Undeciphered writing systems

5 Mysterious Writing Systems That No One Has Deciphered: These ancient scripts offer tantalizing clues about civilizations we still don’t fully understand.Crystal Ponti, History (5/15/26) The five undeciphered writing systems covered in this post are: Linear A, Indus Script, Rongorongo, Proto-Elamite, and The Phaistos Disk. We have discussed each of these scripts on Language Log, some of them at consierable length and on multiple occasions. What conditions unite them? Early civilizations recorded trade, ritual and governance in various written forms, leaving behind systems of communication that shaped human history. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya glyphs have been deciphered, but others remain stubbornly encoded, even after centuries of study. As Marc Zender, associate professor of anthropology and director of the linguistics program at Tulane University, explains, decipherment depends on a specific set of conditions: Script typology: Determining what kind of writing system it is and…