The Book Of Lost Languages (an Epic Quest To Decipher The Past)

By (author) Harbour, Daniel
Short description/annotation:
An immersive journey into the art of decipherment and the lost past that emerges when ancient scripts are brought back to life.
Description:

‘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 the challenge of a cryptic crossword'' DAVID CRYSTAL
''There is magic in this book . . . The perfect passport into lost worlds'' UNSEEN HISTORIES
''Harbour is the real thing'' SPECTATOR

An immersive journey the lost past that emerges when ancient scripts are brought back to life

Two 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 adventure, 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 farmers that drove the decipherment of Old Chinese.

Moving through these discoveries, Daniel Harbour celebrates the minds behind them – their strengths and quirks, their brilliance and pettiness, their inexplicable flashes of insight. He reveals the astonishing engine that drives decipherment: when we unravel forgotten scripts, we connect across millennia with the minds that created them.

The result is an exhilarating story of people and politics, dogma and doubt, genius and ingenuity, and of the beguiling artistry behind some of the greatest puzzles ever created.

Review quote:
Harbour is the real thing – a theoretical linguist fluent in more languages than you can shake a wedge-shaped reed at. But The Book of Lost Languages is accessibly done, its focus as much on the lives of the decipherers who have come before him – their travels and spats and eccentricities – as it is on the technicalities of early Chinese or Anatolian hieroglyphs. At heart, it is a book about writing – and what it is about this extraordinary global invention that is essentially human. Right now that feels like a very welcome thing
Review quote:
Engrossing . . . There is magic in this book. As Harbour himself notes, "to decipher a script" from some distant era, "is to converse with people from those times, their writers, readers and inventors." One of decipherment''s great contemporary figures himself, Harbour is an authoritative guide to this beguiling subject. A playful book, loaded with puzzles for the reader, it''s the perfect passport into lost worlds
Review quote:
Daniel Harbour has done a masterful job at bringing decipherment to life. Rich in historical anecdote, with clear linguistic exposition – and entertaining puzzles – he brilliantly conveys the thrill of connecting with the ancient world. Harbour is an immensely knowledgeable guide and he has written a playful, deeply-researched book full of fascinating detail that w