There is an ongoing decipherment project in which a pair of objects has begun to yield results leading to it being called a Rosetta Stone. That is the decipherment of the khipus, a writing system tied in knots that developed in the Andes over a thousand years ago, and the "Rosetta Stone" is the two Collata khipus. Khipus are writing tied in knots instead of carved in stone or written in ink. While they first appear during the Wari period (roughly AD 600-1100), they are most famous for their use during the Inca Empire (1438-1533).

Around 1300 khipus, usually assumed to date to the Inca period but rarely carbon dated, still exist today. The "typical" khipu consists of a top cord with pendant cords hanging down from it. These cords can be made of cotton but also of animal fibers such as camelid furs. Knots are tied into the cords at different intervals, which is the main way that khipus encoded information. Some khipus appear colourless today, though this can be a preservation issue in cotton, while others were dyed.

The Inca used khipus for a variety of purposes. Most famously, khipus were used for accounting. The Inca ran a vast empire which at its height was the size of the Western Roman Empire. Their economy was redistributive, so accurate record-keeping was essential to mantaining the proper flow of goods. The decimal system was deciphered by Leland Locke in the 1920s. While this allowed us to read the numbers on many khipus, it still doesn't tell us anything about the context of what those numbers meant, and it also leaves a whole group of non-numeric khipus unintelligible.

Because the khipus weren't just used for accounting, even though this is a persistent myth. Spanish chroniclers also reported that the Inca used khipus to record their histories, literature, and correspondence. While many academics used to proclaim that khipu use had stopped when the Spanish burned all the Inca khipus in the 16th century, we know now that this is not true. When the Spanish arrived in Peru and conquered the Incas, some of them tried to adapt non-numeric khipus for similar usages in the new colonial context. The Mercedarians are a religious order who were particularly involved in khipu use in the Andes. They used khipus to teach the Lord's Prayer and the catechism, and they taught the Indigenous people how to use khipus to make confessions. Herders also continued making khipus to keep track of their flocks. Some Andean communities continued to make and read khipus until the early 20th century and still use them for ritual purposes (without being able to read them) today.

Enter the Collata khipus. Sabine Hyland, a khipu researcher at the University of St Andrews, was contacted by a woman called Zoila Forss. Forss lives in Finland but grew up in San Juan de Collata, a small and remote community in the Andes. She got in touch with Hyland because she knew that her ancestral community had some khipus and she wanted to know if Hyland could make any sense of them. At the time, Hyland was becoming known for her work on khipu boards, hybrid khipu-alphabetic texts that were used in colonial churches in the 18th century. These boards had names in Spanish with khipu cords hanging off at the end of each name and were used to keep track of villagers' obligations for festivals. While there was some hope at the time that these khipu boards might be the "Rosetta Stone", the lack of one-to-one correspondence meant that while they taught us a lot about how khipus encoded information (e.g. using ply direction to indicate which moiety a person belonged to), they were not a key to "translating" the khipus.

But the Collata khipus were different. Hyland travelled to Collata where the village elders granted her access to the khipus. She and her husband were the first outsiders ever allowed to see them thanks to the lobbying of Zoila's mother Meche, head of the Association of Collatinos in Lima. The Collata khipus are made of animal fiber cords dyed in various colours. There are no knots tied in their cords. They were accompanied with manuscripts from the 17th and 18th century. By talking with the village officials and examining the documents, it was determined that these two khipus represented correspondences between local leaders during a rebellion against the Spanish in the 18th century.

In 1783, Collata and the neighbouring village San Pedro de Casta (today most famous for its alleged UFO sightings) were involved in a Native insurrection led by Felipe Velasco Tupa Inca Yupanki, who claimed that his brother was an Inca pretender hiding out in the rainforests. Yupanki was captured and executed by the Spanish before their planned siege of Lima could take place, but Spanish archives hold over a thousand pages of unpublished testimonies about the revolts, giving Hyland a great deal of information to work with when attempting to situate the Collata khipus into the context of the revolt. While many local leaders were implicated in alphabetic letters intercepted by the Spanish, no alphabetic letters were found implicating the Collata leadership, whose khipu communication was never found, so they escaped persecution.

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Yes! The Behistun Inscription has been called the Near Eastern Rosetta Stone. Personally, I think that's underselling Behistun. Where the Rosetta Stone helped decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs with the aid of the already understood Demotic and Ancient Greek, the Behistun Inscription helped linguists decipher all three (previously unknown) languages on the monument as well as a host of other languages.

