

Now tatanka is a buffalo bull while tonkala is a mouse. In Sioux the word peta means stone, yet the word pte is a buffalo cow. This daring leap was the key essential to cracking that nut.Īlso without a native speaker you have to rely on samples matched with the word. First the writings were not Cretois but those of a Greek invader and that the signs did not stand for a thing like Egyptian but rather some sound as in phonetic writing. The text they left behind, labeled Linear B, had confounded scholars until Ventris came up with what many considered a ridiculous hypothesis in the 1960s. This created a stepping-stone into the nuances of the Egyptian written language, or an important puzzle piece to unlock the whole.Īnother language is Cretois, a dead language in all senses. The decree was written in three languages, Grecian, Demotic, and Egyptian. The stone had a decree by Ptolemy V engraved in it in 196 BC.


It was discovered by chance when a French officer found it during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt during 1799. The only reason Champollion solved the mystery was when he got a hold of the Rosette Stone. First one needs to understand the foundation of the language and its basic interpretations.Īs stated the Egyptian writings were frustrating since there was no foundation to work from as it was a dead and forgotten language.
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The book also includes several large, elaborate fold-out pages full of the same strange text and drawings.ĭeciphering an unknown language is a daunting task. Some illustrations appear to be plants and herbs, most of them strange and unidentifiable others resemble astrological charts and still others are groups of nude women bathing in tubs and pools shaped like human organs. The manuscript appears to be made up of several sections, each containing distinctly different illustrations which shed little light on its contents. The textual content of this mysterious illustrated book is unknown because it is written in an unidentified language using an unfamiliar alphabet, and despite the efforts of expert linguists and cryptographers over many decades, not a single word has been deciphered.Ĭuriosity of the book’s content is fed by the bizarre, elaborate illustrations that appear throughout its pages. Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library is in possession of many fascinating historic texts, but perhaps its most perplexing item is a six century old, one-of-a-kind book known as the Voynich Manuscript.
