Editorial Foreword

Extract

MAKING ILLEGIBILITY The great decipherments of defunct writing systems—of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the cuneiform script of the Sumerians and Akkadians, the Brahmi of Ashoka, Linear B, the Mayan glyphs—have vastly increased the extent of the past accessible to history. Decipherment of lost scripts is a decidedly modern impulse. The ancients showed little inclination to rescue lost scripts or save dying ones; John Leyden wrote (about 1810) of the Romans in Egypt that they did nothing to preserve Egyptian literature, leaving us “nothing but the hieroglyphics as a riddle to perplex future ages, a cipher of which they destroyed the key.” The modernist imperative to decode past scripts has been exercised to great effect since the early nineteenth century, but there has been little scholarly attention to the causes of the extinction of scripts. The opening essay is, as far as we know, the first comparative study of how scripts die.