Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "Why Some Ancient Texts Will NEVER Be Read - Decipherment Club #2" video.

  1. In this case, the Hittite language was deciphered first, in the early 20th century when Hugo Winckler discovered tablets written in the Akkadian cuneiform script of an unknown language, which turned out to be Hittite. So really, the process here involved two steps: First, decipher the unknown language (Hittite) from the known script (Akkadian cuneiform), then decipher the unknown script (Hittite) from the known language ( . . . also Hittite). History is not usually so isolated as the intriguing examples these videos like to present. Bilingual texts are especially useful, as in the famous example of the Rosetta Stone aiding the deciphering of both hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts of the previously untranslated Ancient Egyptian language. Even so, there probably do exist some supremely isolated examples like Rongorongo that will forever resist deciphering.
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