A Bronze Age script was cracked without anyone knowing what a single sign said. First the signs were sorted into a grid by pure structure — which share a vowel, which share a consonant — with no sounds at all. Then four guessed place-names pinned a handful of rows and columns, and signs that appeared in no place-name came out forced — and what they spelled was Greek. One of those forced words was tripod. Then a tablet no one could yet read turned up with that very word, beside a three-legged cauldron.
Here is a corner of the grid — a column for each vowel, a row for each consonant. Each cell holds one sign, shown first only by its catalogue number. No sounds are assigned. Walk it forward.
Not “AI art.” This is standard, textbook history of the decipherment, made operable. Nothing here is an original finding; the only new thing is the form — the grid run as a machine. The interactive is a faithful subset of an ~87-sign syllabary; the propagation it shows is true to the method, smaller than the historical one.
Sources.