My eye was caught by the announcement of the discovery of the earliest known Mayan glyphs in San Bartolo, Guatemala. The story of the Mayan glyphic writing system is told quite brilliantly in Michael D. Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code. Coe not only tells the story of the deciphering of Mayan, but he has a lot to say about the problem of deciphering ancient scripts generally. (For example, for an ancient text to be read, one needs not only a key — such as the Rosetta Stone, but also a living spoken descendant of the language being deciphered, as Coptic is for the Egyptian hieroglyphs and contemporary Mayan is for the Mayan glyphs.)
thank you