In her opinion it had to mean that the sublinear signs had to be "more important" than the supralinear ones. This conclusion formed the basis of her conjectures. She focused on the prose te'amim system only. That system comprises 8 sublinear signs. She made the hypothesis that it corresponded to the eight degrees of a musical scale, particularly of a tonal scale, (the diatonic scale - C, D, E, etc. - being the oldest). In her mind that was supported by the nearly systematic writing of a vertical sign at the end of each verse. This sign, she assumed, could work like an end note, and could be used to indicate the main note (tonic) of a scale. As she worked with each verse she became convinced that the notes of her transcription formed coherent melodies and not random sounds. By comparing individual verses she then compiled tables of concordant sequences. Analyzing the shapes of signs, she finally assigned conjectural values to the 8 sublinear signs of the prose system, suggesting that they are the 8 notes of a scale. Some musicologists view as unlikely her hypothesis that the signs represent the degrees of a scale. It is asserted that what seems to be her method is flawed. (I.e., in the eyes of some critics, her method appears to assign the values of the signs arbitrarily, based only on a subjective assessment of the musical quality of the melody that a given assignment produces.) Nevertheless, her reconstruction of these notations allowed her to perform around the world the haunting, beautiful and spiritually uplifting music thus "recovered". The work to pursue this conjectural decipherment and to justify its methodology and assumptions has been carried on since her death by her students and associates Gilles Tiar and John H. Wheeler (Johanan Rakkav on the net) who had some success in spreading her theories. In 1978 the Institut de France awarded the second edition of Haik-Vantoura's French book the Prix Bernier, its highest award. Encyclopaedia Universalis, a French online encyclopedia, presents her work as a firmly scientifically established conclusion. Some musicians have also produced recorded music based on her alleged decipherment, more particularly the French harp player Esther Lamandier. Haik-Vantoura's work has been rejected by some researchers as based on Western preconceptions and subjective assignments, coupled with historical misunderstandings. However author David C. Mitchell has defended it, noting that it agrees closely with