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4、压码看电影学习法系列贴：（多语言入门）字母表汇总

sunyuting1

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Akkadian

Quick Facts
Type	Logophonetic
Genealogy	Cuneiform
Location	West Asia > Mesopotamia
Time	2500 BCE to 100 CE
Direction	Variable

While the cuneiform writing system was created and used at first only by the Sumerian, it did not take long before neighboring groups adopted it for their own use. By about 2500 BCE, the Akkadian, a Semitic-speaking people that dwelled north of the Sumerians, starting using cuneiform to write their own language. However, it was the ascendency of the Akkadian dynasty in 2300 BCE that positioned Akkadian over Sumerian as the primary language of Mesopotamia. While Sumerian did enjoy a quick revival, it eventually became a dead language used only in literary contexts, whereas Akkadian would continue to be spoken for the next two millenium and evolved into later (more famous) forms known as Babylonian and Assyrian.
Syllabic Writing
Sumerian and Akkadian are vastly different languages. Sumerian is a more agglutinative language, where phonetically unchanging words and particles are joined together to form phrases with increasingly complex meaning. Akkadian, however, is infectional, meaning that the basic form of a word, called a root, can be modified in a myriad of ways to create words of related but different meanings. In particular, the basis of Semitic languages is the triconsonantal root, which is a sequence of three consonants representing the most basic and abstract form of a word. Inflections include added vowels between consonants of the root as well as added prefixes and suffixes to the root. For example, in Arabic, the triconsonantal root ktb represent the idea of writing, but by itself it doesn't mean anything. Inflections of this root, however, creates a breadth of words, such as /kitāb/ "book", /kutub/ "books", /ketib/ "writer", /kataba/ "he writes", and so on.
The implication of this is that whereas it was acceptable to simply juxtapose logographic signs in Sumerian to write out a sentence, using the same logograms in Akkadian would not convey the exact meaning of a word. In order to more faithfully reproduce the correct inflection of a word, some signs were used for their phonetic values rather than their meanings. Eventually, Akkadians came to regularly use a group of signs for their phonetic values. We call these signs phonograms. Many of these signs are "simple" These signs became the Akkadian "syllabary", as illustrated below:

Note that the first four columns (with headings "Ca", "Ce", "Ci", and "Cu") represent syllabic signs that start with a consonant on the left side of the chart, the exception being the first row which are pure vowels. The last four columns ("aC", "eC", "iC", and "uC") are signs that end with a consonant.
Also, recall in Sumerian very often different signs represent the same sound, a phenomenon called homophony, due to the fact that words in the Sumerian language tends to be monosyllabic. Since Akkadian adopted the Sumerian writing system, it also inherited all its homophonous sounds. For simplicity sake, I only listed one sign per syllable in the previous chart, but in fact it is possible to have multiple signs for the same syllable. In the traditional transliteration scheme, the first homophone of a sign has an acute accent over the vowel, like á. The second homophone has a grave accent over its vowel, like à. All other homophones have a subscript at the end starting with 4, such as a₄, a₅, a₆, etc.

In addition, there are signs that represent a syllable of the structure consonant, vowel, and consonant (CVC). Another way to write these CVC syllables is to write a consonant-initial sign followed by a consonant-final sign, where the vowels of both signs being equal. The following example shows some CVC phonograms on the first row, and the same CVC syllable written as sequences of Cv-VC signs.

However, even though the Akkadian language can be wholly written by phonetic signs, tradition dictated that the full spectrum of signs, namely logograms and determinatives, be used in conjunction.
Logograms and Determinatives
Logograms are signs that represent words or morphemes. Determinatives are unpronounced signs used to denote the general meaning or categorization of following words. However, logograms and determinatives do not form separate groups of signs. In fact, nearly all determinatives are taken from logograms. Moreover, a good amount of phonetic signs also double as logograms and, by extension, determinatives. A sign that has more than one function is polyvalent. Only through the context in which a polyveant sign occurs can one tell if it functions as a phonetic sign, a logogram, or a determinative.
One common sign that can be used as all three types of signs is

, which is a phonetic sign denoting the syllable an. In addition, it also stands for three logograms: the word ilum which means "god" (but transliterated as DINGIR, the Sumerian word for "god"), the god of heaven Anum, and then by extension the word šamû which means "heaven". And on top of all this, it can also function as a determinative for names of deities. The following example illustrates this polyvalency:

Quick note on the traditional transliteration of Akkadian signs: Phonograms are written in italic. Logograms are written in capitals, often transcribing Sumerian words, but also sometimes Akkadian if the logogram has more meanings in Akkadian than in Sumerian. The superscripts are determinatives, and they tend to use the same convention as logograms (capital letters transcribing Sumerian words). The only exception is the determinative for deity names, which is shortened to ^D instead of ^DINGIR.
Going back to the example, you have most likely noticed that the same sign can represent different words. This polyvalency originated in Sumerian when the same logogram was used to write related words that had vastly different pronunciations. To distinguish between different readings, contextual information is extremely important. One kind of hint to indicate which word the logogram referes is the phonetic complement. It is a phonogram that spells out part of the word that the logogram represents, and so allow the reader to identify the word. In the example, the sign sequence AN-ú identifies the word šamû, not the deity Anum. Another form of hint is the determinative. The sequence KÁ-DINGIR-RA is followed by the determinative ^KI, meaning that is must be the name of a city. Only one city is written as KÁ-DINGIR-RA, and that would be Babylon. In fact, the logogram KÁ represents the word babu ("gate"), DINGIR resolves to ilum ("god"), and RA is the genitive case in Sumerian for dingir. Together the sequence gives Babilum, or "Gate of the God", where the god in question would be Marduk, the patron god of Babylon.
Because of the inflected nature of the Akkadian language, a logogram often only represents the root, or basic form, of a word. To derive other forms of the word, phonetic complements are added to the logogram to indicate inflectional endings.

