Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper (American, 1957)

Summary:
Martha Dane is a linguist on an archaeological expedition on Mars. The Martians have all been extinct for a while now, and there is no record that they ever made contact with the humans on Earth, meaning there is nothing akin to a bilingual dictionary. Martha expects to discover something similar to the Rosetta Stone that will ultimately help her decode the Martian language. Martha finds several Martian texts, one of which resembles a magazine. Because of the richness in images that this particular text possesses, Martha hopes to make some sense out of the written language but to no avail: the images are not simple enough to avoid wrong interpretations. When the expedition finds a university library, they are faced with a wall in which there is a table with 92 cells. It quickly occurs to Martha that this is the same periodic table that is used on Earth. After some studying, her hunch proves to be correct, leading the expedition to believe the Martians are humanity’s ancestors.

Another summary:
An expedition from Earth to Mars has been carried out with the amazing result that about 50,000 years ago there used to exist a civilization on the planet. There are books and texts, some drawings and they have even found a few Martian bodies. However there is no way to decode them since there is no one who can speak or read that language nor any text that could help figure out what had lead to the decay of the Martian civilization. 
 Is in this moment when we meet linguist and archeologist Martha Dane which is the responsible of deciphering the Martian language. Nonetheless, her progress is slow since there is no document such as the Rosetta Stone on Earth that would help her learn(?) how the Martian language used to work, along with these, her colleagues do not have high hopes for her. It is not until, by accident, they find a building that resembles a university and enter what seems to be a library which can provide the firsts clues for decoding the language. Then they find a room that looks like a laboratory and Martha’s attention is caught by a periodic table. With a little bit of help from her colleagues she begins to figure out that there is indeed a periodic table and by using it they can now translate the rest of the texts.

Another summary:
The book is set on Mars, approximately at the end of the twentieth century among a group of explorers and archaeologists brought from Terra (Earth) who are trying to figure out the past of the martian civilization that lived in the planet around fifty thousand years before their time. There is no attention drawn to the social order nor the life conditions of the people and we do not get to see their way of living. It presents a possible goal to be achieved by the human race in the sense of technological and scientific progress, by implying the capacity to get to Mars and explore its past civilizations. 
 
 In regards to ideology and institutions, we can infer the existence of institutions such as universities, museums, and in general any institution we could find in the real world. Nonetheless, there is equally little interest in these subjects.
 
 The plot is simple: we follow Dr. Martha Dane, an archaeologist part of the expedition in charge of exploring the Martian civilization. She among other colleagues is stuck on decoding the Martian language; other members of the crew explore ancient buildings. In one of these, they find bones and books, and eventually a periodic table, which will allow Dr. Dane to fulfill her objective.

World view: Describes in a variety of aspects and with some consistency an imaginary state or society which is regarded as better, in some respects at least, than the one in which its author lives.
Future projections: Presents a future-historical goal to be achieved by the efforts of human beings.
Ideology: Explains how a better society came to be, in which sociopolitical institutions and individual relationships are organized to a more perfect principle than in the author's community.
Characters, plot and writing style: A perfectly planned social order derives on the personal satisfaction and psychic well-being of the characters.
Classification: Dystopia