Alice Kober Gesellschaft für die Entzifferung antiker Schriftsysteme
A safe place for technical script decipherment

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News

By using the GEAS decipherment tool with its dynamic syllabary sequence detection method, we have contributed to a number of small-step decipherment advancements with results partially or fully accepted among scholars.

2023.08.01 Paleografia Quantitativa Norditalica (PQN): Massing some evidence, Missing some conference

The collective GEAS project called PQN (Paleografia Quantitativa Norditalica) depicts every single graphic shape of the Lepontic/Brembonic/Cisalpine-Celtic, Raetic/Camunic, and Etruscan/Lemnic sub-alphabets…. and the Elder Futhark.

2023.07.01 Byblos Script: First sound value proposal ever based on external (iconographic) evidence

In an article soon to be published in Ugarit Forschungen, M. Mäder will suggest the first two sound value proposals for the Byblos Syllabary ever achieved by external evidence. A cylinder seal published by Garbini in 2004, depicting the three daughters of Achenaton and Nofretete together with three names written in Byblos script attached to them, is compared to the Berlin Familienstele showing the…

2021.07.01 Linking Leponticon and Raeticon to Lexicon Leponticum and Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum

It is our duty to provide photographs to every inscription depicted in the GEAS Corpora. But in the case of Lepontic and Raetic, this would be double work. Instead of collecting and rendering images for each of the more than 600 inscripitons unicodified by GEAS, we decided to link each of the Leponticon and Raeticon inscriptions to the respective entrance in [LexLep]…

2021.03.01 James Hoch (1990) confirmed: The Byblos syllabary is indeed adopted from the Egyptian Consonant Alphabet

Back in 2017, Marwan Kilani pushed us to new realms by recommending Harvey Sobelman’s (1961) n-gram analysis and James Hoch’s (1990) suggestion of comparing the Byblos script to the Egyptian phonographic (consonantial) sub-alphabet. Departing from the successful sound value attribution of ;  pa compared to p3 in Anchesen-pa-Aton’s hieroglyphic name on the Berlin Familienstele, combined with the…

2019.09.01 Does Brian Colless refuse the  me-ke-t-ATON ≈  me-ri-t-ATON proposal?

We appreciate Brian Colless’ great and almost live-long efforts and contributions to the deipherment of the Byblos syllabary, and we agree that IF one of the former claims for full decipherment should be partially taken for serious, then it is clearly Mendenhall’s (1985) work, who integrates Dunanats (1945) basic observations better and more cautiously than anyone since and before. And, to be…