Note that the logogram for "king", šarrum in Akkadian, is transliterated as LUGAL, which is Sumerian for "king".
As you have no doubtly gathered by now, the Akkadian script was an extremely complex writing system. The number of signs used hover from 200 to 400 (although the total number of signs is between 700 and 800), and homophony and polyvalency give Akkadian scribes multiple ways to spell the same sequence of sounds. However, it remained as one of the great writing systems of the ancient Middle East, preserving the history, literature, and science of the ancient Mesopotamians for the modern world.
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Aztec

Quick Facts
Type	Logophonetic
Genealogy	Mesoamerican
Location	Americas > Mesoamerica
Time	1400 CE to 1600 CE
Direction	Variable

The Aztecs, or Mexica as they called themselves, were the elite of a militaristic empire centered at Central Mexico when the Spanish conquistadores landed in America at the beginning of the 16th century CE. The Aztecs originated in the semi-arid environments of northern Mexico as one of the many barbarian or "Chichimec" tribes. When they arrived at the fertile Valley of Mexico at 14th century CE, they found the land already settled and divided by city states. They built their city, Tenochtitlan, in the marshes of Lake Texcoco, and quickly adopted much of the culture and language of their new neighbors. As a result, the Aztecs adopted a writing system that had been used for many centuries before and shared by many of the other Nahuatl-speaking nations of Central Mexico.
Aztec writing, or more generally, Nahuatl writing, was primary written on perishable media such as deer-skin and paper codices. Due to ravages of time and purposeful destruction of books by both the Aztecs and the Spanish conquistadores, no pre-Columbian book has survived to the modern age. All surviving documents about Nahuatl writing were composed after the Conquest and contained a mixture of Aztec glyphs and Spanish notes. There are a few codices made before the Conquest from the Puebla region in a somewhat different style known as the "international" Mixteca-Puebla, style, but their exact relationship to either Aztec or Mixtec writing is still somewhat obscure.
General Overview Aztec writing had three primary functions, namely to mark calendrical dates, to record accounting mathematical calculations, and to write names of people and places. No continuous texts like those of the Maya, Epi-Olmec, or even Zapotec writing system has been be found. Therefore, one can say that the Aztec writing system was more rudimentary than those of its southerly neighbors, but by no means it is primitive. It shares many of the same concept as
The writing system of the Aztecs is very rudimentary. Its core consists of a set of calendrical signs and a vigesimal number system. Like other Mesoamerican people, the Aztecs used the 260-day sacred calendar, which in Nahuatl was called tonalpohualli. The tonalpohualli is essentially two parallel and interlocking cycles, one of 20 days (represented by "day signs"), and one of 13 days (represented by numbers called "coefficients"). The following are the 20 day signs in the Aztec sacred calendar. The Nahuatl names are in red, and their meanings in English are in blue.

A date in the tonalpohualli is composed of a day sign and and a coefficient. So, for example, the first day in the 260-day cycle would be 1 Cipactli. As both the day sign and the coefficient moves forward, the next day would be 2 Ehecatl. This goes on until 13 Acatl is reached, at which point the coefficient cycle loops back to 1, and hence the next day would be 1 Ocelotl. Similarly, upon reaching the last day sign on day 7 Xochitl, the day sign cycle goes back to the first sign, and the next day would be 8 Cipactl.
The Aztecs had a 365-day solar calendar called xiuhpohualli, which consisted of 18 months of 20 days, and an unlucky 5-day period at the end of the year. However, they rarely recorded dates in the solar calendar on manuscripts, and never on monuments.
In addition, like other Mesoamerican cultures, the Aztecs also employed the Calendar Round, a 52-year period created by interlocking the 260-day and 365-day cycles. A year in the Calendar Round was named by the tonalpohualli name of last day of the last month in the xiuhpohualli for that year. Because of the way the math worked out, only four day signs, namely Calli, Tochtli, Acatl, and Tecpatl, could be part of a year's name, and hence they were called "year bearers". Accompanying the year bearers were coefficients, which could range from 1 to 13. To distinguish Calendar Round years from days in the 260-day calendar, years glyphs were drawn inside rectangular "cartouches". A good example occurs in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, a document written after the Spanish Conquest but at a time when knowledge of the pre-Columbian culture was still available. In this document, Aztec years are correlated to Western Gregorian years.

Another example of year sign can be found on the coronation stone of Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin (Moctezuma II), which you can see at the Art Institute of Chicago"s Art Access website.
As you have probably gathered by now, Aztec numbers are represented by long sequences of dots. In general, the Aztecs almost exclusively used dots on manuscripts as well as on stone monuments, but the more ancient bar-and-dot system does make rare appearances on carved monuments as well, primarily due to artistic consideration. The dot system, while feasible for calendrical use (since no number will ever exceed 20), was impossible when dealing with accounting, especially since the Aztecs had to record large amounts of tribute frequently demanded from its provinces. The Codex Mendoza, another post-Conquest manuscript, depicted life in Central Mexico around the time of conquest and also contained a section on the tribute exacted by the Aztec Empire. To count items in excess of 20 efficiently, the Aztecs used glyphs for the numbers 20 (a flag), 400 (a feather), and 8000 (a bag of incense).

For example, the number 500 would be a feather and five flags (400 + 5 x 20 = 500). To indicate that the multiple glyphs forming a number belong to a single sign group, a line is drawn to connect all the glyphs. The line is then connected to the object it is counting.

The previous examples are taken from the Codex Mendoza, and they provide both the Aztec and Spanish versions of the information they are conveying. On the left, you can see the a bundle topped by a series of five flags, which is the number 100 (5 x 20), and is reflected by the Spanish caption "çient cargas de cacao", meaning "100 loads of cacao beans". In the middle, the Aztec representation is that of four flags and a bird, which is mirroed in the Spanish caption "ochenta pieles de pajaros deste color", or "80 pelts of birds of this color". And finally, on the right, the caption "cccc manojo de plumas coloradas" meant "400 bundles of red feathers" and is shown in Aztec as a schematic, black feather (400) with a bundle of red feathers.
In addition to calendrical and numeric signs, a number of highly pictorial logograms were used to write down personal names, names of places, and historical events. For example, there are many records of the Aztec army conquering other cities documented in the Codex Mendoza. To show that a city has been conquered, the city's name is written next to the "conquered" glyph which is a temple (pyramid) in smoke and flames with its top toppling over. In the following example, the ancient cities Colhuacan and Tenayucan were shown to be conquered. And to drive the point home, Aztec warriors are shown with captives.

Since Aztec names tend to be composed of words in the Nahuatl language, names are often written as groups of highly pictorial logograms that make up the roots of the name. However, sometimes names also contain phonetic elements in the form of rebus writing to either disambiguate the reading, or explicitly spell out the entire name.
The following is a small set of toponyms (place names) as found in various post-Conquest manuscripts. The first set of examples are names spelled out mostly by pictorial logograms.

Explanations for the previous example:

Chilapan, from chilli + apan, meaning "at the water of chiles". The picture of a chile pepper provides the first root chilli, while the ending apan, meaning "place of water", is provided by water in a canal.
Colhuacan, from colhua + can, meaning "twisted or crooked hill". Clearly illustrated by the twisted hill top.
Ocelotepec, from ocelotl + tepec, meaning "hill of the ocelot". The ocelot is wildcat common to the Americas and is depicted here by its head. Also, in Nahuatl, can is synonymous with tepec, and hence both words are represented by the same sign.
Coatlan, from coatl + tlan, meaning "place abundant with snakes". Here we encounter the first example of using phonetic elements. Teeth in Nahuatl is tlantli, and so a set of teeth is conventionally read as tlan, which is a Nahuatl suffix meaning "place abundant with".
Coatzinco, from coatl + tzin + co, meaning "little Coatlan". The ending tzinco is represented phonetically by the lower half of a crouching man, which in reality carries the meaning of 'buttocks'. The word 'buttocks' in Nahuatl is tzintli, and conveniently spells out the syllable tzin.
Ahuacatlan, from ahuacatl + tlan, meaning "place abundant with avocadoes". Once again the ending tlan is represented by a set of teeth, but this time incorporated into the avocado tree.

