A fish under a roof. A stick figure without a head. A series of lines that look like a garden rake. <\/p>\n
These symbols are part of an entirely undeciphered script from a sophisticated ancient civilization thousands of years old. And they remain an enduring mystery that has sparked heated debates, death threats to researchers, and cash prizes for the coveted answer. <\/p>\n
The latest such prize was offered last month by the chief minister of one Indian state: $1 million to anyone who can decode the script of the Indus Valley civilization, which stretched across what is now Pakistan and northern India. <\/p>\n
\u201cA really important question about the pre-history of South Asia could potentially be settled if we are able to completely decipher the script,\u201d said Rajesh P. N. Rao, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who has worked on it for more than a decade. <\/p>\n
If deciphered, the script could offer a glimpse into a Bronze Age civilization believed to rival ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Some believe this vast domain held millions of people, with cities that boasted advanced urban planning, standardized weights and measures, and extensive <\/strong>trade routes. <\/p>\n Perhaps more importantly, it might help answer fundamental questions about who the Indus Valley people and their descendants were \u2013 a politically fraught debate about the disputed roots of modern India and its indigenous inhabitants. <\/p>\n \u201cWhichever group is trying to claim that civilization would get to claim that they were among the first to have urban planning, this amazing trade, and they were navigating seas to do global trade,\u201d Rao said. <\/p>\n \u201cIt has a lot of cachet if you can claim that, \u2018Those were our people who were doing that.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n Though the script has remained unsolved since its earliest samples were published in 1875, we do know a little about Indus Valley culture itself \u2013 thanks to archaeological excavations of major cities like Mohenjo-daro, located in what is now Pakistan\u2019s Sindh province, about 510 kilometers (317 miles) northeast of Karachi. <\/p>\n These cities were designed along a grid system like New York City or Barcelona, and were equipped with drainage and water management systems \u2013 features which at that point were \u201cunparalleled in history,\u201d one paper said. <\/p>\n Throughout the second and third millennia BC, Indus merchants traded with people across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, their ships bringing copper ingots, pearls, spices and ivory. They crafted gold and silver jewelry, and built faraway settlements and colonies. <\/p>\n Eventually around 1800 BC \u2013 still more than 1,000 years before the birth of ancient Rome \u2013 the civilization collapsed and people migrated to smaller villages. Some believe climate change was the driving factor, with evidence of long droughts, shifting temperatures, and unpredictable rainfall that could have damaged agriculture in those final few centuries. <\/p>\n But what we know about the Indus civilization is limited compared with the wealth of information available about its contemporaries, such as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the <\/strong>Maya. That is largely because of the undeciphered script, which was found on artifacts such as pottery and stone seals. <\/p>\n There are a few reasons it\u2019s been so hard to decode. First, there aren\u2019t that many artifacts to analyze \u2013 archaeologists have only found about 4,000 inscriptions, compared with an estimated 5 million words available in ancient Egyptian, which includes hieroglyphics and other variants. <\/p>\n Many of those Indus relics are very small, often stone seals measuring one square inch \u2013 meaning the script on them is short, most sequences containing only four or five symbols. <\/p>\n Crucially, there isn\u2019t yet a bilingual artifact containing both the Indus Valley script and its translation into another language, as the Rosetta Stone does for ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek. And we don\u2019t have clues such as names of recognized Indus rulers that could help crack the script \u2013 the way the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy helped decipher ancient Egyptian. <\/p>\n There are some things that experts largely agree on. Most believe the script was written from right to left, and many speculate it was used for both religious and economic purposes, such as marking items for trade. There are even some interpretations of signs that multiple experts agree on \u2013 a headless stick figure representing a person, for instance. <\/p>\n However, until a Rosetta Stone equivalent is found, these remain unproven theories. \u201cNo unanimity has been reached even on the basic issues,\u201d wrote Indus experts Jagat Pati Joshi and Asko Parpola in a 1987 book that catalogued hundreds of seals and inscriptions. <\/p>\n Even decades later, \u201cnot a single sign is deciphered yet,\u201d said Nisha Yadav, a researcher at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, who worked with Rao on the project and has studied the script for nearly 20 years. <\/p>\n For some people, solving the script isn\u2019t just about intellectual curiosity or academic study \u2013 it\u2019s a high-stakes existential question. <\/p>\n That\u2019s because they believe it could settle the controversy of who exactly the Indus people were, and which way migration flowed, in or out of India. <\/p>\n There are two main groups vying to claim the Indus civilization. One group argues the script has links to Indo-European languages such as ancient Sanskrit, which spawned many languages now spoken across northern India. <\/p>\n Most scholars believe Aryan migrants from Central Asia brought Indo-European languages to India. But this group argues it was the other way around \u2013 that Sanskrit and its relatives originated in the Indus Valley civilization and spread out toward Europe, said Rao. <\/p>\n He described their claim as: \u201cEverything was within India to begin with \u2026 Nothing came from outside.