At one point, there's a reference to the aliens losing some very basic knowledge due to dark ages at various points in their history, to the point of rediscovering twice that their world was not the centre of the universe. Really, thought I? I wonder if the later societies revere the earlier more accomplished cultures? This wouldn't require writing as a key - Western architecture owes a strong debt to classical Roman and Greek roots, via the British Empire and Napoleonic France. We also display frequent use of Roman numerals and Latin tags - again, information that could be observed and compared, rather than based on being able to read any of the words involved.
Later, they're examining an enigmatic alien structure, and one of the characters comments that "...you’d expect the central tower to be the tallest of the group. Not the shortest. They just don’t think the way we do.” Part of the bias toward higher central towers in our culture is a legacy of our collective militaristic background. Castles are constructed with a higher central keep so that if the walls are taken by the enemy, the defenders can retreat to the central fortifications and still maintain the advantage of height. Architecture with lower central features might well indicate a less bellicose cultural background.
Ha, maybe I should have been an archeologist - or a science fiction writer.
- Sid
* I'm sorry, but I'm completely sceptical about the possibilities of
translating a completely alien language without some sort of Rosetta
Stone. For the alternative viewpoint, recommended reading is H. Beam
Piper's short story Omnilingual, in which scientific constants such as the table of elements provide an initial point of access for translation. Which might well work, but you'd be a long time figuring out Shakespeare from that.
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