The following examples have more extensive use of phonetic elements in the form of rebus writing.

Explanations for the previous example:

Capulteopan, from capulli + teopan, meaning "the temple of the neighborhood". The word "temple", teopan, is clearly depicted, but "neighborhood", capulli is harder to visualize. Rebus writing comes to the rescue in that capulli is phonetically similar to capulin, which is a Mexican plant related to cherries. By drawing the capulin tree, the sound capul is expressed.
Mapachtepec, from mapach + tepec, meaning "near the hill of the raccoon". Instead of drawing a raccoon, mapach in Nahuatl, a hand (maitl) and a piece of moss (pachtli) are drawn together. By taking the first syllables of both words, /ma/ and /pach/, we obtain mapach.
Miacatla, from mitl + aca + tla(n), meaning "place abundant with arrows". The picture of an arrow, mitl logographically represents the first part of the word. The ending, acatla, is provided phonetically by the depiction of a reed, acatl in Nahuatl.
Amacoztitlan, from amatl + cozti + tlan, meaning "place abundant with yellow papers". The concept of a yellow paper is expressed in the yellow rectangular in the middle of the signs. Water, atl, on the bottom is used phonetically to provide the initial vowel /a/, reinforcing the reading of "amacoztli". The set of teeth on the top phonetically provide the ending tlan.
Pantepec, from pan + tepec, meaning "upon the hill". The particle pan carries the meaning of "above" or "upon", which is depicted by the picture of a flag, pantli in Nahuatl.
Tepechpan, from tepexitl + pan, meaning "above the crag". The phonetic elements consist of tetl and petlatl, which together approximates the initial tepech. The final syllable pan is indicated figuratively by placing a house above the tepech component at the bottom, effectively giving the reading of "above the crag".

You might find that from the above examples that the way to read place names is complicated and not straightforward to modern eyes. Signs could be polyvalent, such as the "hill" sign which can stand for both can and tepec. Glyphs in a place name are not always read in a linear fashion but could jump from one end to another. And sometimes, visual metaphors come into play, such as the position of glyphs itself representing a sound. It is true that for the most part this system did not record human speech or long texts, and it might seem to be not a true writing system. However, it does exhibit a lot of regular rules and conventions. The seemingly random reading order often can be inferred by the knowledge of language and naming convention. Signs used for phonetic values are not randomly drawn from the logograms but actually from a very predictable and minimal set. But, most of all, since the knowledge of the underlying language, Nahuatl, is essential to fully interpret the glyphs, the Aztec script most certainly classifies as a writing system.
Despite the limitation of their writing systems, the Central Mexicans must have produced countless numbers of manuscripts with subject matters as diverse as time-keeping, astronomy and astrology, mythology, genealogy, and history, all attesting to the power of the written word.
The toponyms in the previous examples were taken from Nombres Geográficos de México" project website.
Related Links

GB Online"s Ancient Mesoamerican Writing.info about manuscripts
Aztec Calendar.tells you today"s "date" in the Aztec calendar
Mexica/Aztec Calendar Systems.about how the solar and the sacred calendar work
Prehispanic Calendars.
Nahuatl Culture.with section on Aztec writing
Codex Mendoza.
Images from Codex Mendoza.

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Cuneiform

Quick Facts
Type	Logophonetic
Genealogy	Cuneiform
Location	West Asia > Mesopotamia
Time	3300 BCE to 100 CE
Direction	Variable

Sumerian
The term "cuneiform" is very deceptive, in that it tricks people into thinking that it's some type of writing system. The truth is that cuneiform denotes not one but several kinds of writing systems, including logosyllabic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts. In fact, "cuneiform" came from Latin cuneus, which means "wedge". Therefore, any script can be called cuneiform as long as individual signs are composed of wedges.
Many languages, including Semitic, Indo-European, and isolates, are written in cuneiform, as the following list shows:

Eastern Semitic, including Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian
Elamite
Eblaite
Hittite
Hurrian
Utartian
Ugaritic, in fact an alphabetic system unrelated to other cuneiform scripts except in outward appearance.
Old Persian, a mostly syllabic system with a few logograms.

Akkadian Homepage
Clay Tokens: The Precursors of Cuneiform
The earliest examples of Mesopotamian script date from approximately the end of the 4th millenium BCE, coinciding in time and in geography with the rise of urban centers such as Uruk, Nippur, Susa, and Ur. These early records are used almost exclusively for accounting and record keeping.
However, these cuneiform records are really descendents of another counting system that had been used for five thousand years before. Clay tokens have been used since as early as 8000 BCE in Mesopotamia for some form of record-keeping.
Clay tokens are basically three dimension geometric shapes. There are two types of clay tokens, plain and complex. The plain tokens are the oldest ones, found as far back as 8000 BCE, in a very wide area, including modern places like Turkey, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran, at settlements of all sizes. They are plain, unadorned geometric shapes like spheres, disks, cones, tetrahedrons, and cylinders. In contrast, complex tokens are decorated with markings, and appeared only during the 4th millenium BCE in large settlements in southern Mesopotamia.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat theorized that both are used for record keeping. In particular, the plain tokens, given their long timespan and their widespread use, most likely counted agricultural items like grains or cereal. On the other hand, complex tokens were used to record manufactured goods as they appeared when Sumerian cities were growing rapidly in size and had flourishing non-agricultural industries. In fact, one of the earliest examples of complex tokens was found in the temple of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and fertility, in the city of Uruk. This implies that the temple institution used clay tokens to record goods manufactured for the temple.
Often there would be more than one tokens, and in fact more than one type of token, in a single transaction. So how did the ancient Mesopotamians kept multiple tokens together without losing them? One answer was envelopes, where tokens are sealed inside a large clay hollow sphere. This was used primarily for plain tokens. Another solution, mostly used for complex tokens, was to string the tokens to a solid oblong piece of clay called a bulla which usually had seal impressions on it.
How do archaeologists know what these tokens actually represent? Well, many of the tokens, especially the complex ones, can be shown to evolve into cuneiform signs. For instance, the token with a disk space and cross markings evolved into the sign for sheep.