\u201d <\/p>\n Then there\u2019s a second group that believes the script is linked to the Dravidian language family now largely spoken across South India \u2013 suggesting Dravidian languages were there first, widely spoken across the region before being pushed out by the arrival of Aryans in the north. <\/p>\n M. K. Stalin, the southern <\/strong>Tamil Nadu state leader offering the $1 million prize, is among those who believe the Indus language was a Dravidian ancestor \u2013 which Rao described as the more \u201ctraditional\u201d theory, though there are respected scholars on both sides. <\/p>\n Then there are some like Indus expert Iravatham Mahadevan, who argued there\u2019s little point in the debate since the distinction between northern Aryans and southern Dravidians isn\u2019t clear anyway. <\/p>\n \u201cThere are no Dravidian people or Aryan people – just like both Pakistanis and Indians are racially very similar,\u201d he said in a 1998 interview. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are both the product of a very long period of intermarriage, there have been migrations \u2026 You cannot now racially segregate any element of the Indian population.\u201d <\/p>\n Still, the question is fraught. In a 2011 TED Talk, Rao said he received hate mail after publishing some of his findings. Other researchers have described receiving death threats \u2013 including Steve Farmer, who along with his colleagues stunned the academic world in 2004 by arguing the Indus script doesn\u2019t represent a language at all, but is merely a set of symbols like those we\u2019d see on modern traffic signs. <\/p>\n Despite these tensions, the script has long enamored researchers and amateur enthusiasts, with some dedicating their careers to the conundrum. <\/p>\n Some, like Parpola \u2013 one of the eminent experts in the field \u2013 have tried figuring out the meaning behind certain signs. For instance, he suggests, in many Dravidian languages the words for \u201cfish\u201d and \u201cstar\u201d sound the same, and stars were often used to symbolize deities in other ancient scripts \u2013 so Indus symbols that look like fish might represent gods. <\/p>\n Other researchers, like Rao and Yadav, are more focused on finding patterns within the script. To do this, they train computer models to analyze a string of signs \u2013 then take away certain signs until the computer can accurately guess what the missing symbols are. <\/p>\n This is useful for several reasons: We can better understand patterns in how the script works \u2013 like how the letter \u201cQ\u201d is most often followed by \u201cU\u201d in English \u2013 and it can help researchers fill in the gaps for artifacts with damaged or missing signs. <\/p>\n Significantly, knowing these common patterns can help identify sequences that don\u2019t <\/em>follow the rules. Yadav pointed to seals found in West Asia, far from the Indus Valley; while they used the same Indus signs, they followed entirely different patterns, suggesting the script may have evolved to be used across different languages, similar to the Latin alphabet. <\/p>\n Then there are your average Joes, fans of the puzzle who want to try their hand at solving it. With the announcement of the $1 million prize \u2013 though no clear information about where people can apply for it \u2013 amateurs have flocked to experts to eagerly share their theories. <\/p>\n \u201cI used to get about one or two emails a week. But now, after the prize was sent out, I pretty much get emails every day,\u201d Rao said. They come from all sorts of people around the world, writing in different languages \u2013 with even families working on the puzzle together. <\/p>\n After so many years, Rao swings between optimism and resignation. Any further breakthrough would require international multi-disciplinary teamwork, massive <\/strong>funding, and even political negotiations to allow excavations in border areas disputed by India and Pakistan, he said. <\/p>\n But on good days, he\u2019s still hopeful. So is Yadav, who has been fascinated by the Indus Valley civilization since learning about in the fourth grade. Even without the promise of a solution, the beauty of the task draws her back year after year. <\/p>\n \u201cI look forward to working on the problem every day,\u201d she said. \u201cIf we decipher the script, it will open a window into the lives and ideology of Indus people. We will get to know a lot of things about our ancestors \u2026 what they were thinking, what were they focused on?\u201d <\/p>\n These details are \u201cjust hiding from us today,\u201d she added. \u201cThat keeps me glued to the problem rather than anything else.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A fish under a roof. A stick figure without a head. A series of lines…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14163,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Why is it so hard to decipher?<\/h2>\n
Controversial theories<\/h2>\n
How they\u2019re trying to crack it<\/h2>\n