Your post reminded me of one of my favorite books of all time, Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B. Linear B is the name given to a syllabic script used on

Your post reminded me of one of my favorite books of all time, Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B. Linear B is the name given to a syllabic script used on clay tablets excavated on Crete around 1900. Chadwick's book recounts the tale of how Michael Ventris ultimately deciphered it and revealed the text to be Ancient Greek rather than any other language, which was against scholarly opinion of the time - and even his own. It's a wonderful story about human intelligence (there was no Rosetta stone equivalent for Linear B; the decipherment had to be accomplished purely by deriving rules from the corpus), the transferability of skills (Ventris was an architect, not a linguist or cryptographer), dispassionately following where the evidence leads, and the value of sharing information openly in the sciences (Ventris' insights were enabled by data compiled and shared by others, notably the equally brilliant American researcher Alice Kober, as Margalit Fox documented in a more recent book). Now, after it gets done describing this accomplishment, it ends with a brief section on how the now-readable documents revolutionized our view of ancient European history, and what their contents tell us about their authors and their lives. It was a hugely inspirational read on so many levels. I read it as a teenager, and if there's any teen around you who seems like they might enjoy it - give it to them.