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Orkhon runes by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893, revealed a Dani, A. H. (1986). Indian palaeography (2nd ed.). New Delhi, India:
handful of inscriptions attesting to the presence of Turkic Munshiram Manoharlal.
Daniels, P. T. (1988). “Shewing of hard sentences and dissolving of
speakers in Mongolia in the eighth century CE, but little doubts”: The first decipherment. Journal of the American Oriental Soci-
more. (The key to the script was an accompanying Chi- ety, 108, 419–436.
Daniels, P.T. (1995).The decipherments of ancient Near Eastern scripts.
nese paraphrase.)
In J. M. Sasson, J. Baines, G. Beckman, & K. S. Rubinson (Eds.),
Civilizations of the ancient Near East (Vol. 1, pp. 81–93). New York:
Scripts from Elsewhere Scribner’s.
Daniels, P. T., & Bright, W. (Eds.). (1996). The world’s writing systems.
The most recent decipherment brings us to the only writ- New York: Oxford University Press.
ing system created in the Western Hemisphere in antiq- Hallo, W. W., & Lawson Younger, K., Jr. (Eds.). (2003). The context of
scripture: Canonical compositions, monumental inscriptions and
uity: the Maya glyphs of ninth-century CE Mesoamerica (a
archival documents from the Biblical world. Leiden: Brill.
number of similar-looking graphic complexes of earlier Iversen, E. (1993). The myth of Egypt and its hieroglyphs in European tra-
date are known, but they are understood little or not at dition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work pub-
lished 1961)
all). The principal names are Yuri Knorosov and Floyd Larsen, M.T. (1996). The conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an antique
Lounsbury, Soviet and American, who published their land 1840–1860. London: Routledge.
Lounsbury, F. (1989). The ancient writing of Middle America. In W. M.
results in 1952 and 1973 respectively. Maya monuments
Senner (Ed.), The origins of writing (pp. 203–237). Lincoln: Univer-
commemorate key dates in the lives of rulers of cities; sity of Nebraska Press.
what can so far be interpreted of them has shed light on Oppenheim, A. L. (1977). Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a dead civi-
lization (rev. ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
chronology and ritual. Details continue to be worked out. Parkinson, R. (1999). Cracking codes: The Rosetta Stone and decipher-
A few scripts can be read while their languages remain ment. London: British Museum.
Pope, Maurice. (1999). The story of decipherment: From Egyptian hiero-
obscure: the Etruscan of ancient Italy, the Meroitic south
glyphs to Maya script (rev. ed.). London: Thames and Hudson.
of Egypt, the most ancient Iberian in Spain. There are Reading the past: Ancient writing from cuneiform to the alphabet. (1990,
three scripts with corpora large enough that decipher- reprint). London: British Museum; Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press. (Reprinted New York: Barnes & Noble)
ment remains a possibility, but with no texts likely to pro- Robinson, A. (2002). Lost languages: The enigma of the world’s undeci-
vide more than minimal economic data: Linear A of the phered scripts. New York: McGraw Hill.
Salomon, R. (1998). Indian epigraphy:A guide to the study of inscriptions
ancient Aegean, Proto-Elamite of Iran, and the Harappan
in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan languages. New York:
script of the Indus Valley. Greater potential is offered by Oxford University Press.
the variety of Mesoamerican scripts. But there is little Schele, L., & Friedel, D. (1990). A forest of kings:The untold story of the
ancient Maya. New York: Morrow.
hope that such ill-attested graphic systems as the Phais- Schele, L., & Mathews, P. (1998). The code of kings:The language of seven
tos Disk (from Crete) or rongorongo (Easter Island) will sacred Maya temples and tombs. New York: Scribner.
Van De Mieroop, M. (1999). Cuneiform texts and the writing of history.
ever be read—if they are even ways of writing language.
London: Routledge.
Peter T. Daniels

Further Reading Decolonization
Briant, P. (2002). From Cyrus to Alexander:A history of the Persian Empire
(P.T. Daniels,Trans.).Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. (Original work
published 1996) ot many years ago decolonization was a Cinderella
Bühler, G. (1980). Indian paleography. New Delhi, India: Munshiram Nsubject in international relations, the poor sister to
Manoharlal. (Original work published 1904)
Chadwick, J. (1967). The decipherment of Linear B (2nd ed.). Cambridge, the study of the Cold War. For historians, it was the
UK: Cambridge University Press. “inevitable” terminus to the history of empire, a sort of
Christian, D. (1998). A history of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia:Vol.
1. Inner Eurasia from prehistory to the Mongol Empire. Oxford, UK: punctuation mark before the new history of postcolonial
Blackwell. states got under way. In a world in which the division