One key event that led to the transition of 3-D tokens to 2-D signs is that sealing plain tokens inside an envelop made it impossible to count how many tokens there are. The solution was to impressing the tokens onto the outside of the envelope (while the clay is still soft) before sealing them inside. So three impressions mean three tokens inside.
Eventually, the process of putting tokens inside envelopes was abandoned and impression of tokens was used exclusively. Complex tokens got incorporated as well, but instead of making impressions of the tokens on the clay, the ancient Sumerian scribes used stylus to make wedge-like shapes into the clay to represent the token. However, instead of making the same sign three times to represent three items, the scribes used the sign for grain, which eventually became just a wedge, to denote quantity. A wedge came to represent "one", and a circle denote "ten". So to write five sheep, the scribe impress a wedge five times, and then make the sign for sheep.
From this beginning the Sumerian writing system grew to become more than just an accounting device. But that's another story. For more information, you can go to the

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Egyptian

Quick Facts
Type	Logophonetic
Genealogy	Egyptian
Location	Africa > Egypt
Time	3100 BCE to 400 CE
Direction	Variable

The Egyptian Hieroglyphs is among the old writing system in the world. Unlike its contemporary cuneiform Sumerian, Egyptian Hieroglyph's origin is much more obscure. There is no identifiable precursor. It was once thought that the origin of Egyptian Hieroglyphs are religious and historical, but recent developments could point to an economical impetus for this script as well as push back the time depth of this writing system.
How It Works
The Egyptian writing system is complex but relatively straightforward. The inventory of signs is divided into three major categories, namely (1) logograms, signs that write out morphemes; (2) phonograms, signs that represent one or more sounds); and (3) determinatives, signs that denote neither morpheme nor sound but help with the meaning of a group of signs that precede them.
Examples of logograms:

Like Proto-Sinaitic-derived scripts, Egyptians wrote only with consonants. As a result, all phonograms are uniconsonantal, biconsonantal, and triconsonantal.
The following are the uniconsonantals:

And a few biconsonantals and triconsonantals:

F.Y.I. - "Pronunciation" of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Technically we don't know what vowels went in between the consonants of each sign. For convenience (as it was very hard to pronounce a string of consonants without vowels in the middle of a lecture) archaeologists made up a protocol of artificially putting vowels in hieroglyphs. A /e/ is placed between consonants, /y/ is transcribed as /i/, /w/ became /u/, and /3/ and /‘>/ are subsituted as /a/. For some reason this system had taken a life of its own, and often now people actually think it is how Egyptian words were pronounced. For example, the 19th Dynasty king R‘-mss is known as Ramses or Rameses in modern day. However, the correct rendition of his name was probably Riamesesa, which was discovered from cuneiform documents composed for diplomatic exchange between Mesopotamia and Egypt.
For more information, refer to the Pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian.

The determinative is a glyph that carries no phonetic value but instead is added at the end of a word to clarify the meaning of the word. This is due to the fact that the writing system does not record vowels, and therefore different words with the same set of consonants (but different vowels) can be written by the same sequence of glyphs. Therefore the determinative became necessary to disambiguate the meaning of a sequence of glyphs.

Note: The logogram indicator is a determinative that marks a glyph as a logogram, as many logograms can also double as phonograms (like the duck glyph /s3/).
Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic
Traditionally Egyptologists divided Hieroglyphs into three types based on appearance: hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic. Hieroglyphic is almost always inscribed on stones in large scale monuments. Hieratic is the "priestly" script extensively used on manuscripts and paintings, and really is just a rather cursive form of monumental hieroglyphics. And finally, demotic is a highly cursive script that replaced hieratic as the script for everyday use from 600 BCE onward. In fact, some demotic signs translate into more than one hieratic or hieroglyphic signs, so there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between demotic and the other two systems.
As mentioned before, aside from the shape of the signs, the hieroglyphic and the hieratic systems are virtually identical. In fact, Both of these variants date from the dawn of Egyptian civilization at the latter half of the 3rd millenium BCE at a time period called the Predynastic period. Recently some new discoveries have shed light on an ancient predynastic king named Scorpion I. His name has been found carved in the wilderness ("King Scorpion: A Pretty Bad Dude"), and in his tomb in Abydos "Earliest Egyptian Glyphs"). In fact, Abydos yielded a great number of inscribed seals dating from between 3400 and 3200 BCE, making them the oldest example of Egyptian writing.
Another early examples of hieroglyphic inscriptions is found on the famous Palette of Narmer. Narmer was a very early king, although he does not appear on the traditional Egyptian king list (like the King List of Abydos created during the reign of Seti I). However, according to the iconography on the Palette, he already ruled over an unified Egypt around 3000 BCE as he wore both the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. Many Egyptologists equate him with Menes, the first king of the first Dynasty, while others placed him somewhat earlier in "Dynasty Zero" which might have also included pharoahs Scorpion II and Ka (or Zekhen).

"Narmer"
There are two glyphs that make up Narmer's hieroglyphic name, which is enclosed by a serekh. The serekh, much like the cartouche later on, always denotes royal names. The top part of the name is a catfish, and the lower part is a chisel. In Egyptian, catfish is /n‘>r/, and chisel is /mr/. Together they spell /n‘rmr/. We vocalize this as Narmer, but in reality we don't really know what vowels existed between the consonants in /n‘rmr/.
In addition to the monumental hieroglyphic, the cursive hieratic also date from as early as the reign of king Ka in the form of pottery inscription. There were slightly later examples of this cursive script from the reign of kings Aha and Den, both of the first Dynasty, but it was the 4th Dynasty that there are substantial records written in hieratic.

While the hieroglyphic remained the same, the hieratic became increasingly cursive, and an increasing amount of ligatures come into usage. Look at this comparison of hieroglyphic vs hieratic (from roughly around 1200 BCE):

You could still see some resemblance between the first and the second row. However, you probably also have noticed that groups of hieroglyphic signs are reduced to a single hieratic sign. Many of the most frequently used sequences of signs were joined together into ligatures, much like sometimes we join 'a' and 'e' as 'æ'.
Eventually the most cursive form of hieratic became the demotic which gives no hint of its hieroglyphic origin. By 600 BCE, the hieratic, which was used to write documents on papyri, was retained only for religious writing. The demotic became the every-day script, used for accounting, writing down literature, writings, etc. The following demotic inscription is from the famous Rosetta Stone. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the hieroglyphic script. In fact, it is so cursive that it resembles more like the Aramaic scripts used around the Fertile Crescent at this time.

