Episode 790: Sam Kean: Lost Cities, Ancient Mysteries & The Museum of Lost Things

some things that you contend are lost aren't really lost.

We have them right in front of our eyes and we can look at them.

So why are they lost?

So they are lost in the sense, and this happened with a lot of languages, hieroglyphs from ancient Egypt is the most famous example.

The knowledge of how to read them was lost for a very long

time.

So We could look at the characters.

We

could

quantify how many of each character appeared, things like that.

But we just didn't know what it meant.

We didn't know how to read them.

And the decipherment strategies that they've used are really clever and really ingenious.

It's like reading a mystery novel or something where you're putting together all these clues and then there are big breakthroughs.

There are rivals going at it.

People are getting very mad at each other and all this stuff.

All the juicy human drama you would want in a novel are in these decipherment stories.

So they're really incredible.

And with Linear A and Linear B specifically, the Linear B one was a very nice example of just using context clues to figure these kind of things out.

And I think that story is especially interesting because the person who broke through and finally deciphered it, Michael Ventress, he actually used a lot of the same exact strategies that we saw with the decipherment of hieroglyphs.

So the hieroglyph decipherment really provided a template for a lot of later decipherments as well.

And there's just this something, just a rush you get when you can see it through their eyes of them finally deciphering.

being able to read this after thousands and thousands of years and knowing that you are the first person who can understand this text in millennia and millennia.

It's really as close as you can get to time travel and reaching back to those people in time.

So Linear B, we have deciphered thanks to Michael Ventris.