The Book of Lost Languages - Daniel Harbour

‘Rich in historical anecdote . . . Brilliantly conveys the thrill of connecting with the ancient world’ ALEX BELLOS'All the drama of a political thriller, the intrigue of a detective story, and thechallenge of a cryptic crossword' DAVID CRYSTAL'A remarkable uncovering of hidden treasures' IAN McMILLANAn immersive journey into the art of decipherment and the lost past that emerges when ancient scripts are brought back to lifeTwo hundred years ago, in the 1820s, history did not reach back further than the Iron Age. Less than a hundred years later, an extraordinary group of people had pushed our knowledge of the past back by 3,000 years. Sixty per cent of the timeline of recorded world history went from unreadable to read in a matter of decades.Part detective story, part history, part linguistic history, The Book of Lost Languages traces the decipherers who made this happen. In cracking lost languages, they recovered forgotten worlds.We meet the novelist, saved from the French Revolution by his fictions, whose love of forgotten classics led him to decipher an ancient alphabet in a single night – and who then sifted through the king's coin collection to decipher a second, then a third. We meet the Irish cleric, banished to an insignificant parish, who had an almost magical intuition for lost languages. With time, wit and a good armchair, he cracked the writing of Mesopotamia. And we encounter the mysteriously inscribed 'dragon bones' unearthed by illiterate fa
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