Lectures - The Rosetta Stone

Accessed February 25, 2010

Thanks goes to Marina Poveda, one of the presenters of these lectures, for passing along this information on to me.

The following are some talks happening at the Assembly Hall of the Casa de Cultura, C/ Jaume II, 3. Novelda (Alicante):

1. Friday 5th of March at 20:00: La Piedra de Rosetta: Llave maestra de la egiptología, by Santiago Mallebrera, teacher of Egyptian language. Member of ITERU.
2. Friday 12th of March at 19:30: Más Allá de la Piedra de Rosetta: El papel fundamental de la lengua copta en el desciframiento de la escritura jeroglífica, by Marina Escolano, deputy director of the joint EES/Durham University archaeological expedition to Saïs (Sa el-Hagar, Egypt).

A poster for these lectures is available.

Decoding Antiquity: Eight Scripts That Still Can't Be Read

Originally published May 27, 2009 | New Scientist | by Andrew Robinson

Robinson starts with an introduction to the challenges of deciphering relatively unknown scripts and uses Egyptian hieroglyphs as an example (having been deciphered 180 years ago). He then describes eight scripts that are partially deciphered, providing a brief history of the scripts' origins and if the language and script are known, partially known, probably known, possibly known, or unknown: Etruscan, Meroitic hieroglyphs, The New World (Olmec, Zapotec and Isthmian), Minoan (Linear A and B), Rongo-rongo (Easter Island), Indus script, Proto-Elamite, and Phaistos disc. He ends the article with an outline of the world's greatest decipherments, which includes Egyptian hieroglyphs.