The last Egyptian inscription dates from the 5th century CE. By this time, Coptic, a Greek-based alphabet with some demotic signs, became the primary writing system used in Egypt.
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Elamite

Quick Facts
Type	Logophonetic
Genealogy	Various
Location	West Asia > Mesopotamia
Time	3300 BCE to 500 BCE
Direction	Variable

Before the great Achaemenid Persian Empire of the 5th century BCE, the Elamites were the most influential people to hold dominion over the regions east of Mesopotamia, in what is now southwestern Iran.
The development of writing in Elam paralleled that in Sumer. From as early as the 8th millenium BCE, clay tokens of different shapes were used to represent commodities such as grain, livestock, alcohol, and manufactured goods for economic record-keeping and transactions. And like the rest of Mesopotamia, by the late 4th millenium BCE clay tokens were being stored inside bullae, oblong or spherical clay envelopes stamped with seal impressions, which most likely indicated the owners or contents of the tokens inside the envelopes. Quickly thereafter, marks were impressed into the surface of the bullae to count number of tokens inside, thus marking the appearance of a numerical system. Soon clay tokens were completely left out of the bullae, and so completing the transition to a purely abstract representation of quantities.
At the beginning of the 3rd millenium BCE, the written tradition in Sumer diverged from that of its contemporaries in Mesopotamia. Along with changes in the script, the archaeological record also indicates changes in material culture, as reflected in new architectural style and ceramic technology that bore closer resemblance to cultures of the Iranian plateau rather than Mesopotamian traditions. It is possible that a new people migrated into this area, although one cannot completely discount the whole-hearted adoption of a new culture.
Whatever the reason, a new script tradition appeared in Elam at approximately 2900 BCE. Called proto-Elamite, this script represented the earliest native writing system in Elam. Visually, proto-Elamite is quite unlike the cuneiform script prevalent in other parts of Mesopotamia, and instead is composed of lines and circles. All proto-Elamite texts can be demonstrated to be accounting records, as numbers are preceeded by one or more non-numerical signs, which were logograms and maybe even syllabograms. However, this is about all we know about proto-Elamite, as the script remains undeciphered due to lack of a sizeable corpus and any bilingual text.
The following is an example of a proto-Elamite accounting tablet. The direction of reading is right-to-left, then downward when the end of line is reached.

By the latter half of the 3rd millenium BCE, the proto-Elamite script had evolved into the Linear Elamite script. The discovery of a bilingual text, with one version in Linear Elamite and the other in Old Akkadian, in 1905 at the Elamite capital of Susa made it possible to partially decipher Linear Elamite. The system is discovered to frequently make use of syllabograms, with logograms sprinkled in. The following is the Elamite portion of the bilingual tablet, which is attributed to the Elamite king Puzur-Inshushinak around the 22th century BCE.

Like cuneiform scripts at roughly the same time, the set of syllabograms contains both signs to represent consonant-vowel syllables and signs for vowel-consonant syllables. However, not all readings presented are certain. The same sign is used to end a CVC syllable where the vowel can be either /a/ or /u/, so it is hard to tell the exact vowel for this sign. The most problematic of the readings on this table is the phrase "son of Shimpishhuk". From the Old Akkadian version, scholars know that this phrase is in the text, but there is disagreement on how the signs should be read. Another school of thought states that only the first seven signs form this phrase, leaving the last three out, and the sequence should instead be read as "shi-in-pish-hu-uk shak-ik".
Problems of this kind persist in Linear Elamite epigraphy, and there is no remedy in the forseeable future. A basic requirement for deciphering a writing system is a large corpus of texts, but only few examples of Linear Elamite texts have been found so far. Another problem is the poor understanding of the Elamite language, which is unrelated to any other language in the world, and also suffers from being less studied than other Mesopotamian languages like Sumerian and Akkadian.
The native Elamite writing system would not endure, as no other examples of Linear Elamite date past the 22th century BCE. And due to the tremendous prestige of Mesopotamian languages and scripts, almost all texts from Elam for the next thousand years were either Sumerian or Babylonian. For 900 years, the Elamite literary tradition remained silent. Only starting from the 13th century BCE onward did the Elamite language reappear in the archaeological record, but at this point in time the Elamite had borrowed and adapted the cuneiform script to write their language. Unlike their Mesopotamian neighbors which had more than 700 signs, the Elamite cuneiform only contained 145 signs, where 113 were syllabograms, twenty five were logograms, and seven were determinatives.
The most famous Elamite cuneiform inscription comes from the rock inscriptions at Behistun, carved by the order of the Persian king Darius I of the Achaemenid dynasty, around the 5th century BCE. At this time, Elamite, Old Persian, and Aramaic, were the "official" languages used in the Persian court and bureaucracy, while older Mesopotamian languages such as Babylonian and Sumerian continued to be used in literary, religious, and scientific circles. As such, Elamite appeared along side with Babylonian and Old Persian on the Behistun inscriptions. The following is an excerpt of the Elamite text.

While important during the early history of the Persian empire, Elamite gradually faded from history after the 5th century BCE as Aramaic became increasingly important as the "international" language of the Persian empire. As such, Elamite has remained an enigma even today.

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Epi-Olmec

Quick Facts
Type	Logophonetic
Genealogy	Mesoamerican
Location	Americas > Mesoamerica
Time	100 BCE to 500 CE
Direction	Top to Bottom

