The Book of Lost Languages

An immersive journey into the art of decipherment and the lost past that emerges when ancient scripts are brought back to life

Two hundred years ago, in the 1820s, history did not reach back further than the Iron Age. Less than a hundred years later, an extraordinary group of people had pushed our knowledge of the past back by 3,000 years. Sixty per cent of the timeline of recorded world history went from unreadable to read in a matter of decades.

Part detective story, part history, part linguistic adventure, The Book of Lost Languages traces the decipherers who made this happen. In cracking lost languages, they recovered forgotten worlds.

We meet the novelist, saved from the French Revolution by his fictions, whose love of forgotten classics led him to decipher an ancient alphabet in a single night – and who then sifted through the king's coin collection to decipher a second, then a third. We meet the Irish cleric, banished to an insignificant parish, who had an almost magical intuition for lost languages. With time, wit and a good armchair, he cracked the writing of Mesopotamia. And we encounter the mysteriously inscribed 'dragon bones' unearthed by illiterate farmers that drove the decipherment of Old Chinese.

Moving through these discoveries, Daniel Harbour celebrates the minds behind them – their strengths and quirks, their brilliance and pettiness, their inexplicable flashes of insight. He reveals the astonishing engine that drives decipherment: when we unravel forgotten scripts, we connect across millennia with the minds that created them.

The result is an exhilarating story of people and politics, dogma and doubt, genius and ingenuity, and of the beguiling artistry behind some of the greatest puzzles ever created.

About the Author

Daniel Harbour is a leading expert on writing systems and formal linguistics and a Fellow of the British Academy. For 25 years, he has worked with speakers of endangered languages from the United States to the South Caucasus, helping preserve their knowledge for future generations. Raised in Australia and educated at Oxford and MIT, he is one of the few people alive, outside tribal elders, familiar with the Kiowa language of Oklahoma. A research professor at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and University Paris 8, he regularly works in eight languages and is conversant in several more.