The quest to decipher Maya hieroglyphs began with the very Spanish invaders whose hegemonic rule did so much to wipe out the ancient Maya script. Among them was the conquistador Hernando Cortes, who ...

A 2,000-year-old code that once looked like random scratches on parchment has finally given up its secret, turning a handful of obscure Dead Sea fragments into a new window on one of antiquity’s most ...

It took more than 20 years to translate the Rosetta stone. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Some ancient societies had written ...

For centuries, the meaning of the mysterious and mystical Egyptian hieroglyphs baffled the greatest minds in the world. Then, in 1799, the discovery of the most famous piece of rock in archaeology ...

French scholar Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs on September 27, 1822 Trending Today Meilan Solly - Senior Associate Digital Editor, History “The first ...

The hunt to decode one of the world’s strangest writing systems has shifted from a fringe obsession to a serious scientific effort, powered by new tools and a fresh generation of researchers. What ...

Just as the Rosetta Stone was fundamental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, other writing systems followed a similar process, sometimes more rugged and convoluted. Some contributed in part ...

Cinema critics keep raving about Arrival, a sci-fi drama by Denis Villeneuve focusing on one linguist’s attempts to decipher an alien language. Star Trek recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. As a ...

When the Spanish conquered the Maya empire in the 16th century, they forced their new subjects to convert to Christianity and speak and write in Spanish. But long before the Maya used the Roman ...