How Does The ancient secrets revealed by deciphered tablets | BBC Ideas Work?

It’s like finding hidden messages inside old puzzle boxes that help us understand ancient people’s lives.

Imagine you have a special notebook full of strange shapes and symbols, not letters we know, but something totally new. These are deciphered tablets, like ancient puzzles. A long time ago, people wrote on clay or stone using these symbols to tell stories, record events, or even write poems. But no one could read them until someone figured out the code, just like you solve a puzzle by finding the right pieces.

Think of it as cracking a secret language. If you found a message written in a foreign tongue and had to guess what it meant, that’s deciphering, like solving a riddle from the past. Once we figured out how to read these tablets, we discovered ancient secrets, such as how people lived, what they believed, and even their favorite foods.

These tablets are like time machines. When we read them, it’s like getting a letter from someone who lived thousands of years ago, except instead of paper, it’s stone or clay, and the message is written in symbols that took us a while to understand.