very compact surface of the four writing surfaces contains traces of thousands of texts, estimated to have been written over several decades. As such, the stylus traces form a constant mesh of lines across the entire surface. To complicate the process, they are also all written by a single hand, making handwriting analysis impossible. As such, Zaliznyak does not call the process 'reading'; instead, he calls it 'reconstruction'. Instead of asking himself the question, 'what's written on this line', Zaliznyak approaches the problem as 'is a phrase A or a word B possible among everything written in this sector'. The reconstruction is therefore done letter by letter, starting from an arbitrary position, usually somewhere at the top of a 'page'. After analyzing a meshwork of scratches and identifying some of the letters in a given spot (which can realistically number hundreds or even thousands), Zaliznyak then moves some distance to the side and begins identifying symbols at the next position. After several positions are discerned in that way, most letter combinations are discarded as senseless jumble, and possibly meaningful words are identified. Zaliznyak then moves to the next position and attempts to locate subsequent symbols that would complete the word or a sentence. As the text, in a typical fashion for the writing of the time, is written with no spaces between words, identifying these chains becomes somewhat easier compared to if it had been written with spaces. After careful examination of each position, Zaliznyak creates symbol chains that continue to grow in size. The search often branches off into false leads, where at a certain symbol the chains switch off to a different text fragment. Sometimes these false branches are identified after only a few symbols, but sometimes the false branches can take several words, sentences, and even longer to be discounted. Such false leads can take several days or even weeks to identify. Another specific of the texts is that many of them have been written multiple times, for reasons that can only be guessed at. Due to the previous copy being erased before a new copy is made, each repetition is written somewhat shifted compared to the previous copy. It is unknown whether the copies were made right after each other, or weeks, months or even years apart. Multiple copies of the same text make identifying false chains easier. The process remains exceedingly hard to peer-review. Only