About 4,000 years ago, the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the world’s oldest civilizations, emerged and flourished in parts of modern-day Pakistan, western India, eastern Iran, and Afghanistan. In addition to building large cities, people created a writing system consisting of hundreds of signs that remain undeciphered.
Sometimes called the Harappan script, this sign varies, with some looking like diamonds with squares at the corners. It’s an oval with a U with three “fingers” on each end and an asterisk-like shape inside.
Article continues below
you may like
undeciphered script
Sign up for newsletter
Sign up for our weekly Life’s Little Mysteries newsletter to get the latest mysteries before they’re posted online.
The Indus Valley Civilization flourished between approximately 2600 BC and 1900 BC. Thousands of artifacts containing this script remain to this day, said Michael Philip Oakes, a computational linguistics researcher at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK, in a paper published in the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics.
Extant texts tend to be very short, with each text containing an average of five symbols, Oakes noted. There are no known parallel texts recorded in the Indus Valley script or known texts to aid in deciphering it. In other words, the Indus Valley script does not have its own Rosetta Stone. It is also unclear what language the script encodes, with some scholars arguing that the script may not encode a language at all, suggesting that the script may function like a emblem, conveying a person or entity.
Exactly how many autographs are included in the script is up for debate, but the number is in the hundreds, Oakes said.
Experts have different ideas about whether the script can be deciphered. Even if it were possible to decipher it, it may be difficult to gain widespread recognition because the length of the text is short and opinions differ widely between scholars.
Some experts believe AI could help decipher language, but researchers said it would likely need to be guided to fully decipher the language.
Has it already been partially deciphered?
Steve Bonta, an independent researcher with a Ph.D. in linguistics who has studied the script extensively, said some of the research may have already been completed.
“I think the Indus Valley script has already been partially deciphered, but recognition of that fact is significantly delayed,” Bonta told Live Science via email. Bonta said he showed that “in the 1990s, certain symbols and standard symbol fields must indicate notations for assets expressed with different weights.” However, many scholars do not accept that decipherment as accurate.
What to read next
Bonta said his claim to have partially cracked the script was not alone. Until the mid-’90s, Bonta said, “claims of decoding were being published fairly regularly.” None of these claims are widely accepted, and one problem is that the extant documents are short, making it difficult to prove the accuracy of the decoding.
“Most Indus scripts are short and repetitive, making reproducible deciphering very difficult,” Bonta said.
Turn to AI
AI could aid in decoding attempts, helping researchers generate a list of possible code values. But ultimately human researchers still need to take the lead. AI is “very powerful, but it’s an extension of human intelligence and intuition,” Bonta said.
Professor Peter Revesz of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an expert in computational linguistics who has studied the Indus Valley script extensively, believes the script could be deciphered and that AI could play an important role. Revesz’s team used data mining and statistical analysis to determine which Indus Valley script symbols were likely to have similar meanings.
“The Indus Valley script will definitely be solved in some way, and AI will help, but it needs to be guided by good research design,” Reves said in an email.
Rajesh Rao, a computer science professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and co-author of several papers on the Indus script, said he was less optimistic about a complete decipherment, but said AI could help. Back in the 2000s, leveraging the more primitive AI available at the time, his team determined that scripts had statistical patterns that suggested they encoded language.
However, Rao said that even with AI, it seems impossible to fully decipher existing documents. Rao told Live Science that the chances are “not very high,” noting that a partial decipherment may be possible. “Maybe we can rebuild their numbering system,” Rao said.
Rao said the number system is already partially understood because some inscriptions have tallies (vertical lines) that are thought to represent numbers. These are next to symbols that may represent objects. Additionally, archaeological data shows that people used a standardized system of weights that included ratios of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. By using the tally and weight system, it may be possible to determine which numbers are recorded in the inscription.
Rao believes archaeologists will need to discover many more scripts to decipher the entire script. Many Indus Valley civilization sites remain largely unexcavated, and he hopes that future excavations may unearth longer texts or texts that feature the Indus Valley script alongside other known languages.
Source link
