language does across a body of texts.
More about John Chadwick6
Tatiana Proskouriakoff
Born
Maya writing
Proskouriakoff noticed that dates on the monuments at Piedras Negras fell into patterns consistent with a person's lifetime. She argued that the inscriptions recorded events in rulers' lives. That changed the questions scholars could ask of a monument, from how its calendar worked to whose history it told.
More about Tatiana Proskouriakoff7
Yuri Knorozov
Born
Maya writing
Knorozov treated signs in a colonial-era record of Maya writing as clues to syllables. This helped make sense of signs that stood for sounds alongside signs that could stand for whole words. Put his work next to Proskouriakoff's to see how a reading of the signs and a reading of the events could support each other.
More about Yuri Knorozov8
David Stuart (Mayanist)
Maya writing
Stuart identified ways that scribes used different signs for the same syllable. An unfamiliar spelling could make more sense beside another version of the same word. His work helps explain why a single sound could look different from one Maya inscription to the next.
More about David Stuart (Mayanist)9
Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1st Baronet
Born
Cuneiform
Rawlinson worked from the multilingual inscription at Behistun, starting with its Old Persian text. He was also one of four scholars who independently translated an Assyrian royal inscription for the Royal Asiatic Society in 1857. The comparison made it possible to judge the readings against each other.
More about Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1st Baronet10
Edward Hincks
Cuneiform
Hincks was one of the four readers in the Royal Asiatic Society's 1857 comparison. His reading and Rawlinson's came closest to each other. Seeing where independent translations agreed gave readers a better reason to trust the work than any one scholar's account could provide.
More about Edward Hincks11
Henry Fox Talbot
Born
Cuneiform
Talbot sent the Royal Asiatic Society a sealed translation of an Assyrian royal inscription and suggested asking other readers to translate it independently. His proposal gave the society a way to compare translations of the same text without the scholars seeing each other’s work.
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Julius Oppert
Cuneiform
Oppert was among the scholars who submitted independent readings of the same Assyrian inscription in 1857. He worked from his own incomplete copy of the inscription. The comparison shows how readers could agree on much of a text while still debating individual lines.
More about Julius Oppert
