$1 million prize for decrypting an ancient script

$1 million prize for decrypting an ancient script

A fish under one roof. A headless stick figure. A series of lines that look like a garden rake. These symbols belong to a fully deciphered script of an advanced civilization that existed thousands of years ago. They represent an unsolved mystery that has sparked heated debates, threats against researchers and cash rewards to reward the long-awaited decryption.

A challenge for scientists

The latest bounty was offered last month by a chief minister of an Indian state: $1 million to anyone who can decipher the script of the Indus Civilization, which spanned the area that now includes Pakistan and northern India. "A really important question about South Asian prehistory could potentially be solved if we can fully decipher the script," 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 into the Bronze Age

If deciphered, the writing could provide insight into an advanced Bronze Age civilization that may have rivaled ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Some estimates suggest that this sprawling civilization was home to millions of people whose cities boasted advanced urban planning, standardized weights and measures, and extensive trade routes. Crucially, deciphering the script could also answer fundamental questions about the Indus Valley people and their descendants - a politically charged issue that concerns the controversial origins of modern India and its indigenous people.

The complexity of decryption

Although the writing remains unsolved since the earliest samples were published in 1875, we know something about the Indus Civilization itself - thanks archaeological excavations important cities like Mohenjo-daro, which is located in present-day Pakistani Sindh. These cities were laid out on a grid system, similar to New York City or Barcelona, ​​and had sewage and water management systems that were "unparalleled in history" at the time.

Trade relations of the Indus Civilization

During the second and third millennia B.C. In the 4th century BC, Indus traders traded with peoples in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. Their ships brought copper ingots, pearls, spices and ivory. They made gold and silver jewelry and founded distant settlements and colonies. Finally, around 1800 B.C. In the 4th century BC - still over 1,000 years before the founding of ancient Rome - civilization collapsed and people moved to smaller villages. Some believe that climate change was the driving factor Prove for long periods of drought and variable temperatures that may have severely affected agriculture in recent centuries.

The characteristics of the Indus script

However, what we know about the Indus Civilization is limited compared to the wealth of information about its contemporaries, such as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Maya. This is due in large part to the undeciphered writing found on artifacts such as ceramics and stone seals. There are several reasons why decryption is so difficult. First, there aren't many artifacts to analyze - archaeologists have only found about 4,000 inscriptions, compared to an estimated 5 million words in the ancient Egyptian language, including hieroglyphs and other variants.

The mystery of the Indus symbols

Many of these Indus relics are very small, often stone seals measuring only one square inch. The writing on them is therefore short, with most strings containing only four or five symbols. The crucial point is that there is currently no bilingual artifact that contains both the Indus script and its translation into another language, as is the case with the Rosetta Stone for ancient Egypt and ancient Greek. Also missing are clues such as the names of well-known rulers of the Indus Civilization that could help crack the script - just as the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy helped decipher ancient Egypt.

Controversial theories about the Indus civilization

For some people, solving Scripture isn't just about intellectual curiosity or academic study - it's a high-stakes existential question. This is because they believe it could resolve the controversy over the identity of the Indus people and the direction of migration, to or from India. There are two main groups vying for membership in the Indus Civilization. One group argues that the script has connections to Indo-European languages ​​such as ancient Sanskrit, which gave rise to many languages ​​spoken in northern India today.

The rivalry of theories

Most scholars believe that Aryan migrants from Central Asia brought Indo-European languages ​​to India. But this group claims it was the other way around - that Sanskrit and its relatives originated in the Indus Civilization and spread to Europe. Rao describes her claim: "Everything was already in India to begin with... Nothing came from outside." A second group believes that the script is linked to the Dravidian language family, now spoken primarily in southern India - suggesting that Dravidian languages ​​were first widespread in the region before being displaced by the arrival of the Aryans in the north.

The challenges of decryption

The debate over Scripture and its meaning remains contentious, and in one TED talk in 2011, Rao reported hate mail he received after publishing some of his results. Other researchers, including Steve Farmer, who along with his colleagues surprised the academic world in 2004 by claiming that the Indus script did not constitute a language but was simply a collection of symbols like those we see on road signs today.

Methods for deciphering the Indus script

Despite these tensions, writing has long fascinated the research community and amateur enthusiasts, with some devoting their careers to the puzzle. Some, like Parpola - one of the most renowned experts in the field - have tried to figure out the meaning of certain characters. He suggests that in many Dravidian languages ​​the words for "fish" and "star" sound similar, and stars were often used to represent deities in other ancient writings - so Indus symbols resembling fish could represent gods.

Other researchers, like Rao and Yadav, focus more on finding patterns within writing. To do this, they train computer programs to analyze a sequence of characters and then remove certain characters until the computer can accurately predict which symbols are missing. This approach helps to understand patterns in the way writing works and can help fill in gaps in artifacts with damaged or missing characters.

Thanks to these common patterns, you can even identify sequences that don't follow the rules. Yadav pointed to seals from western Asia, far from the Indus Valley; While they used the same Indus characters, they followed entirely different patterns, suggesting that the script evolved to be used in different languages ​​- similar to the Latin alphabet.

The interest of the general public

Then there are the average citizens who are fans of the puzzle and want to try to solve it themselves. With the announcement of the $1 million award - although there is no clear information on where to apply for it - amateurs flocked to the experts, eager to share their theories. "I used to get about one or two emails a week. But now, after the reward has been announced, I get emails almost every day," Rao said. These come from different people from all over the world who write in different languages ​​- even entire families work on them together.

After working on this topic for so many years, Rao oscillates between optimism and resignation. Any further breakthrough would require international, interdisciplinary collaboration, massive funding and even political negotiations to enable excavations in border areas disputed between India and Pakistan. But on good days he remains hopeful. Yadav, who has been passionate about the Indus Valley civilization since fourth grade, is also drawn to the challenge. Even without the promise of a solution, the beauty of the task draws her back year after year. “I look forward to working on this issue every day,” she said. "If we decipher the writing, it will open a window into 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 now “just hidden,” she added. “That keeps me tied to the problem more than anything else.”

CNN's Aishwarya S Iyer contributed to this report.