James Norman (1) (1912–1983)

When someone offers you something too good to be true... you know the rest.

This is a wonderful, breezily written book about the rediscovery of ancient languages -- how we came to understand extinct languages like ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Linear B, and Old Persian. It is, I think, the most readable book I've ever seen on the subject.

But accurate? Uh....

I didn't count every error I saw; I just kept noticing them, until finally I decided I'd better write a review to point them out. For example, p. 88, "The Latin writers, Diodorus and Siculus, mentioned the rock's cuneiform inscriptions." Latin writers Diodorus and Siculus? I'd suggest Mr. Norman look up Diodorus Siculus's (Diodorus of Sicily's) Greek volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

Or page 103, "The library had been collected by King Assurbanipal, the son of one of Sennacherib's favorite wives." Sennacherib was succeeded by Essarhaddon (as we find in the Bible), and Assurbanipal was Essarhaddon's son, not Sennacherib's (that one isn't in the Bible; we learned it from the very tablets that this book describes being deciphered!).

There are lots of mistakes in dates, too.

If you're just reading for an overview, these won't detract from the book. But the conclusion I come away with is that I simply can't trust anything in this volume. If there are so many errors, typos, and instances of poor logic in the parts I can check, how many are there in the parts I don't have any specialized knowledge about?

Bottom line: Think of this as a historical novel about deciphering dead languages, not an actual history. The broad strokes are right. But don't look at it under a magnifying glass.… (meer)