“The Book of Lost Languages tells the gripping tale of the individuals who pushed back the dawn of history by 3,000 years.” -Laura Spinney, author of Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

A riveting, immersive, and puzzle-packed journey through the decoding of ancient languages, unlocking the hidden secrets of human history.

In 1799, a lieutenant in the Napoleon's army accidentally stumbled upon an engraved rock near an Egyptian port city on the Nile. The long-hidden face of the half-buried boulder-the Rosetta Stone, as it came to known-bore the marks of three ancient scripts, an ancient Pharoah's message in triplicate. The stone became an essential key that allowed archaeologists and linguists to decipher the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egyptian, finally unlocking one of the world's most ancient written languages.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are only one of a dozen scripts we meet in The Book of Lost Languages. Endangered-language expert Daniel Harbour takes us on an adventure of discovery through the most extraordinary language decipherments in history: from the groundbreaking 18th-century effort by a French novelist to unlock the Phoenician alphabet; to an antique collector's use of engraved “dragon” bones to decipher Old Chinese; to revelations about the Andes' woolen writing that unraveled during the writing of this book. These intricate, obsessive quests illuminated millennia of human history that had long gone unread. And through them, ancient peoples now speak to us in words they themselves chose.

Featuring puzzles throughout that give readers the thrill of codebreaking, The Book of Lost Languages reveals the beguiling beauty that underlies the art of decipherment. Harbour weaves an utterly gripping story of people and politics, of genius and ingenuity, of blinkered skepticism and blind acceptance, and most of all, the very texture of ancient life on earth.