Omniglot is a nice website if you’re interested in languages. It has a large collection of different scripts, currently in use and long dead, from all over the world. These four specimens are from their page on undeciphered scripts.
#1 contains selected symbols from the Vinča script. This script is associated with the Vinča culture, which existed in the Balkan region in the Neolithic (the Vinča archeological site is near Belgrade, Serbia). These symbols are found on artifacts 8,000 to 6,500 thousand years old, several thousand years before the first widely accepted examples of writing. It’s unclear whether this is actually writing or a form of “proto-writing”, and there’s too little information to decipher the script or reconstruct the language it may have represented.
#2 contains selected symbols from Linear A, perhaps the most famous undeciphered script in existence. In 1900, an archaeologist found a number of clay tablets at Knossos on Crete. On them were inscriptions in three different scripts: a hieroglyphic script and two scripts known as Linear A and Linear B. Linear B is thought to have developed from A, which developed from the hieroglyphic script. Only Linear B has been deciphered. Linear A dates from around 4,000 years ago, and the language it represented is unknown; Linear B dates from after an invasion of Greeks and was used to write a form of the Greek language centuries before the Greek alphabet (the one that evolved into the Latin alphabet this post is written in).
#3 shows both sides of the Phaistos disc, also found on Crete. The symbols on the disc are not known to be related to the Crete hieroglyphics or Linear A and B.
Finally, #4 is of more recent origin: it’s a section of the Voynich manuscript. The manuscript is written in an unknown script and contains illustrations of plants and biology, astronomical diagrams and more. The manuscript is named after a Polish bookdealer who acquired it in the early 1910s. Carbon dating puts the origin of the manuscript around the 15th century. Although the authenticity of the manuscript is not under dispute, one hypothesis says that it’s all part of a medieval joke, a hoax, that there is no meaning to the symbols, only the suggestion of one. Nevertheless, many have attempted to solve the riddle; according to wiki, “an alphabet with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text.”
dailymeh posted this on January 18, 2011
