$ 1 million price for decrypting an old script

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A fish under one roof. A headless stroke figure. A number of lines that look like a garden rake. These symbols are part of a fully decrypted script of a highly developed civilization that existed thousands of years ago. They represent an unresolved puzzle that caused heated debates, threats to researchers and cash premiums to reward the long -awaited decryption.

a challenge for scientists

The latest premium was offered by an Indian state last month: $ 1 million for anyone who can decipher the Scripture of Indus civilization that extends across the area that now comprises Pakistan and North India. "A really important question about the history of South Asia could potentially be solved if we succeed in completely deciphering the writing," said Rajesh P. N. Rao, a professor of Computer science at the University of Washington, who has been working on it for over a decade

A look at the Bronze Age

If it is deciphered, the writing could give an insight into a high culture of the Bronze Age, which could possibly compete with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Some estimates assume that this extensive civilization housed millions of people whose cities bragged with advanced urban planning, standardized weights and dimensions as well as extensive trade routes. It is of crucial importance that the deciphering of the writing could also answer fundamental questions about the Indus-Valley people and their descendants-a politically explosive topic that concerns the controversial origins of modern India and its indigenous population.

The complexity of decryption

Although the writing has remained unsolved since the earlier rehearsals in 1875, we know something about the indus civilization itself-thanks to Archaeological excavations of important cities such as Mohenjo-daro , which is located in today's Pakistani Sindh. These cities were laid out according to a scanning system, similar to New York City or Barcelona, ​​and had wastewater and water management systems that were "in no way" at that time.

trade relationships of indus civilization

In the course of the second and third millennium BC. BC, Indus dealers acted with peoples in the Persian Gulf and in the Middle East. Her ships brought copper bars, pearls, spices and ivory. They made gold and silver jewelry and founded distant settlements and colonies. Finally, around 1800 BC. BC - still over 1,000 years before the foundation of the ancient Rome - collapsed civilization, and people moved to smaller villages. Was, with prove for long drought time and changeable temperatures that may have significantly impaired agriculture in the past centuries.

The properties of the Indus script

what we know about indus civilization is limited compared to the extensive information about their contemporaries, such as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Maya. This is largely due to the unsettled script, which was found on artifacts such as ceramics and stone seals. There are several reasons why decryption is so difficult. First, there are not many artifacts to analyze - archaeologists have only found around 4,000 inscriptions, compared to an estimated 5 million words in the ancient Egyptian language, including hieroglyphs and other variants.

The riddle of the Indus symbols

Many of these indus relics are very small, often stone seals that only measure one square. The writing on them is therefore short, most of the strings contain only four or five symbols. The crucial point is that there has been no bilingual artifact so far, which contains both the indus font and its translation into another language, as is the case with the Rosetta stone for old Egypt and the old Greek. In addition, there are also no indications of how the names of well-known rulers of the Indus civilization that could help to crack the writing-just like the names of Kleopatra and Ptolemaios helped decrypt the old Egypt.

controversial theories about indus civilization

For some people, solving the writing is not just intellectual curiosity or academic studies - it is an existential question with high operations. This is because you believe that it could clarify the controversy about the identity of the Indus people and the direction of migration, in or from India. There are two main groups that compete for the belonging to indus civilization. The one group argues that the writing has connections to Indo -European languages ​​such as the old Sanskrit, which has produced many languages ​​that are today spoken in northern India.

The rivalry of theories

Most scientists believe that Aryan migrants from Central Asia brought Indo -European languages ​​to India. But this group claims that it was the other way around-that Sanskrit and its relatives have their origin in indus civilization and have spread to Europe. Rao describes her claim as follows: "Everything was already in India at the beginning ... nothing came from outside." A second group believes that the writing is connected to the dravid language family, which is now spoken primarily in southern inia - which indicates that dravidal languages ​​were first widespread in the region before they were displaced by the arrival of the Aryans in the north.

The challenges of decryption

The debate about the writing and its meaning remains controversial, and in a ted-talk from 2011 reported Rao von Hassbriefen, which he received after the publication of some of his results. Other researchers, including Steve Farmer, who, together with his colleagues, surprised the academic world in 2004 by claiming that the Indus script was not a language, but was only a collection of symbols like the one that we see today on traffic signs.

methods for decrypting the Indus script

Despite these tensions, the Scriptures have long fascinated the research community and amateur enthusiasts, with some devoted their careers to the riddle. Some, such as Parpola - one of the most renowned experts in this area - have tried to find out the importance of certain signs. He suggests that the words for "fish" and "star" sound similar in many dravidal languages ​​and were often used to present deities in other old writings-so that Indus symbols that resemble fish could represent gods.

Other researchers, such as Rao and Yadav, focus more on finding patterns within the writing. To do this, train computer programs to analyze a sequence of characters and then remove certain characters until the computer can precisely predict which missing symbols are available. This procedure helps to understand patterns in the functionality of the writing and can help fill gaps in artifacts with damaged or missing signs.

Thanks to these common patterns, you can even identify sequences that do not follow the rules. Yadav referred to Siegel from West Asia, far from the Indus valley; As they used the same indus signs, they followed completely other patterns, which indicates that the script has developed to be used in different languages-similar to the Latin alphabet.

The interest of the general public

Then there are average citizens who are fans of the puzzle and want to try to solve it themselves. With the announcement of the 1 million-US-dollar bonus-although there is no clear information about where you can apply-amateurs flock to the experts in order to tell you your theories eagerly. "I used to receive about one or two emails a week. But now after the premium has been advertised, I get emails almost every day," reported Rao. These come from different people from all over the world who write in different languages ​​- even entire families work together.

After working on this topic for so many years, Rao commutes between optimism and resignation. Every further breakthrough would need international, interdisciplinary cooperation, massive financing and even political negotiations to enable excavations in border areas that are controversial between India and Pakistan. But he stays hopeful on good days. Yadav, who has been enthusiastic about the civilization of the Indus Valley since fourth grade, also feels attracted to the challenge. Even without the promise of a solution, the beauty of the task withdraws it year after year. "I look forward to working on this problem every day," she said. "If we decipher the font, a window opens in the way of life and ideology of the Indus people. We will learn a lot about our ancestors ... what they thought, what they were focused on." These details are "simply hidden" today, added. "That keeps me more tied up than anything else."

cnns aishwarya s iyer contributed to this report.