"Insights"? When you break an encryption scheme, you get a readable text in a language you understand. The thing is, the written word as an artifact does not i

"Insights"? When you break an encryption scheme, you get a readable text in a language you understand. The thing is, the written word as an artifact does not itself contain its meaning. To go from writing to meaning is what's called knowing language. The context needed to do that is in the mind of the reader, it's not in the text. Writing something down is quite simply not the same as encrypting it. What we have here is a few thousand small inscriptions of less than ten characters each. We assume - but don't know for sure - that the characters correspond to sounds, and, if they do, what kind of sounds - syllables, phonemes, maybe a mixture. And even if you could go to sound, then, in order to understand anything, you have to go from sound to meaning, if indeed there is meaning. Which requires knowing the language. And not only do we not know the language, we don't even know what language it is! It might be related to a language of the region, it might not.