News: Ancient Mask Adds to Corpus of Isthmian Script
One of the most amazing thing about Mesoamerican archaeology is that new discoveries are constantly being made. Among one of the most important was the discovery of an inscribed slab found under the waters of the Acula River near the village of La Mojarra in 1986 in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Dubbed Stela 1 of La Mojarra, this monument was inscribed with 465 glyphs arranged in 21 columns, and the image of a ruler. The writing on it is nothing like any other writing system in Mesoamerica, such as Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, or Aztec, although like the Maya it also used the Long Count.
However, Stela 1 of La Mojarra is not the only example of its writing system. Most of the monuments that bear glyphs in the same (or similar) writing system are also found near the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the thin stretch of land that separates the majority of Mexico from its south-eastern states and from Central America, although none has texts as long as the Stela. The famous Tuxtla Statuette, a hand-length nephrite figurine of an almost comedic man dressed in a duck's outfit, bears a Long Count date of 162 CE as well as non-calendric glyphs. Other famous inscriptions include Stela C of Tres Zapotes, with a Long Count date of 32 BCE, and Stela 1 of Chiapa de Corzo (located in Chiapas, Mexico), with an incomplete date conjectured to be 36 BCE. In the site of Cerro de las Mesas, Veracruz, highly erroded monuments also bear Long Count dates, but from the early Classic period at around 450 CE, as well as a large stone version of the Tuxtla Statuette devoid of any text.
Scholars have given this script many names. I have chosen to use epi-Olmec since it is more common in scientific literature. Some have called this script the "La Mojarra script" after the location where the Stela was found. Another name, also based on a geographical name, is the "Isthmian Script", named after the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. You would find all three names used in publications, and websites. Yet another name is the "Tuxtla Script", named after the Tuxtla Statuette as well as the Tuxtla Mountains near which many of the texts have been found.
Decipherment
Among the researchers who have worked on this script were John Justeson and Terrence Kaufman, who in 1993 published a paper in the journey Science describing the partial decipherment that they have arrived.
Justeson and Kaufman proposed that the language this script recorded was pre-proto-Zoquean, which belongs to a small language family called Mixe-Zoquean. This family is still spoken today around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
Why Mixe-Zoquean? Why not Mayan, or any other family for that matter? Well, it has been theorized that speakers of Mixe-Zoquean languages have stayed near the Isthmus of Tehuantepec since the Pre-Classic, and many modern Mixe-Zoquean languages are still spoken in this area. Secondly, there are a lot of Mixe-Zoquean loanwords in other Mesoamerican languages, such as pom, or copal incense, a very important component of any ritual (even today), and kakawa, or cacao beans, used for preparing ritual drinks as well as currency. It is likely that the Olmecs spoke a Mixe-Zoquean language, because the environmental requirements of these plants match that of Gulf Coast Mexico. Kaufman argued that as the Olmecs transmitted their rituals, words related to these rituals also diffused. And it is also likely the people who subsequently inhabited the same geographical area as the Olmecs were descendants of the Olmecs and spoke a Mixe-Zoquean tongue. And therefore their writing system would therefore record a Mixe-Zoquean language.
Well, this isn't truly an impeccable model. There is still not enough information to argue that there wasn't an influx of people into the Isthmus and thus replacing earlier inhabitants. Also, the fundamental assumption that the Olmec spoke a Mixe-Zoquean language is still debatable. In fact, the correctness of the Justeson/Kaufman decipherment was thrown into doubt with the discovery of a new mask. When veteran epigraphers Stephen Houston and Michael Coe plugged the values proposed by Justeson and Kaufman into the texts on the mask, they found the reading far from satisfactory.
There is still much to be done to either prove or disprove the Justeson and Kaufman decipherment. However, in the mean time, I will assume that their work is valid and present an overview based on their work.
Overview of the Epi-Olmec Script
The Epi-Olmec script turned out to be structurally similar to the Maya. It is logophonetic, meaning that one set of the signs, the phonograms, have phonetic values, while the other glyphs, called logograms, represents morpheme. A morpheme is a word or part of a word that cannot be broken further into smaller units with relevant meaning. For instance, the English word beautiful can be broken down into beauty and -ful, neither of which can be broken down further. Beauty is a morpheme because it is a word. Furthermore, -ful carries the meaning of "a lot of", and can also be used with other words, like bountiful, faithful, and others. Hence it is not a unique derivation of beauty, but a morpheme in its own right.
In a logophonetic system, both logograms and phonograms are used. Frequently logograms make up the root of a word whereas phonograms spell out the prefixes and suffixes that modify the root.
Syllabary Phonetics for details on how to pronounce it.
The vowel u ("u" with a line through the middle) is a strange vowel. It is a central high vowel, meaning that it's like the common vowel but the position of the peak of the tongue is halfway between the throat and the teeth. You can check out
All phonograms in the Epi-Olmec script represent syllables. So we call the set of phonograms the syllabary:

However, because Pre-Proto-Zoquean can also have syllables that end with a consonant (like CVC), it is necessary to represent the second consonant. To do this, two syllabograms are used: the first glyph would represent the first consonant and the vowel, and the second glyph would just represent the last consonant, and its vowel is omitted from reading. While there are six possibilities for the second glyph (as there are six glyphs with the same initial consonant), usually the one with the same vowel as the first glyph's vowel is used. For example, to spell ’i-kip-wu, which means "he fought them", I would use the syllabograms &\#>146;i ki pi wu:

LogogramsAncient Mask Adds to Corpus of Isthmian Script.
Logograms are signs that represent an entire morpheme, that is, a whole word, or part of a word that has meaning similar to that of the word. They usually do not contain any phonetic information at all.
The following is a grab bag of logograms, some with known reading and meaning, while others only meanings are known.

Related Links
Epi-Olmec Writing and Texts.Written by Justeson and Kaufman, this paper gives you lots of details about the La Mojarra, or Epi-Olmec, writing system.
Terrence Kaufman"s running translation of the La Mojarra Stela 1.
Newly discovered column of text on La Mojarra Stela 1.
Epi-Olmec Decipherment.Archaeology article summarizing the discovery and analysis of the new column of text on La Mojarra Stela 1.

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Hittite

Quick Facts
Type	Logophonetic
Genealogy	Cuneiform
Location	West Asia > Anatolia
Time	1700 BCE to 1100 BCE
Direction	Variable

Anatolia, the region corresponding to the Asiatic part of modern Turkey, has been a hotbed of urban life from as far back as 9,000 years ago and is where one of the earliest cities of the world, Çatal Höyük, is located. However, literate urban societies did not appear in Anatolia until the 18th century BCE with the rise of the Hittite Empire centered at its capital of Hattusa.
The Hittites were one of the many nations that spoke the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The Hittite language was related to Luwian and Palaic, and possibly to later languages such as Lydian, Lycian, and Carian. Unlike Luwian, which had an indigenous writing system, Hittite adopted the Akkadian cuneiform to write their language. Approximately 375 cuneiform signs were adopted from Akkadian cuneiform. As in Akkadian, signs can be roughly categorized into phonograms, logograms, and determinatives.
Phonograms are signs used for their phonetic values. They can be a single vowel, a consonant followed by a vowel, or a vowel followed by a consonant. The following is the set of phonetic signs used in Hittite cuneiform.

Note that in the transliteration scheme, /z/ stands for the affricate sound [ts], where as /š/ can actually stand for both [s] and [š].
Hittite also adopted the spelling conventions that Akkadian employed in order to write syllables ending in a consonant, which is to write the syllable as two signs, the first sign a CV phonogram with the starting consonant and the vowel (or just a V phonogram if the word starts with a vowel), followed by the second sign a VC phonogram with the same vowel again followed by the ending consonant.
The following is an example of how isolated consonants are written. Note that the red text is the Hittite transliteration, the purple text is the phonetic representation, and the blue text is the English meaning.

To write consonant clusters, either a CV or VC sign is written used but its vowel is "silent" so that only the consonantal value is pronounced. Depending on the structure of the consonant cluster, the phonogram with the suppressed vowel can precede or follow a fully pronounced phonogram containing the vowel of the syllable.

