MODERN SCIENCE DECIPHERS Ancient Love Letters (Sep, 1939) MODERN
SCIENCE DECIPHERS Ancient Love Letters By R. DeWITT MILLER FOUR
THOUSAND years after a man wrote a love letter, a bookkeeper, a
chemist, and a scholar got together and deciphered the missive
of adoration. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But that’s exactly what
happened. The story goes like this. Ever since scientists began
digging up the contents of Babylonian wastebaskets, they have
been trying to work out some simple system for preserving and
deciphering this ultrapersonal correspondence. Of course, the
secret of cuneiform writing on clay tablets, with its odd-
looking, wedgelike marks, was discovered years ago, but that was
just the beginning of trouble for the archaeologists. In the
first place, the clay tablets were likely to be ruined be- fore
they could be read, and in the second place, it took so long to
decipher even one tablet that it looked as though our
civilization would be dead, and forgotten too, before that
Babylonian correspondence was