When he announced his successful decipherment of the Rongorongo script of Easter Island in 1996, Steven Roger Fischer joined the ranks of the great decipherers of all time. No one had ever deciphered not one but two ancient scripts. Both scripts, the Rongorongo writing and an ancient Cretan artifact called the Phaistos Disk, yielded information of great historical importance calling for a revision of current archaeological theories. Glyphbreaker is the exciting story of how Fischer did it, by the man who can claim the title of the greatest glyphbreaker who ever lived.

1 IN ODYSSEUS'S WAKE 1 1 LOGOS 13 3 THE NEW LABYRINTH 47 4 THE SKEIN OF ARIADNE 65 S "HEAR YE, CRETANS AND GREEKS!" 93 6 THE BATTLE OF NAXOS 119 7 RAPANUI 139 8 TALKI NG BOARDS OF TH E PACI FIC 153 9 ATOP TERE VAKA 167 10 "ALL THE BIRDS ... " 187 11 SURFING THE RONGORONGO 205 Suggested Reading 223 Index 227 A "glyph" (short for hieroglyph) is a sign in a script. And a "breaker" is a person who cracks a script's code. A "glyph­ breaker" is then a decipherer, someone who lets us read the unreadable, that linguistic magician who gives voice to the mute past. Until 1984 no one had been able to read Crete's 3600-year­ old Phaistos Disk, Europe's earliest literature and greatest written enigma. Until 1994 no one could make sense of Easter Island's mysterious Iongorongo writing, Oceania's only script predating the twentieth century. No one had ever deciphered two wholly different historical scripts before. Until now. This is the true story of these two achievements.