"Do you enjoy solving puzzles? What would you do if given a foreign code to decipher but no guide to grammar and no dictionary? That is exactly the problem faced by archeologists and linguists with regard to a number of ancient writing systems that remain a mystery to this day, despite technological advances. They tell of advanced civilizations whose writing we cannot understand."
"Her research involves trying to decipher ancient languages and reconstruct their structures. "I find it very appealing to be faced with an intellectual puzzle that is so challenging that even the brightest minds have failed to solve it," she said. "Such written records give us access to a culture that has long since disappeared." She adds that it was as if these writing systems were a time machine, allowing her to interact with a foreign culture, at least passively."
"Not enough text to work from Bonmann's current research focuses on the Epi-Olmec writing system once used on Mexico's southern coast. Though certain inscriptions and symbols indicate an early writing system, the corpus of texts is so small and the context so uncertain that deciphering it is very difficult. The script of the Indus Valley civilization, also called the Harappan civilization, in what is now northwest India and Pakistan is equally mysterious"
Many ancient writing systems remain undeciphered because surviving texts are scarce, fragmentary, or contextually ambiguous. Specialists in historical-comparative linguistics approach these scripts as intellectual puzzles that can reveal long-lost cultures. The Epi-Olmec corpus on Mexico's southern coast contains few inscriptions and uncertain contexts, complicating interpretation. The Indus Valley script appears on hundreds of small seals and pottery fragments but typically in very short sequences, leaving debate over whether it encodes a full language or a symbolic system. Rongorongo from Easter Island consists of abstract glyphs on a few damaged wooden tablets, further limiting confident decipherment and reconstruction.
Read at www.dw.com
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