A scribe:n.

A public clerk or secretary, especially in ancient times.

A professional copyist of manuscripts and documents.

A writer or journalist.

A decipher:v.

To read or interpret (ambiguous, obscure, or illegible matter). See synonyms

at solve.

To convert from a code or cipher to plain text; decode.

Invention:

Cuneiform writing was probably invented by the Sumerians.

Around 3100 B.C. people began to record amounts of different crops. Barley was
one of the most important crops in southern Mesopotamia and when it was first
drawn it looked like this.

hieroglyphics:

Hieroglyphics was the form of writing used in ancient Egypt. It is a form of picture writing.

Behistun rock:

behistun, Bisitun, or Bisotun is the word for an ancient village and a steep rock located in today's Iran.
Bisitun became an official UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Behistun Rock is one of the keys to finding the Lost Tribes. The crux is knowing
the names used to identify those people. With the trilingual inscription of Behistun
Rock we discover what three other cultures called the Ten Tribes. And it
wasn't Israelites.
Behistun Rock is found in the Zargos mountains, in northwestern Iran, on an old
caravan road that runs from Babylon to Ecbatana, the ancient capitol of Media.
The mountain is 1700 feet high and on the sheer face, 300 feet above the base is
a huge bas relief commissioned by Darius the Great in 515 BC as a grandiose
Ode to his great accomplishments. Listed are the nations and peoples he
conquered and ruled as the king of the Medo-Persian empire.
The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is part of an Ancient Egyptian granite stele with engraved text that
provided the key to modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The inscription records a decree that was issued at Memphis in 196 BCE on behalf of
King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three texts: the upper one is in ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle one in Egyptian demotic script, and the lower text
in ancient Greek.

Originally displayed within a temple, the stele was probably moved during the early
Christian ormedieval period, and eventually used as building material in the construction
of a fort at the town ofRashid (Rosetta) in the Nile delta. It was rediscovered there in
1799 by a soldier of the French expedition to Egypt.
Francois Champollion (23 December 1790- 4 March 1832) was a renowned
French Linguist and Egyptologist. He is credited with unlocking the mysteries of
the Egyptian hieroglyphics.

For a very long time, the Egyptian hieroglyphics had puzzled and frustrated
researchers on Ancient Egypt. What did they say? And how did one go about
finding out what they said? People in contemporary Egypt didn't use that script
any more and there was no one to offer a clue to their meaning.

And then, in 1799, the clue manifested itself in the shape of the Rosetta Stone.
This was a large, black slab, inscribed with three scripts – Hieroglyphics, Demotic
and Greek. It was found in Rashid, a village on the outskirts of Alexandria, by a
French engineer, Pierre-Francois Xavier Bouchard, and his team of workers.
They were excavating material for fortification works; the French, under
Napoleon Bonaparte's leadership, were in the middle of a war with the British.
The workers thought the stone slab was of black basalt – it has since been
identified as black granite – and they were impressed enough with it to keep it
from being turned into fortification fodder.

The slab was turned over to French intellectuals, who had tagged along to see
the Egyptian sights while their forces fought the British. The linguists amongst
them recognized what a find it was and had it moved to Cairo. Since the
Frenchmen referred to the Rashid village as Rosetta, the stone was promptly
dubbed the Rosetta Stone. Later, after the cease fire, it became the property of
the British and lies today in the British Museum.

So what was so special about the Rosetta Stone? Well, it was inscribed with the
same text in three scripts - Hieroglyphics, Demotic and Greek. So, if you knew
two of these scripts, like the linguists did Demotic and Greek, it was possible to
decipher the meaning of the third, hitherto mystifying script, the Hieroglyphics. Of
course that is putting it too simply, and it actually took several linguists a long
time to do the deciphering.

The inscribed text was a decree written by the Priests of Memphis in 196 B.C.,
extolling Ptolemy V Epiphanes for restoring the glory of Egypt and rendering to
the priests their due privileges. To ensure everyone could read the decree, the
Priests had it inscribed in three scripts that were in widespread use in the Egypt
of that period. These three scripts were the Hieroglyphic that was used by the
Priests, the Demotic that was used by the common people and the Greek that
the royal court used.

The Hieroglyphic and the Demotic scripts fell out of use over time, but the
contemporary Coptic script had retained some alphabets of the Demotic script.
By painstakingly piecing those and the Greek script with the Hieroglyphic script,
the latter began to make sense as a phonetic alphabet.

The British linguist Stephen Weston deciphered the Greek part in 1802. Others,
namely the British physicist Thomas Young, the Swedish diplomat Johann
Akerblad and the French linguist Silvestre de Sacy attempted to decipher
Demotic Script and the Hieroglyphics and had a limited measure of success.
Champollion studied their research, worked on his own and, after long years of
study, went on to crack the code. His expertise in Coptic (he knew eleven
languages), plus his determination gave him an edge over the others. Young's
research too played a big role in assisting him, something Champollion remained
reluctant to admit.

On 27 September 1822, he presented a paper, 'Lettre a M. Dacier', detailing his

research and compilation of 26 alphabet letters to M.Dacier, the permanent
secretary of the French Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Two years
later, in 1824, he published further research in a book ' Précis du système
hiéroglyphique'.
The Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs or Maya hieroglyphs, was
thewriting system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica,
presently the only[citation needed]Mesoamerican writing system that has been
substantially deciphered. The earliest inscriptions found which are identifiably
Maya date to the3rd century BCE in San Bartolo, Guatemala, [1] [2] and writing
was in continuous use until shortly after the arrival of
the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century CE (and even later in isolated
areas such as Tayasal). Maya writing usedlogograms complemented by a set
of syllabic glyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese writing.
Maya writing was called "hieroglyphics" orhieroglyphs by early European
explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries who did not understand it but found its
general appearance reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs, to which the Maya
writing system is not at all related.