![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He also honors the translators themselves and is sympathetic to the obstacles they faced: he describes, for instance, a 16th-century bishop who destroyed Mayan codices even as he left "essential clues" for the decipherment of those that remained he hails the young 18th-century Englishman whose friends called him "Phenomenon Young" as the man who "really launched the decipherment" of the Rosetta Stone. Whether conveying the gradual discoveries in cracking Minoan writing and Mayan glyphs or the ongoing frustrations with the mysterious texts of ancient Sudan, Crete, Iran and India, Robinson ( The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms) is always careful to address the lay reader in clear prose, and to offer relevant photos, drawings, charts and maps. Major breakthroughs, such as the Rosetta Stone and its key to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and continuing enigmas-such as the undeciphered scripts of the Etruscans and Easter Islanders-are explored with all the fervor of a contemporary news story. This richly illustrated book, which highlights the thrills of archeological sleuthing, recounts the many attempts at understanding ancient civilizations through the decipherment of their long-lost writing. ![]()
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