Ancient Inscriptions

Ancient inscriptions might be of two kinds.

(i) Written in a dead language bearing no resemblance or relationship to any known language. Such an inscription is forever indecipherable. There is only an arbitrary agreed conventional connection between the written or inscribed symbols, "To be or not to be," the sounds of the corresponding spoken words and the meaning that we attribute to them. Not only would anyone who possessed only the written symbols neither understand nor even know how to pronounce them, they might conceivably agree between themselves to ascribe entirely different meanings to "T," "o," "b," intervening space etc.

(ii) Intended to convey information to anyone who found them later irrespective of any intervening linguistic changes. Obviously, pictures would be the best way to do this. Carl Sagan in Contact showed another way: a single dot followed by an arbitrary symbol followed by another single dot followed by a second arbitrary symbol followed by two dots would convey that the arbitrary symbols meant "plus" and "equals." From this, it would be possible to build up the whole of mathematics, then to convey engineering instructions.

In Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire, Axor says first that some Ancient symbols have seemed to point him towards the Patrician System but later that he has not yet deciphered any Ancient symbols, merely identified possibly significant regularities between them. Is this a contradiction? When talking about the apparent reference to Patricius, he says that some of the symbols are entirely incomprehensible whereas others do seem to be astronomical or numerical so perhaps the Ancient ruins contain symbols of both kinds, (i) and (ii)?