Decipherment

3 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it.

  1. The mystery of Rongorongo: a script that may not be writingFor over a century, scholars have struggled to crack the code of Easter Island's Rongorongo. Is it a lost language or a sophisticated mnemonic device? The truth lies in a complex …
  2. How a 2,500-year-old script was lost and then rebornCuneiform vanished so completely that the Greeks were practically unaware of its existence. This complex system of wedge-shaped marks fell into oblivion as more efficient scripts …
  3. The Rosetta Stone was found built into the wall of a fort.In 1799, French soldiers demolishing a wall in a fort in the Nile Delta found a slab carved with the same decree in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. Because scholars…

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