Can You Decipher This Quiz on Ancient Languages?

The oldest known Ge’ez inscription dates to the third century CE. Ge’ez evolved into the Tigrinya and Tigré languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, and it remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian church. Unlike other Semitic languages, Ge’ez is read from left to right.

The ancient Nigerian form of communication known as Nsibidi is believed by some scholars to date as far back as 2000 BCE. Nsibidi utilizes pictographs, and was used to decorate everything from sculptures to skin. It also allowed people to leave messages on other houses in the village, serving as an early form of mail.

The world’s largest religious structure, the Buddhist temple of Angkor Wat, was built to serve as the political center of the Khmer Empire in modern Cambodia, and the word “Angkor” means “capital city” in the Old Khmer language. Though originally constructed as a Hindu temple, Angkor Wat transformed into a Buddhist site during the 12th century.

The Dravidian language family now consists of around 70 languages primarily located in South Asia, with origins stemming back to the second millennium BCE. More than a dozen Dravidian languages were detected in the Rigveda (an ancient Sanskrit text from around 1500 BCE). The earliest known Tamil writing is “Tolkappiyam,” a work of ancient literature dating to sometime between the first and fourth centuries CE.

Luwian hieroglyphs were used in Bronze Age Anatolia between around 1400 BCE and 700 BCE. The hieroglyphs were related to the Hittite language and script, and they were actually believed to be Hittite upon their discovery. Further research determined the language belonged to a distinct empire ruled by the Luwian people in what is now Turkey.

The Euskara language, also known as Basque, stems from the Basque region between France and Spain. Euskara is a pre-Indo-European language, making it more than 12,000 years old, and it’s the only pre-Indo-European tongue found in Western Europe.

Aramaic was an ancient language akin to Hebrew derived from the Phoenician alphabet. It first appeared around the 11th century BCE, though it became the official language of Persia’s Achaemenid Empire from 559 to 330 BCE, supplanting the Akkadian language in the region. East Aramaic is still spoken by small groups of Jacobite and Nestorian Christians throughout the Middle East.

While almost the entire Old Testament of the Bible was written in Hebrew, the New Testament was penned around the first century CE in Greek, the language primarily used by scholars at the time.

Oracle bone script is the oldest form of Chinese writing, dating to the late 13th century BCE. The pictorial script was first identified in 1899 on fragments of bone and turtle shell, and in 1928, scholars tracked the origin of the oracle bones to modern-day Xiǎotún, a village in Hénán Province. Many of the discovered script fragments contain divinations for royal households.

Coptic is considered the last written phase of the language of the ancient Egyptians. While Coptic used Egyptian vernacular, it is inscribed in the Greek alphabet. After the Arab Conquest of Egypt between 639 and 646 CE, Arabic became the dominant language. Coptic became restricted to liturgical purposes until around the 13th century, after which it sharply declined.

The Book of the Dead is a collection of funerary texts that were compiled during the 6th century BCE. The texts included hymns and spells that were thought to protect and aid people in the afterlife, so the book was entombed along with the dead. In its entirety, the book contains about 200 chapters, but of all the copies found in Egyptian tombs, none have included the complete book.

“The Epic of Gilgamesh” was written in the ancient language of Akkadian. Composed of 12 Akkadian tablets, the epic chronicles the odyssey of Gilgamesh, the king of the Mesopotamian city-state Uruk. The tablets were discovered in the 19th century by a Turkish Assyriologist in the ancient library of Nineveh (near modern-day Mosul, Iraq).

Sumerian cuneiform is the earliest known writing system. The cuneiform script — which uses symbols to depict words or syllables — emerged in Sumer, Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), about 5,500 years ago. The Sumerian language began to die out after Sumer was conquered by the Akkadians in 2340 BCE, but cuneiform as a system of writing continued for three more centuries.

The Minoans called Crete and other Aegean islands home during the Bronze Age. Their language is referred to by researchers as “Linear A,” which relates to the “Linear B” language known to be used on the Greek mainland years later. Linear A remains somewhat mysterious, though it can be found on around 1,400 clay tablet inscriptions that have been discovered.

The Vedas are a collection of four religious Hindu texts and are among the oldest religious works in the world. The texts existed in an oral format passed down from master to student before they were written in Vedic Sanskrit in India during between 1500 and 500 BCE.

Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” is written in Middle English, which was the language spoken in England between around 1100 to 1500. Middle English was made up of five major dialects, and Chaucer used the London dialect in his composition. The dead language ultimately evolved into the standard English we use today.

Cleopatra's native language was an ancient Greek dialect known as Koine. However, the Egyptian queen was a gifted linguist and was fluent in no fewer than nine languages, including Arabic and Hebrew. Cleopatra was also the only member of the Ptolemaic dynasty to successfully learn the Egyptian tongue of the people she ruled.

Vikings spoke Old Norse, which developed from Proto-Norse around 750 CE. Much of our knowledge of Norse mythology comes from texts written in Old Norse. But as the sea-faring Vikings dispersed around northern Europe, the language fragmented into region-specific languages, including Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Faroese.

The meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics was a mystery until scholars obtained the Rosetta Stone in the early 19th century. The artifact is inscribed with one text written in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic, and ancient Greek. Scholars translated the Greek, which they used as a guide to deciphering the hieroglyphics. Linguists finally cracked the ancient script in the 1820s.

In the mid-18th century, botanist Carl Linnaeus developed the modern Latin naming system for plant and animal species. Called binomial nomenclature, the system combines two names to form a species: the genus name and a specific epithet. For example, humans are Homo (genus) sapiens (epithet).