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

For centuries, the world’s earliest writing stood unread. Only through the work of decipherers did their languages begin to speak again, revealing lives that were long forgotten.

The Book of Lost Languages is part detective story, part history, part linguistic adventure. It traces the epic journeys of decipherment, from the international strife that unearthed the Rosetta Stone, key to Egypt’s hieroglyphs, to the drunken wager that unsealed Old Persian, and from the malaria cure that revealed China’s most ancient writing to the proof by chocolate that Mayan writing had been unlocked behind the Cold War’s Iron Curtain. From earliest victories to latest findings, Harbour chronicles the remarkable mental feats that have restored forgotten worlds.

As it moves through these discoveries, the book celebrates the minds behind them – their strengths and quirks, their brilliance and pettiness, their inexplicable flashes of insight. It reveals the astonishing engine that drives decipherment: when we unravel forgotten scripts, we connect across millennia with the minds that created them. Through these connections, we have extended our knowledge of written history by thousands of years.

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.