The Etruscan Alphabet – Shown here are two of three gold plaques from Pyrgi, circa 500BC. The plaque on the left is written in Etruscan, while the one on the right is written in Phoenician. They both describe the same event – the dedication by the Etruscan ruler Thefarie Velianas of a cult place (Image: Museo di Villa Giulia, Rome) An Etruscan vase or inkwell in the shape of rooster, from Viterbo, circa 600 BC. It is inscribed with the letters of a “model” alphabet borrowed from the Greek Alphabet (Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) The Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. French orientalist Jean-Francois Champollion used the work already done on deciphering the bilingual Rosetta Stone as a building block, and managed to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs (Image: Per Lindgren / Rex Features) Meroitic script, from an Egyptian tomb painting from the Theban tomb chapel of Sobekhotep. It shows Nubians presenting exptic gifts to the Pharoh Tuthmosis IV (1419 – 1386 BC) (Image: British Museum, London) An unusual Isthmian statuette made of jade, ploughed into a field in the Olmec area. The figure is a man dressed as a duck and is inscribed with 70 unknown symbols (Image: Kenneth Garrett / NGS) Linear A script etched into a clay tablet (Image: The Art Archive / Heraklion Museum / Dagli Orti) Rongo-rongo script, as seen on the Mamari tablet (Image: Padri Dei Sccri Cuori (SSCC), Rome) Indus script is a long way from being deciphered. Popular symbols within this script include the fish, as seen in this image (Image: Erja Lahdenperä, University of Helsinki / courtesy of the Archaeological Survey of India) …