This is the allusionist in which I Helen Zoltzman smir a thin layer of language over the

lens so everything looks a little bit nicer. Just to warn you there's a category B-swear

word towards the end of the show but it's educational if that helps.

On with the show.

In the last episode the Rosetta Stone provided the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics by presenting

them in parallel with Greek which enabled them to be deciphered. But languages aren't

designed to be deciphered. They were never meant to be incomprehensible in the first place.

Undecided it's a temporary state in my opinion. I look at it optimistically with the general

guiding rule that anything that anybody over any period of time wrote should be decipherable

by somebody else. Irving Finkl is a curator in the Middle East Department of the British

Museum. The fact is that none of the words writing systems apart from codes are meant to

be obscure. And this is crucial. Normal writing systems that we can't read just because we

haven't deciphered them. It doesn't mean that they are indecisiveable. It means that we

haven't done it. And the fact that we haven't done it depends on various things. Sometimes

it's a matter of extreme rarity. So there's hardly anything to go. And sometimes it's a matter

of a profusion of inscriptions which are all too short to be diagnostic.

All that remains of some languages is the ancient equivalent of a few no-parking signs. Or

sometimes lists of names. But trying to deduce a language from those would be like trying

to figure out the whole of English from a phone book. There's also the issue of the evidence

being mostly whatever was written on durable materials which skews the known vocabulary

of that language towards the official and formal paper or leaves or skins are less likely

to have survived time and climates than stone or clay or ivory or tombs. But those aren't

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