Hittites and the Riddle of the Scripts
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Description: An account of Bedrich Hrozny's decipherment of Hittite and discovery of its Indo-European affiliation.
Hittites and The Riddle of the Scripts Would you like to make this site your homepage? It's fast and easy... Yes, Please make this my home page! Don't show this to me again. ehind the decipherment of ancient inscriptions lies a tradition of some one hundred and fifty years. The two momentous triumphs in this field are linked with the names of Georg Friedrich Grotefend, the brilliant German schoolmaster, and Jean-Francois Champollion, the child prodigy who at sixteen already knew eight languages. In both cases one element in the script was already known. For Grotefend, who deciphered the cuneiform script, this element was admittedly pure hypothesis at first (his assumption that certain signs represented three known names of Persian kings), but it proved to be correct at the very first test, and the way was then open for further deciphering. For Champollion, the unraveller of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the known element was contained in a readable Greek text. On the trilingual Rosetta Stone, Champollion identified the name of Ptolemy, mentioned in the Greek text, with a group of hieroglyphic signs that were emphasised by being framed in a ring, and thus he determined the first few letters-the basis for further interpretation. From Champollion's day on, however, a text in two languages - what archaeologists call a bilingual - has remained the dream of all philologists when confronted with newly discovered scripts. Rarely has such a dream been so beautifully fulfilled as it had been for Champollion. On the other hand, such staggering luck is no longer necessary-techniques have been refined greatly in the past century. Insignificant hints which would have meant nothing to the pioneers of deciphering now furnish vital information. And with each new decipherment has come a growth in understanding of the network of interrelationships linking the ancient languages with one another. It is curious that the most important of these networks among ancient languages was detected long before the first decipherm
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