decipherments

Decipherment is the process of rendering a text that is encoded, unknown, or unreadable into a form that can be read and understood. The term is used in two related areas: decipherment of scripts and languages in historical linguistics and epigraphy, and the cryptanalytic recovery of plaintext from ciphertext in modern cryptography. In each field, decipherment aims to reveal the underlying message and its cultural context.

In historical decipherment, scholars seek to identify the language behind a script and to map symbols to sounds or words. Notable milestones include the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs after the Rosetta Stone played a central role for Jean-François Champollion in 1822; the decipherment of cuneiform by Henry Rawlinson and colleagues in the 19th century; and Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in 1952. The decipherment of the Maya script, advanced by Yuri Knorozov in the 1950s, opened much of Mesoamerican history to reading.

In cryptography, decipherment refers to recovering plaintext from ciphertext, typically through knowledge of the encryption method or via cryptanalytic techniques. This field includes breaking the Enigma machine during World War II and solving substitution ciphers through statistical analysis. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with decryption, though practice distinguishes decryption with a key from decipherment without full key knowledge.

Decipherment remains ongoing for several scripts and inscriptions that are still unreadable or only partly understood, and it continues to shape the study of history, linguistics, and security.