From Magic to Rationality: The Pioneering Stages in the Deciphering of Anatolian Hieroglyphic

This article traces the pioneering stages in the history of deciphering Anatolian Hieroglyphic from the mid-19th century to the 1930s. The first attempts to understand this hitherto unknown script were made in the circles of the museums, societies and clubs of Victorian England. Among the main protagonists were Archibald H. Sayce and George Smith, who compared the hieroglyphic signs of the so-called Hama Stones with the Cypriot Syllabary. However, for many decades the scholars involved in such an arduous task mainly stumbled into mistakes. The first corpus of Anatolian Hieroglyphic inscriptions was published by Leopold Messerschmidt in the early twentieth century. The first substantial steps toward decipherment were taken only in the 1930s by five scholars: Piero Meriggi, Emil O. Forrer, Ignace J. Gelb, Helmuth Th. Bossert and Bedřich Hrozný.