So what is it? Well in my opinion, the Behistun Inscription is just more interesting as a document than the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is the legal text of a royal decree, while Behistun tells the story of Darius the Great's rise to power via a coup, the absolutely massive civil war that followed, and the establishment of a new upper echelon of the Persian nobility. It was carved into a sacred mountain in southern Media (modern Kermanshah) and over the course of the following centuries and later empire, it was joined by a statue of Heracles and some Sassanid reliefs.

The three languages on the Behistun inscription (and most other Achaemenid inscriptions) are: Old Persian, Akkadian, and Elamite. The three different styles of cuneiform text had already been identified as three separate languages for decades before anyone made progress on deciphering them. Work on deciphering the three languages was spurred on by the work of Sir Henry Rawlinson during his military service with the British East India Company in Persia. Rawlinson and a few other scholars worked off of the rubbings he took of the Old Persian text.

Old Persian was deciphered through a combination of tools. First they identified repeated words in many Achaemenid inscriptions as royal titles and names (ie King Darius, Great King, King of Kings, etc). With this they were able to confirm that Old Persian used an alphabetic script made up of cuneiform symbols. They combined that knowledge with knowledge of modern Persian and the even older, related Avestan language used in Zoroastrian holy texts to identify the meaning and pronunciation of the words they had identified. Once scholars understood the different sounds made by most of the symbols, they could read the Old Persian text and translated it with the help of Avestan, Modern Persian, other Iranian languages, and Sanskrit (closely related to Avestan).

Once Old Persian was understood, they could once again identify the names and titles in the other inscriptions and starting working to decipher them. The second language to be deciphered from Behistun was Akkadian (called Assyrian at the time). Akkadian cuneiform was identified as syllabic rather than Alphabetic, but also as a semitic language with similarities to known languages like Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Using those tools, a few other sources of Akkadian, and the base knowledge taken from Behistun linguists were able to translate the Akkadian inscription at Behistun.

From there, Akkadian was used to translate other languages found in bi- and tri- lingual inscriptions. This included Sumerian, Urartian, Hittite, and eventually many others.

The third language at Behistun was Elamite, which was (and to a degree still is) harder to crack. Elamite is a language isolate, meaning it doesn't have any related languages to help with translation. The basics of Elamite pronunciation and script could be identified at Behistun, but the whole language was slowly deciphered with the aid of many other inscriptions where it appears alongside Akkadian and Old Persian. After several decades (now into the 20th century) Elamite was understood well enough to translate most documents.

I just want to reiterate how much more complex the Behistun Inscription translation was than the Rosetta Stone. It would be like translating the Rosetta Stone if we only knew modern Greek and Latin, and if Demotic were an entirely seperate language from Egyptian. Ultimately, largely because of the Akkadian portion, the Behistun Inscription yielded many more "rosetta stones" for many other languages.

How about "Rosetta" knowledge? There have been interesting cases where a single individual's knowledge of the past or of their own culture suddenly allows people to understand vast amounts of hitherto misunderstood facts about others or even about themselves. My favourite example is an elder close to home, Kwakwaka'wakw elder Adam Dick. He was hidden from residential school, taught half a thousand songs and the history, ceremony and knowledge of his community. Among other things, his knowledge suddenly let scientists understand that thousands of rock formations were man made clam gardens, that often reached back several thousand years. here's a newspaper article on him, and here is a paper on the clam gardens that was co-published by him.

Another example was Tupaia the Tahitian navigator who traveled with Captain Cook on his first voyage. Tupaia was an amazing navigator in his own right, having voyaged to many of the islands of the polynesian world. When her arrived in Aotearoa (New Zealand) he was able to speak the local language, but what amazed people was the knowledge that he brought with him of Polynesian myths, history, practices - a knowledge that made sense of their own, deepened it, and made him the superstar of Captain Cook's travels around the island. Tony Horwitz's books "Blue Latitudes" was where I initially read an account of Tupaia's impact, though his story also features heavily in Wade Davis' Massey lecture "The Wayfinders". and here is a paper about the map that Tuvaia created showing the Polynesian world.

I find the Rosetta stone to be amazing not just in that it became a key to understanding something, but in that it was "the" key, i.e. it was the only thing at the time that could have functioned as a key. In programming, there's the idea of a "bus factor", the number of team members that would have to be hit by a bus to kill the project, and in many of these situations, the Rosetta Stone or the Behistun Inscription really do seem to be the things without which we would never have learnt what we learnt, at least not without great difficulty, and while these may be the main such inscriptions, I would love to hear other stories of individuals who were equally as important.