Will the Indus Valley script ever be deciphered?
About 4,000 years ago, one of the world’s oldest civilizations emerged: the Indus Valley Civilizationthriving in what is now Pakistan, western India, eastern Iran and parts of Afghanistan. In addition to building large cities, its inhabitants created a writing composed of hundreds of signs that remain undeciphered.
The signs, sometimes called Harappan script, vary, some resembling a diamond with a square in its corner; a U with three “fingers” on each end and an oval with an asterisk-like shape inside.
Article continues below
Undeciphered writing
Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up for our weekly Life’s Little Mysteries newsletter to hear about the latest mysteries before they appear online.
The Indus Valley Civilization flourished between 2600 and 1900 BC. Thousands of artifacts containing writing survive to this day, Michael Philip Oakesresearcher in computational linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom, wrote in an article published in the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics.
Surviving texts tend to be very short, averaging five signs per text, Oakes noted. There are no known bilingual texts recorded in the Indus Valley script nor any known texts to aid decipherment. In other words, the Indus Valley script does not have its own script. Rosetta Stone. It is also unclear what language the script encodes, and some researchers have argued that it may not encode a language at all, suggesting that they may function more like emblems that convey a person or entity.
Exactly how many signs the script contains is a matter of debate, but they number in the hundreds, Oakes said.
Experts have mixed ideas about whether the script will ever be deciphered. Even if it is decoded, the short length of the texts and the wide differences of opinion of researchers can make wide recognition of a decipherment difficult.
Although some experts believe AI could help decipher language, researchers will likely need to guide the AI for complete decoding, experts said.
Is it already partially decrypted?
Steve Bontaan independent researcher with a doctorate in linguistics who has studied the writing extensively, said some of the work may already be complete.
“I think the Indus Valley script is already partially deciphered, but recognition of this fact is way overdue,” Bonta said in an email to Live Science. Bonta said he showed “in the 1990s that certain canonical signs and sign fields should indicate asset ratings, expressed in different weights.” However, many scholars do not recognize the accuracy of the decipherments.
Bonta said his claims that he partially deciphered the script were far from the only ones. Before the mid-1990s, “claims of decryption were published quite regularly,” Bonta said. None of these claims have been widely accepted, the problem being that the brevity of the surviving texts makes it difficult to prove the accuracy of a decipherment.
“Most Indus inscriptions are brief and very repetitive, making the task of reproducible decipherment very difficult,” Bonta said.
Turn to AI
AI is useful for decipherment attempts and can help researchers generate lists of possible sign values. But ultimately, it will still be human researchers who will have to take the lead. AI “is an extension of human intellect and intuition, albeit an extraordinarily powerful one,” Bonta said.
Peter Reveszprofessor of computer science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an expert in computational linguistics and who has studied Indus Valley script extensively, believes that the script will be deciphered and that AI could play an important role. Revesz’s team used data mining and statistical analysis to help determine which scriptural signs from the Indus Valley are likely to have similar meanings.
“The Indus Valley scenario will surely be resolved one way or another, and AI can help, but it must be guided by good research design,” Revesz said in an email.
Rajesh Raoprofessor of computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle who has co-authored several papers on the Indus script, is less optimistic about a complete decipherment, but said AI would be helpful. In the 2000s, with the most primitive AI available at the time, his team determined that the script has a statistical pattern that suggests it encodes a language.
However, even with AI, complete decipherment seems unlikely with existing texts, according to Rao. The chances “are not very high,” Rao told Live Science, noting that partial decryption might be possible. “We may be able to rebuild their digital system,” Rao said.
Rao said the number system is already partly understood because some inscriptions feature tally marks (vertical lines) meant to represent numbers. These are located next to symbols that may represent objects. Additionally, archaeological data indicates that people used a system of standardized weights involving ratios of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. Using the tally marks and the weight system, it might be possible to determine what numbers are recorded on the inscriptions.
To decipher the entire script, Rao believes archaeologists will need to uncover more texts. There are many Indus Valley Civilization sites that have largely not been excavated, and he hopes that future excavations can produce texts that are longer or feature the Indus Valley script alongside a known language.
