Outspoken Science

Will Computer Unlock the Mystery of 4000 Year Old Indus Valley Script?

Posted on August 4, 2009 with No Comments

Indus valley is one of the most important urban civilizations under research till date for its mysterious scripts. Archaeologists believe that Indus Valley was the beginning of Indian civilization that flourished around 2600 to 1900 B.C. in the area that is border of modern Pakistan and India. It was discovered in 1922 and since then a lot of work has been done on analyzing the language, but still that mysterious language of one of the earliest civilizations is an unbroken code.

The Mysterious Script of Indus Valley

The Mysterious Language:

The records of their language have been found on seals, small pieces of soft stones and on copper tablets. It is also proved that Harappans (that age was called Harappan Age) sailed to far countries for trading purposes as their seals have been recovered in Mesopotamia civilization that is Modern Iraq.

Around 400 different signs have been used in the language with the average length of text to 5 signs, while the longest text is of 14 signs.

According to some experts this language belongs to Dravidian family and it is logo-syllabic, but some think that these signs are just pictogram of political or religious icons instead of a language.

Latest Research on this Mystery:

A team of Indian and American scientist and archeologists are now using mathematics and computer science to break the mysterious code. The project is being funded by Packard Foundation, Sir Jamsedji Tata Trust, University of Washington and the Indus Research Center.

The study shows distinct patterns in the symbols’ placement in sequences and creates a statistical model for the unknown language.

According to Rajesh Rao, Associate professor of computer science at University of Washington:

“The statistical model provides insights into the underlying grammatical structure of the Indus script. Such a model can be valuable for decipherment, because any meaning ascribed to a symbol must make sense in the context of other symbols that precede or follow it.”

They are actually working on recognizing the mathematical patterns in the sequence of symbols. Calculations show that the order of symbols is meaningful; taking one symbol from a sequence found on an artifact and changing its position produces a new sequence that has a much lower probability of belonging to the hypothetical language.

Till now they are sure that this script is a language and there is a clear underlying logic in Indus Script.

As it is previously discussed that their seals have been recovered in Mesopotamia civilization in Modern Iraq it is sure that they used to trade with these civilizations and hence it is a firm belief that the language is not just a religious or political symbol, but a mode of representing different information in West Asia by Indus traders.

Rao says:

“The finding that the Indus script may have been versatile enough to represent different subject matter in West Asia is provocative. This finding is hard to reconcile with the claim that the script merely represents religious or political symbols.”

Markov Model of Research:

The researchers have used Markov statistical model that estimates the likelihood of a future event based on patterns seen in the past. It was developed a century ago by Andrey Markov, a Russian mathematician and is used in economics, genetics, speech-recognition and many other fields.

Researcher have used statistical model to fill missing symbols on damaged archeological artifacts. This will increase the pool of data available for encoding the scripts of that ancient civilization.

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