In addition to phonograms, Hittite also employed a number of logograms. Many phonograms also serve as logograms, and many logograms have multiple meanings as well. This phenomenon is known as polyvalence, and it existed in all cuneiform scripts from as far back as Sumerian. Because the system is adopted from Akkadian, which in turn was adopted from Sumerian, two types of logograms exist in Hittite. Sumerograms are signs adopted from Sumerian, and in Akkadian they already served as logograms. In constract, Akkadograms are signs that originally phonetically spelled words in Akkadian but adopted into Hittite and treated as logograms. This means that even though the signs can be "read" phonetically one way in Akkadian, they are read as a word in Hittite.

Note: In the traditional transliteration scheme, logograms are written out in capital letters.
Quite often logograms are accompanied by phonetic complements, phonograms that serve to disambiguate the reading of logograms and/or to explicitly write out inflectional ending of the word. The following are some examples:

The Hittite Empire flourished until the 12 century BCE when internal political turmoil and external threats brought about its fragmentation and demise. The Hittite cuneiform script died with the Hittite Empire. Neo-Hittite city states which arose in northern modern-day Syria from fragments of the empire had rulers that were dynastically related to the old Hittite aristocracy but were ethnically Luwian and left inscriptions in the Hieroglyphic Luwian script. However, the Hittite language did not completely disappear, and might have evolved into, or at least contributed to, a later tongue known as Lycian.
Hittite and Historical Linguistics
Because of its great antiquity, Hittite and its close relative Luwian provided invaluable aid to the study of Indo-European linguistics. In particular, they were the only languages with evidence to support the laryngeal theory, which profoundly changed the understanding of Proto-Indo-European, the supposed mother tongue of all Indo-European languages.
A full treatment of the laryngeal theory would be too technical and too lengthy here, but suffice to say that the laryngeal theory concluded that atypical Proto-Indo-European roots (abstract, basic form of words) were actually typical Proto-Indo-European roots that contained "laryngeal" consonants. Some of these laryngeal consonants "colored" or modified the vowels they preceded or followed. All laryngeals eventually coalesced with the vowels and disappeared, leaving no trace in most documented Indo-European languages. It is still in intense debate how many laryngeals there were, but most linguists agree on three:

h₁: neutral laryngeal, meaning it doesn't change the vowel
h₂: a-coloring, turning vowel into /a/
h₃: o-coloring, turning vowel into /o/

The original form of the theory was proposed in 1879 by Ferdinand de Saussure, but because of its purely analytical arguments and lack of evidence, it remained highly controversial. However, with the discovery of Hittite and its identification as an Indo-European language, scholars started to notice cuneiform signs representing /h/-like sounds appearing in places where the theory predicted laryngeals would appear. For example, consider Latin pōtare and Sanskrit pā-, both meaning "to drink". Because of the long vowel /ō/ (in Sanskrit /ō/ became /&\#x0101;/), the reconstructed PIE form would be *peh₃, and in Hittite scholars found the word pahs which meant "to drink, to swallow". Similarly, we find the cognates Greek anti "against", Latin ante "in front of, before", and Sanskrit anti "near, in presence of". Because of the short /a/ vowel, the reconstructed PIE form would be *h₂ent, which is quite similar to Hittite hants "front, face".
Eventually it became accepted that the /h/-like sounds in Hittite were in fact Proto-Indo-European laryngeals. Later it was discovered that some laryngeals also survived in Luwian. With two languages providing evidence, laryngeal theory became validated and accepted by modern linguistics.
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Indus Script

Quick Facts
Type	Logophonetic
Genealogy	Unrelated
Location	South Asia
Time	2600 BCE to 1900 BCE
Direction	Variable

Stamp seal with unicorn and ritual offering stand, ca. 2000-1900 B.C.; Harappan. Indus Valley, Harappa, 8796-01. Indus inscription. Steatite; L. 5.2 cm (2 in.); W. 5.2 cm (2 in.). Harappa Museum, Harappa H99-4064. Courtesy of the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Ministry of Minorities, Culture, Sports, Tourism, and Youth Affairs, Government of Pakistan.
Photograph © www.metmuseum.org

The Indus Valley Civilization was the first major urban culture of South Asia. It reached its peak from 2600 BC to 1900 BC roughly, a period called by some archaeologists "Mature Harappan" as distinguished from the earlier Neolithic "Early Harappan" regional cultures. Spatially, it is huge, comprising of about 1000 settlements of varying sizes, and geographically includes almost all of modern Pakistan, parts of India as far east as Delhi and as far south as Bombay, and parts of Afghanistan.
The main corpus of writing dated from the Indus Civilization is in the form of some two thousand inscribed seals in good, legible conditions. (In case you don't know what seals are, they are used to make impressions on malleable material like clay.)
Although these seals and samples of Indus writing have been floating around the scholastic world for close to 70 years, little progress has been made on deciphering this elegant script. However, we should not blame scholars for their lack of progress, for there are some major impediments to decipherment:

Very short and brief texts. The average number of symbols on the seals is 5, and the longest is only 26.
The language underneath is unknown.
Lack of bilingual texts.

For instance, consider Champollion, who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs with all of these 3 important clues: there were very long Egyptian texts; he knew Coptic, a descendant of Egyptian; and the Rosetta Stone, a bilingual text between Greek and two written forms of Egyptian.
But the script isn't as bad as undecipherable. For one, even though scholars don't have long texts and bilingual texts, they can still theorize about the language underneath the writing system. There are several competing theories about the language that the Indus script represent:

The language is completely unrelated to anything else, meaning an isolate. Well, this doesn't get us anywhere.
The language is "Aryan" (some form of Indian-Iranian Indo-European). The historical languages spoken in Northern India and Pakistan all belong to the Indic branch of Indo-European, including Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi, etc., so maybe the people of the Indus valley spoke a very old Indo-European language?
The major problem with this model is the fact that horses played a very important role in all Indo-European cultures, being a people constantly on the move. "There is no escape from the fact that the horse played a central role in the Vedic and Iranian cultures..." (Parpola, 1986) Sidenote: "Vedic" means from the time of the Vedas, the earliest text in India, and the Vedic culture is from around 1500 to 500 BC. However, no depiction of horses on seals nor any remains of horses have been found so far before 2000 BC. They only appear after 2000 BC. Very likely there were no Aryan speakers present before 2000 BC in the Indus Valley.
The language belongs to the Munda family of languages. The Munda family is spoken largely in eastern India, and related to some Southeast Asian languages. Like Aryan, the reconstructed vocabulary of early Munda does not reflect the Harappan culture. So its candidacy for being the language of the Indus Civilization is dim.
The language is Dravidian. The Dravidian family of languages is spoken in Southern Indian, but Brahui is spoken in modern Pakistan. So far this is the most promising model, as in the following points:
- There are many Dravidian influences visible in the Vedic texts. If the Aryan language gradually replaced the Dravidian, features from Dravidian would form a "substratum" in Aryan. One of these features is the appearance of retroflex consonants in Indian languages, both Indo-European and Dravidian. In contrast, retroflex consonants do not appear in any other Indo-European language, not even Iranian ones which are closest to Indic. (For more information on retroflex consonants please visit my Phonetics page).
- Another possible indication of Dravidian in the Indus texts is from structural analysis of the texts which suggests that the language underneath is possibly agglutinative, from the fact that sign groups often have the same initial signs but different final signs. The number of these final signs range between 1 to 3. The final signs possibly represent grammatical suffixes that modify the word (represented by the initial signs). Each suffix would represent one specific modification, and the entire cluster of suffixes would therefore put the word through a series of modifications. This suffix system can be found in Dravidian, but not Indo-European. Indo-European tongues tend to change the final sounds to modify the meaning of a word (a process called inflection), but repeated addition of sounds to the end of word is extremely rare. Often many suffixes in an agglutinative language correspond to a single inflectional ending in an inflectional language.

