Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts

Lost Languages reports from the front lines of scholarship where obsession, genius, occasional delusion and sometimes bitter rivalry are de rigueur among those currently competing for the rare honour of cracking these ancient codes – and giving voice to forgotten worlds.

Beginning with the stories of three great decipherments – Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan Linear B and Mayan glyphs – Lost Languages moves on to dissect the most well-known and enigmatic undeciphered scripts from around the world. They include the Etruscan alphabet of Italy, the Indus Valley seal script, Rongorongo from remote Easter Island, the Zapotec script of Mexico (probably the first writing system in the Americas), and the unique Phaistos disc of Crete (apparently the world’s earliest ‘printed’ document, dating from c. 1700 BC).

Andrew Robinson is the author of more than fifteen books, including the bestselling The Story of Writing, which has been translated into nine languages, The Man Who Deciphered Linear B and The Story of Measurement. Formerly the literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement, he is now a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.