Editing Decipherment (section)

== History ==
Interest in ancient scripts and dead languages began to arise by the [[Renaissance]], if not earlier. Extensive information began to be collected about these scripts in the 16th and 17th centuries, and a typology of writing was established in the 17th century. The first serious decipherments, however, did not take place until the 18th century. In 1754, Swinton and Barthélemy independently deciphered the Aramaic script as represented in Palmyrene inscriptions from the 3rd century AD. In 1787, [[Silvestre de Sacy]] deciphered the [[Sasanian script]], which was the script used in [[Ancient Persia]] to write down the [[Middle Iranian]] language used in the [[Sasanian Empire|Sasanian empire]]. Both decipherments relied on bilingual texts where Greek was included as the second script. It was also in the 18th century when the methodological framework for deciphering scripts and languages began to be established. For example, in 1714, [[Leibniz]] advocated that parallel content in bilingual inscriptions could be specified by correlating where personal names occur in both inscriptions. By the 19th century, the prerequisites for decipherment began to become widely available. These included extensive knowledge about the scripts themselves, adequate editions of known texts from that script, philological skills, and the ability to reconstruct linguistic forms from the limited available evidence. The 19th century saw two major successes in decipherment: that of [[Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts|Egyptian hieroglyphic]] and [[Decipherment of cuneiform|cuneiform]].<ref name=":5" />