Items12The creator’s order
  1. 1Jean-François ChampollionJean-François ChampollionEgyptian 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…0
  2. 2Thomas Young (scientist)Thomas Young (scientist)Born Jun 13, 1773Egyptian 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…0
  3. 3Alice KoberAlice KoberLinear 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.0
  4. 4Michael VentrisMichael VentrisBorn Jul 12, 1922Linear 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…0
  5. 5John ChadwickJohn ChadwickBorn May 21, 1920Linear 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…0
  6. 6Tatiana ProskouriakoffTatiana ProskouriakoffBorn Jan 23, 1909Maya 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…0
  7. 7Yuri KnorozovYuri KnorozovBorn Nov 19, 1922Maya 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…0
  8. 8David Stuart (Mayanist)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.0
  9. 9Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1st BaronetSir Henry Rawlinson, 1st BaronetBorn Apr 5, 1810Cuneiform 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…0
  10. 10Edward HincksEdward HincksCuneiform 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.0