Crack the Code - Get A Cool $Mill
Carved stone seal from the Indus Valley civilization (c. 2,500 B.C.E.). Photo: DEA / G. Nimatallah / De Agostini via Getty Images.
For more than a century, the ancient Indus script has mystified researchers. Left behind by the Indus Valley civilization, which emerged more than five millennia ago in present-day India and Pakistan, these pictorial symbols been found on thousands of copper plates, pottery, bronzes, and stamp seals. To this day, nobody can figure out what they say.
Now, in a bid to spur the cracking of the code, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu is offering a $1 million bounty to experts who can successfully interpret the Indus Valley script.
Thriving for 2,000 years, the Indus Valley civilization represents one of the area’s earliest societies, flourishing the fertile plains of the Indus River. Its settlements, including Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, are estimated to have housed up to 60,000 residents at their height, with infrastructure that boasted advanced architecture, sophisticated urban planning, drainage and water supply systems, and remnants of metallurgic techniques. The civilization likely declined with the drying of the region.
Even though there are about 4,000 relics containing the mysterious script–experts remain baffled.
A host of factors are working against decryption. For one, the corpus of Indus writing is small and the inscriptions are remarkably short, averaging a length of five symbols. Plus, since the Indus or Harappan spoken language has not been identified, there’s really no knowing what the written script is meant to express or represent. Due to their brevity, there remains the question, too, if the inscriptions even convey a spoken language.
And unlike the deciphering of hieroglyphs, no bilingual document such as the Rosetta Stone has turned up. Where there were surviving records of ancient Egyptian rulers including Ptolemy and Rameses, which offered clues to what was expressed in hieroglyphs, no such accounts of Indus leaders or figures are known to exist.
Advances in technology, however, are helping researchers make some headway. A team led by Nisha Yadav, a professor at India’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, for example, has ventured a machine-learning model to analyze the structure of the Indus script. So far, they have identified 67 signs which account for 80 percent of the writing, with a symbol that appears to be a jar with two handles being the most frequently used.
Yet, Yadav told the BBC, “We still don’t know whether the signs are complete words, or part of words or part of sentences.”
The India government’s challenge follows on the heels of a similar contest, spearheaded by University of Kentucky researchers in 2023, to decipher the Herculaneum scrolls, which are charred, 2,000-year-old texts that just barely survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. But it's slow going. The contest has so far seen the deciphering of the word “porphyras” (Greek for purple) and the reading of more than 2,000 ancient Greek letters on a scroll.
This article can be found at artnet.com