Page 146 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

decipherment of ancient scripts 495

Eastern Mediterranean materials that illuminate conditions in the fourteenth
Scripts century BCE in the Levant; of significantly greater interest
A twentieth-century decipherment whose importance to are a number of texts that, like some of the early Mesopo-
historians is perhaps on the level of the Parthian/Sasan- tamian materials, bear directly on the Bible.The Ugaritic
ian is that of the “Hittite” hieroglyphs (actually they language is nearly a direct ancestor of Hebrew, and the
record the related Luvian language) used in Anatolia for Canaanite gods and religious practices invoked and de-
the millennium or so after 1500 BCE. After fifty years of scribed—not to mention the poetic styles—correspond
false starts, it was put on a sound footing by I. J. Gelb and closely to many biblical passages that had previously been
many others beginning in 1931. obscure.
Simultaneously a consonantal script akin to the famil- The most recent decipherment of materials pertaining
iar Phoenician, but written like Mesopotamian cuneiform directly to Western civilization was that of Linear B, used
by impressing wedges into clay, which had been discov- on clay tablets at several sites on southern and western
ered in 1929 at ancient Ugarit on the Syrian coast, was Aegean lands. Such tablets were first found at Knossos,
deciphered by three scholars working independently.The Crete, beginning around 1900, and subsequently at
corpus to date (excavations continue) amounts to only a Mycenae and other mainland locations dating to the fif-
little over 1,000 tablets, but among them are diplomatic teenth century BCE.An obstacle to the decipherment was