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Decipherment is the scientific process through which an incomprehensible writing system becomes understood. Specifically, symbols in the writing system are assigned phonetic, morphemic, or semantic values. Ultimately, texts in the system can be read and understood.
While popular notions tend to depict decipherment as flashes of brilliance, in reality the process is scientific and methodical, slow and tedious, building on small but incremental successes. Also, even though many famous decipherments are credited to an individual epigraphers, such as Jean-François Champollion with Egyptian Hieroglyphs, or Michael Ventris with Linear B, in truth deciphering ancient writing systems is a collaborative effort between many people, the work of one becoming the foundation of another's breakthrough.
The Process
Before decipherment can even begin, it is very important that the corpus, or the set of available texts in the writing system, be as large as possible. The presence of more texts not only give researchers more signs and words to work with, but also can provide good test cases to existing decipherment. In addition, longer texts are also much more useful as shorter texts tend to be more repetitive in nature (imagine how little phrases such as "Made in ..." will tell you about English). Long texts are also more likely to contain complex sentence structures.
The next step
A catalog of all signs in the system. Imagine the grief if a sign is called "that double-squiggly line with three dots" rather than "sign #385". Moreoever, knowing the total number of signs helps with determining what kind of writing systems one is dealing with. About 40 or less, you got an alphabet. Between 50 and 100, you probably have a syllabary. Any more, you probably got yourself a logographic or mixed logosyllabic
system.
A working theory of the underlying language represented by the writing system. You can't write a non-existing language. A writing system always represents a language, even if the degree of complete representation can range widely.
In addition, the pace of decipherment can be sped up considerable by the existence of bilingual texts where one text is written in the undeciphered system and the other in a known and understood script. The most famous of these is the "Rosetta Stone", which enabled the decipherment of demotic and hieroglyphic Egyptian. In fact, often without a working knowledge of the underlying language, bilingual texts can allow linguists to reconstruct the language.
Of course, not all these prerequisites might be available. Often the corpus size is too small and there is no working theory about the underlying language. For example, just 15 years ago, the Epi-Olmec script was completely undecipherable because the corpus was too small, even though there was a guess onto what the language was. Another example is Etruscan, whose written system can be read because it is fairly similar to the Greek alphabet, but the underlying language is unknown and unrelated to any other languages in the world, and therefore the texts cannot be understood.
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Decipherment
