Optimal viewing strategies

• 1). The better you can see a text, the better you can read it. Bright, glare- and shadow-free lighting is essential. Natural lighting is ideal. If none is available, arrange good task lighting.
  
  
• 2). Position your text at a good viewing angle. An upright book cradle or stand is ideal. If you do not have one, prop your text up on a few books, a crumpled towel or any other surface that tilts it as close to upright as possible. The worst position for your text is flat on a desk.
  
  
• 3). Place a blank sheet of paper just below the line you are currently reading to keep your place.
  
  

Deciphering material in a previously unknown script

• 1). It's easiest to read a script if you already know what it says.
  
  
• 2). For ancient scripts, finding a translation into a known language has been a key to decipherment. Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics made use of the Rosetta Stone, a trilingual inscription in Greek, and demotic and hieroglyphic Egyptian.
  
  
• 3). If you know the language represented by a script, mathematical analysis of word and letter frequency can act as guides to decipherment. Once Ventris and Chadwick realized that Linear B was Greek, they used their knowledge of Homeric vocabulary and patterns of inflectional endings to begin decipherment.
  
  
• 4). The larger the sample size of a particular script, the better the chances of decipherment.
  
  
• 5). For many currently undeciphered scripts, both script and language are unknown, as in the case of the Indus script, proto-Elamite, and Phaistos disk.
  
  

Difficult handwriting in known scripts

• 1). Cursive, also called script, joined or connected writing, is often harder to read than writing in which letters are printed separately. Cursive was developed for producing documents quickly before the invention of mechanical reproduction. For example, in Graeco-Egyptian chancery cursive (c. 200 BC - 500 AD), used for copying bureaucratic documents, legibility was less important than speed.
  
  
• 2). To read a difficult handwriting, search for recognizable words or formulaic phrases. Note shapes of individual letters within those words or phrases.
  
  
• 3). When you find a word you cannot read, count the number of letters in the word and draw spaces for each letter on a blank sheet of paper.
  
  
• 4). Compare the shape of an unknown letter to all the letter shapes identified in known words and phrases. Write down each letter in the appropriate space on your draft sheet as you decipher it.
  
  
• 5). If, after 10 or 15 minutes of work on a specific word, you still can't decipher it, move on to the rest of the manuscript. Return to particularly difficult words or phrases after you have spent more time with the text and are more familiar with the hand.