This digest of Andrew Robinson’s work brings into view some vignettes which helpfully illustrate some aspects of scholarly politics and human foibles which are encountered in relation to discovery, knowledge and knowledge claims.  In addition to fanatical perseverance and devotion to detail and wide linguistic and cultural knowledge, the successful archaeological decipher has required a high order of intellectual power of analysis, the courage to follow his or her intuition rather than the conventional wisdom, and the luck to come along at the right moment, which generally was when sufficient examples of the script to be deciphered had become available and accessible.

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