Million Dollar Challenge to Break the Text of the Early Indians

Every week, Rajesh B. N. Rao, a computer scientist, receives emails from people claiming to have cracked an ancient text that has puzzled scientists for generations.

These self-styled “code-breakers” – who range from engineers and IT workers to retirees and tax officials – are mostly from India or of Indian origin living abroad. They are all convinced that they have deciphered the Indus Valley Civilization script, which is a mixture of signs and symbols.

“They claim that they have solved the problem and that the case is closed,” says Mr. Rao, the Hwang Professor at the University of Washington and the author of peer-reviewed studies on the Indus Text.

To add fuel to the race, MK Stalin, the chief minister of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, recently upped the stakes, announcing a $1 million prize for anyone who can crack the code.

The Indus, or Harappan, civilization, one of the world's oldest urban societies, emerged 5,300 years ago in present-day northwestern India and Pakistan. Its Spartan farmers and merchants, living in brick walled cities, flourished for centuries. Since its discovery a century ago, about 2,000 sites have been discovered across the region.

The reasons behind society's sudden decline remain unclear, with no clear evidence of war, famine or natural disaster. But its greatest secret is its undeciphered text, leaving its language, wisdom, and beliefs shrouded in secrecy.

For more than a century, experts — linguists, scholars, and archaeologists — have tried to decipher the script of the Indus. Early theories have linked it Brahmi manuscriptsDravidian and Indo-Aryan languages, SumerianHe even claimed that it was composed of political or religious symbols only.

However, its secrets remain locked. “The Hindi script is perhaps the most important writing system that has not been deciphered,” says Asko Parpola, a prominent Indologist.

These days, the most popular astonishing theories equate the text with content from Hindu scriptures and attribute spiritual and magical meanings to the inscriptions.

Most of these attempts ignore that the text, made up of signs and symbols, appears mostly on stone seals used in trade and commerce, making it unlikely to contain religious or mythological content, according to Mr. Rao.

There are many challenges to deciphering the Indus script.

First, the relatively small number of scripts – about 4,000 of them, almost all of them written on small objects such as seals, pottery and tablets.

Then there is the abbreviation of each text – averaging about five signs or symbols in length – with no long texts on walls, panels or straight stone slabs.

Consider the common square seals: lines of marks running along their top, with a central animal drawing – often a unicorn – and an object beside it, the meaning of which remains unknown.

There is also no such bilingual artifact Rosetta StoneWhich helped scientists decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. These artefacts contain bilingual text, providing a direct comparison between known and unknown text.

Recent advances in deciphering the Indus River script have used computer science to solve this ancient mystery. The researchers used machine learning techniques to analyze the text, trying to identify patterns and structures that could lead to its understanding.

Nisha Yadav, a researcher at the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), is one of them. In collaboration with scholars such as Mr. Rao, her work has focused on applying statistical and computational methods to analyze unencrypted text.

Using a digital dataset of Sindh signs from the text, they found interesting patterns. Caveat: “We still don't know whether the tags are whole words, fragments of words or parts of sentences,” says Ms. Yadav.

Ms. Yadav and co-researchers found 67 marks representing 80% of the writing on the text. The sign resembling a jar with two handles turned out to be the most commonly used sign. Also, the texts began with a large number of signs and ended with a smaller number. Some signal patterns appear more often than expected.

A text machine learning model has also been created to recover illegible and corrupted texts, paving the way for further research.

“What we understand is that the text is structured and that there is an underlying logic to the writing,” says Ms. Yadav.

To be sure, many ancient scripts remain undeciphered, and face similar challenges to Sindhi writing.

Mr. Rao cites texts such as Proto-Elamite (Iran), Linear A (Crete), and Etruscan (Italy), and its primary language is unknown.

Others, such as news (Easter Island) and Zapotec (Mexico), they have well-known languages, “but their symbols remain unclear.” The Phaistos Tablet from Crete – a mysterious baked clay tablet from the Minoan civilization – “closely reflects the challenges of the Indus script – its language is unknown, and only one known example exists.”

Back in India, it is not entirely clear why Stalin of Tamil Nadu announced a reward for deciphering the text. His announcement came on the heels of a new study linking Indus Valley banners to graffiti found in his state.

Rajan and R Sivananthan analyzed more than 14,000 pottery items bearing inscriptions from 140 excavated sites in Tamil Nadu, which included more than 2,000 marks. The researchers claim that many of these marks are very similar to those found in the Indus script, with 60% of the marks matching, and more than 90% of graffiti marks in southern India have “similarities” to those found in the Indus civilisation.

Rajan and Sivananthan say this “suggests some kind of cultural contact” between the Indus Valley and southern India.

Many believe that Stalin's move to announce the award positions him as a staunch champion of Tamil heritage and culture, in the face of Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules Delhi.

But researchers are confident that there will not be any candidates for the Stalin Prize soon. Scientists have compiled complete, up-to-date databases of all known inscribed artifacts – essential for deciphering the codes. “But what did the people of Sindh write? I wish we knew that,” says Ms. Yadav.