The Dravidian model isn't just an unapplicable theory...But first we have to know what kind of writing system is the Indus script.
A count of the number of signs reveal a lot about the type of system being used. Alphabetic systems rarely have more than 40 symbols. Syllabic systems like Linear B or Cherokee typically have 40 to 100 or so symbols. The third ranges from logophonetic to logographic, running upwards of hundreds of signs (like 500 signs in Hieroglyphic Luwian, and 5000 symbols in modern Chinese).
It appears that the maximum number of Indus script symbols is 400, although there are 200 basic signs (ie signs that are not combined from others). This means that the Indus script is probably logophonetic, in that it has both signs used for their meanings, and signs used for their phonetic values.
Many signs start off as pictorial representation of a physical object, often misleadingly called pictograms. They really are should be called logograms because they represent words in the language. However, it's next to impossible to write out a word with abstract meaning pictorially. What all early writers figured out was to use a logogram not for the object or idea it was originally supposed to stand for, but for all words sounding similar to the original word for that object or idea. For example, in English to write "leave" we can use a picture of a "leaf". This is called rebus writing, and is a tremendously common pattern in all early writing systems. We could also then use the same "leaf" symbol to stand for the sound in "relief", adding another symbol in front of the "leaf" symbol in order to indicate the "re" sound. So the logogram gained a phonetic value as well.
Testing the theory
How can we take the theoretical framework so far and apply it to archaeological data?
Numerals seem to represented by vertical lines (represented by number of lines in the glyph), but they only go up to 7. Analysis reveal 4 more signs that appear in the same context as these numerals, and so they likely represent numbers higher than 7.
The fact that no vertical-line numeral sign denotes 8 very likely means the Harappan language is based 8. (For example, the Arabic numerals that we use has symbols from 0 to 9, and to write "ten" we have to combined the symbols 1 and 0, which identify our number system as based ten.)
Base 8 languages are rare in the world, but it does appear that early Dravidian is base 8, but later changed to base 10 (possibly under Indo-European influence). When translated, the count from 1 to 7 is familiar to us: "one", "two", "three", "four", "five", "six", "seven". However, above seven, the number's etymologies become non-numerical: 8 is "number", 9 is "many minus one", and 10 is "many". (Fairservis 1983)
But can we actually read (not interpret) any symbol on the seals? We should start with "pictograms", as this one:

Many scholars (Knorozov, Parpola, Mahadevan, etc) see this sign as a fish. Fish in reconstructed Proto-Dravidian is *mîn. Coincidentally, *mîn is also the word for star. On many pots from Mohenjo Daro, an Indus site, there are drawings of fish and stars together, and so affirming this linguistic association.
Going further, often the numeral six appears before the fish. Either it means 6 fish, or 6 stars. Old Tamil (a Dravidian language still spoken today) texts from just around the 1st century AD recorded the name of the Pleiades, a star cluster visible during autumn and winter just above Orion, as "Six-Stars", or aru-mîn. Throughout the world, titles with celestial connotations are very common, and the clause Six Stars forming part or whole of a Harappan title is not unreasonable. (Parpola, 1986)

Sometimes symbols are added to the basic sign to make new signs. Of these, the one that looks like a circumflex accent placed on top of the fish is quite interesting. It is theorized to mean "roof", and in Proto-Dravidian it is *vêy/mêy. This is phonetically similar to Proto-Dravidian word for "black", *may. Together with fish, it spells out mai-m-mîn, or "black star", which in Old Tamil means the planet Saturn. In Sanskrit texts, Saturn is associate the color black. The god of death, Yama, is the presiding of this planet, and is usually depicted as riding on a dark buffalo.

But the "fish" reading isn't accepted by all scholars. William Fairservis saw it as a combination of a loom twist and a human sign, and form a honorific title pertaining to rulership (Fairservis, 1983). I, however, am more inclined to accept the fish identification.
This is a quick overview of the current process in the decipherment of the Indus script. For more information you can either go to the following links, or go to a good library for books and articles (check out my references).

Links about the Indus Civilization:

History - The Indus Valley Civilisation
Harappa.com intereting site...lots of pictures with an accompanying essay.
The Indus Story
Yet another page on Indus Civilization
Languages in pre-Islamic Pakistan -- Fascinating stuff!

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Linear A

Quick Facts
Type	Logophonetic
Genealogy	Cretan
Location	Europe > Crete
Time	2000 BCE to 1200 BCE
Direction	Variable

Crete was the cradle of the Minoan Civilization, which spanned roughly from 2000 BCE to 1200 BCE. In addition to incredible frescoes, indoor plumbing (!), the Minoans also developed the first written system of Europe.
The oldest example of writing in Crete is a kind of "hieroglyphic" (which means that the signs are picture-like) script. The media where the hieroglyphic inscriptions appeared are mostly clay sealstones.
The origin of the Cretan writing system lies in the extensive use of engraved sealstones, which depict physical objects, to (possibly) record quantities of these objects in soft clay. This forms a natural progression to a systematic writing system.
As time progresses hieroglyphic system became more stylized and more linear. Instead of impressing sealstones in soft clay, the glyphs are incised on the soft clay with a stylus. In addition, quantities are represented by numerals (not multiple impressions of the same sign). As time goes on, it appears that the linear hieroglyphic system evolved into Linear A.
Linear A has roughly 90 symbols, thus most likely a syllabary much like Linear B. However, Linear A has resisted all attempts at decipherment because its underlying language is still unknown and probably will remain obscure since it doesn't seem to relate to any other surviving language in Europe or Western Asia.
Linear B and Cypriot both exhibit considerable similarity to Linear A. Because of its time depth, Linear A appears to be the immediate ancestor to both of these writing systems.
The following is an image of a Linear A tablet.

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