Similar to the famous Rosetta Stone, it was the 2022 discovery of a short bilingual inscription on a rock face in Tajikistan (along with other such discoveries) that helped them decipher it, thanks to the royal name “Vema Takhtu” along with the title “king of kings” and other epithets appearing in both texts.
The script was in use in Central Asia between 200 BCE and 700 CE. It’s associated with nomadic peoples like the Yuèzhī, as well as the ruling dynasty of the Kushans.
What makes this a big deal is that the Kushan Empire of Central Asia was incredibly influential. Among other things, it was responsible for the spread of Buddhism to East Asia.
There are no known texts written in "simply ideograms". (And good reason to believe that no such text has ever existed.) Even in the earliest Sumerian and Chinese texts, symbols are used for their phonetic values.
That said, the level of "ideogrammaticality" in those texts is much higher than you might like.
Not entirely. Each image (hieroglyph) had also a phonetic value, sometimes so well known that most Phoenician characters were modeled after them. Basically all Western alphabets and abjads (like Arabic) stem from the Phoenician script, which is phonetic.
If each ideogram also has some phonetic value(s), does it make script phonetic? From your answer, yes Phoenician script is phonetic but there is nothing against Egyptian being ideogrammatic.
Just like if phonetic kana is based on kanji it doesn't mean those kanji, a good chunk of which is ideogrammatic, is purely phonetic.
It's actually the opposite: Chinese script is quite phonetic (with a lot of different base characters though) with some semantic hints. This is this way and not the other way around because of the historical formation of the main category of characters (形聲) in which new parts were added to do semantic disambiguation between graphemes used to write (quasi-)homonyms.
My impression was that 90% kanji are significantly phonetic but the remaining ideographic 10% are actually some of the most frequently used (上/下 and others)? Which is what I referred to as "a good chunk of it". But I don't know what I'm talking about:)
It isn't possible to produce a written text in purely ideograms for the obvious reason that there are no coherent linguistic utterances in which every word has some semantic content. We can be confident that what isn't possible has never been done.
> Early forms of many written languages had no phonetic values.
Agreed, I hate to flag archaeo stories but "news" sources like this should not be given the boost in search rankings that they will get from showing up in places like this.
fwiw the much more interesting, informative open access paper is here:
fringe publications are that, fringe, I like it, I feel like it's okay to have places where uncertainty can have a space, even if it invites articles that fall over the line, so, this is not a endorsement of aliens or lost ancient civilization, just hope that we can preserve some spaces that take a little risk now and again, like arXiv :)
> How do you know you have the actual decoding and not some valid but incorrect one?
Well, if you're able to decode at high quality, that's not really a concern. There's no such thing as a "valid but incorrect" decoding for the same reason that when you're decrypting an encrypted message, and you get a stretch of valid language, you don't worry about whether that's really the message that was originally encrypted or just a weird coincidence.
However, ancient languages are usually not understood that well, which makes it impossible to determine whether a decoding really is or isn't valid. The protocol is supposed to be that several different teams are issued the same text, and if they produce translations that say the same thing, the decipherment is considered valid. This goal has not necessarily actually been achieved in some languages that are nevertheless considered "deciphered".
Here they say that the unknown language is recognized as a variety of Middle Iranic, which adds some plausibility since other Middle Iranic languages will be well understood and so it's possible for outside experts to criticize their work. The shortness of the inscription they're working from subtracts plausibility; if other texts exist and they can be convincingly deciphered, that would be good favorable evidence.
postscript:
> As a preliminary name, the researchers propose the term "Eteo-Tocharian" to describe the newly identified Iranian language.
This strikes me as very weird, since there is a Tocharian language group and Iranic languages don't belong to it.
>This strikes me as very weird, since there is a Tocharian language group and Iranic languages don't belong to it.
I guess it's because "Tocharian" as used for IE languages of city-states of Tarim considered to be a mistaken name now. Eteo-Tocharian means True/Real Tocharian, and doesn't mean it belongs to "Tocharian".
By 1851, Hincks and Rawlinson could read 200 Akkadian signs. They were soon joined by two other decipherers: young German-born scholar Julius Oppert, and versatile British Orientalist William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1857, the four men met in London and took part in a famous experiment to test the accuracy of their decipherments. Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, gave each of them a copy of a recently discovered inscription from the reign of the Assyrian emperor Tiglath-Pileser I. A jury of experts was impaneled to examine the resulting translations and assess their accuracy. In all essential points, the translations produced by the four scholars were found to be in close agreement with one another. There were, of course, some slight discrepancies. The inexperienced Talbot had made a number of mistakes, and Oppert's translation contained a few doubtful passages which the jury politely ascribed to his unfamiliarity with the English language. But Hincks' and Rawlinson's versions corresponded remarkably closely in many respects. The jury declared itself satisfied, and the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform was adjudged a fait accompli.
To be clear, that is a property of some cryptography; without knowing the key any decryption is equally likely (i.e. there's no one 'valid' decryption result)
Say you use an encryption method to encipher the first page of A Tale of Two Cities. Someone else is tasked with determining what the plaintext was.
If their methodology is to (1) choose some method by which the ciphertext is transformed into a candidate plaintext, and then (2) apply that method, they will not be able to produce a candidate plaintext which (a) makes sense but (b) is not the actual original plaintext.
The exception is one-time-pad encryption, which isn't really worth noting. It's an exception because the decryption method for one-time-pad encryption is isomorphic to "choose what you want the plaintext to say, and then write down the key that will produce that plaintext". If the key is shorter than the ciphertext, this can't happen.
But "a property of all encryption methods other than OTP" is a less convenient way to say "a property of all encryption methods".
This is actually a good question. Before the Rosetta stone work there were a number of published "translations" of Egyptian hieroglyph texts that were honest attempts at decoding the written language (as opposed to frauds). Typically they were somewhat nonsensical and this fact was papered over with "it's a religious text". In my opinion we see the same thing with proposed translations of yet undeciphered scripts like Rongorongo. One thing these typically share is they rely heavily on proposed ideograms and have little or no phonetic component, because there's more room to massage meaning with ideograms.
>> However, ancient languages are usually not understood that well, which makes it impossible to determine whether a decoding really is or isn't valid.
The script was in use in Central Asia between 200 BCE and 700 CE. It’s associated with nomadic peoples like the Yuèzhī, as well as the ruling dynasty of the Kushans.
What makes this a big deal is that the Kushan Empire of Central Asia was incredibly influential. Among other things, it was responsible for the spread of Buddhism to East Asia.
Source: https://ancientbeat.substack.com/p/ancient-beat-69-giant-gro...