Nothing is so romantic as the decipherment of an unknown script.
We moderns are justly proud to have discovered the infinitesimally small world of quarks and the egregiously large world of the general theory of relativity. But the discovery of the human past over the last 200 years has taught us more about who we are and where we come from. Decipherment has made this possible, and there is no better book on the subject than Maurice Pope's revised edition of a study first published in 1975. This courage to err, along with the willingness to revise, is a distinct virtue possessed by almost all of the clear-eyed heroes of our story. Jean-Fran ois Champollion's 1822 decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone.