Million dollar challenge to crack early Native American writing

Every week Rajesh P. N. Rao, a computer scientist, receives emails from people who claim to have cracked an ancient script that has baffled scientists for generations.

Ranging from engineers and IT workers to retirees and tax preparers, these self-proclaimed codebreakers are mostly from India or of Indian origin living abroad. They are all convinced that they have deciphered the script of the Indus Valley Civilization, a mixture of signs and symbols.

“They claim to have uncovered it and that it’s ‘case closed,'” says Mr. Rao, the Hwang Foundation professor at the University of Washington and author of peer-reviewed studies of Indus writing.

M. K. Stalin, the chief minister of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, recently upped the ante, announcing a $1 million prize for anyone who could crack the code.

The Indus, or Harappan, civilization – one of the earliest urban societies in the world – arose 5,300 years ago in what is now northwestern India and Pakistan. Its rugged farmers and traders, who lived in walled brick towns, prospered for centuries. Since its discovery a century ago, around 2,000 sites have been discovered throughout the region.

The reasons for the society’s sudden decline remain unclear, with no clear evidence of war, famine or natural disaster. But the biggest mystery is his undeciphered writing, leaving his language, rule and beliefs shrouded in mystery.

For more than a century, experts – linguists, scientists and archaeologists – have tried to crack the Indic script. Theories connect it with the early Brahmi scriptsDravidian and Indo-Aryan languages, Sumerianand even claimed that it simply consists of political or religious symbols.

However, its secrets remain under lock and key. “The Indic script is perhaps the most important writing system that has not been deciphered,” says Aska Parpola, a leading Indologist.

More popular theories these days equate the writing with the content of Hindu scriptures and attribute spiritual and magical significance to the inscriptions.

Most of these attempts ignore that the writing, which consists of signs and symbols, mainly appears on stone seals used for trade and commerce, making it unlikely that they contain religious or mythological content, according to Mr. Rao.

There are many problems with deciphering the Indic script.

First, there is a relatively small amount of writing – about 4,000 of them, almost all on small objects such as seals, pottery and tablets.

Also, there is the brevity of each script – averaging about five signs or symbols – without long texts on walls, plaques or vertical stone slabs.

Consider the common square seals: lines of characters run along their upper part, with a central motif of an animal – often a unicorn – and an object next to it, the meaning of which remains unknown.

There is also no such bilingual artifact Rosetta Stonewho helped scientists decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. Such artifacts contain text in two languages, offering a direct comparison between known and unknown writing.

Recent advances in deciphering the Indus script have made it possible to use computer science to solve this ancient mystery. The researchers used machine learning techniques to analyze the script, trying to discover patterns and structures that could lead to an understanding of it.

Nisha Yadav, a researcher at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai (TIFR), is one of them. In collaboration with scholars such as Mr. Rao, her work focused on applying statistical and computational methods to the analysis of cryptic writing.

Using a digitized dataset of Indus characters from the script, they found interesting patterns. A caveat: “We still don’t know whether the signs are full words, parts of words or parts of sentences,” Ms Yadav says.

Ms. Yadav and other researchers identified 67 characters that make up 80% of the writing in the script. The sign that looks like a jar with two handles turned out to be the most commonly used. In addition, the scripts started with a large number of characters and ended with fewer. Some character patterns appear more often than expected.

A machine learning script model was also created to recover illegible and damaged texts, which paves the way for further research.

“Our understanding is that the script is structured and there is an underlying logic to the writing,” says Ms Yadav.

Certainly, several ancient scripts remain undeciphered, facing problems similar to the Indus script.

Mr. Rao cites scenarios such as Proto-Elamite (Iran), Linear A (Crete), and Etruscans (Italy), whose base language is unknown.

Others like News (Easter Island) and the Zapotecs (Mexico), know the languages, “but their symbols remain incomprehensible.” The Phaistos Disc from Crete – a mysterious fired clay disc from the Minoan civilization – “closely reflects the problems of the Indus script – its language is unknown and only one known example exists”.

Back in India, it is not entirely clear why Mr. Stalin of Tamil Nadu announced a reward for deciphering the script. His announcement follows new research linking Indus Valley signs to graffiti found in his state.

K. Rajan and R. Sivananthan analyzed more than 14,000 graffiti pottery fragments from 140 excavation sites in Tamil Nadu, which included more than 2,000 signs. The researchers claim that many of these signs closely resemble signs in the Indus script: 60% of the signs are identical, and more than 90% of South Indian graffiti have “parallels” with signs from the Indus civilization.

This “suggests a kind of cultural contact” between the Indus Valley and southern India, Mr Rajan and Mr Sivananthan say.

Mr Stalin’s move to announce the award is seen by many as positioning him as a staunch supporter of Tamil heritage and culture in opposition to Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Delhi.

But the researchers are sure that there will soon be no contenders for the Stalin Prize. Scientists have compiled complete, updated databases of all known artifacts with inscriptions crucial to decipherment. “But what did the Indus people write? I wish we knew,” says Ms. Yadava.