Though we now have thousands of examples of these symbols, we have very little idea what they mean. Over a century after Cunningham’s discovery, the seals remain undeciphered, their messages lost to us. Are they the letters of an ancient language? Or are they just religious, familial, or political symbols? Those hotly contested questions have sparked infighting among scholars and exacerbated cultural rivalries over who can claim the script as their heritage. But new work from researchers using sophisticated algorithms, machine learning, and even cognitive science are finally helping push us to the edge of cracking the Indus script.
The Indus Valley Civilization and the mysteries that surround it are deeply fascinating. It was contemporary to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, yet we know relatively little about it. It honestly blows my mind that computers can now be used to decipher its ancient script, which may give us a lot of insight into this civilisation.
Like in programming, language is key.
It sounds like people are willing to go to actual war based on some racist idea that the “true descendants” of the Indus Valley Culture should own modern day India.
Yeah. While most likely, all current day peoples are “invaders” one way or another.
Well, unless I am wildly mistaken we are all ultimately african immigrants, though the first waves arrived quite some time ago.
Well, Native Americans / First Nations are immigrants from Asia, those from European desent immigrants from Europe. Ultimately we are all immigrants from Africa, but there’s never been immigration directly from Africa, until the Europeans started transporting African slaves.
The slave trade on the arab peninsula existed long before any sub saharan slaves ever was taken by europeans.
Sorry, I was talking specifically about immigrants to the Americas, should’ve clarified that.
What are they going to do if it turns out the information system is largely independent of language?
An article about languages and computers!
Tom, you must be in heaven
I’m in heaven about that, also! ;^)
I’m quite curious why Mr. Farmers viewpoints are so heavily attacked by the professor Wells in the article.
I’m neither a linguist nor a statistician but the point that just because there is a statistical link between symbols it doesn’t mean it is representing a language seems to me quite reasonable ( especially given the fact that all epigrahps excavated up until now have been rather short )
I’d love to hear someone knowledgeable elaborate on this
I had the same thoughts as you. Obviously, it was a high-level article, and didn’t give us enough information to form an intelligent opinion one way or the other, but it was certainly thought-provoking.
I’ve always been interested in undeciphered scripts, and the Indus Valley civilization is intriguing for the reasons listed in the article – it was highly advanced, but apparently relatively peaceful.
My initial thoughts on the script favor the “name” idea – that the inscriptions are names, probably ownership seals. This would fit with the brevity, as well as the “conditional entropy”. And the different sequence patterns for different regions would be expected (assuming it’s phonetic), to account for local names.
Since anyone can play with analysis software, I wonder if any of the raw data are available to the (hobbyist) public.
I think your hypothesis is very interesting and it will likely be something in that direction.
But, I don’t know, it still feels lacking because it’s odd to me to write names in a script that is at least partly iconographic.
All in all, I think that the key to really get what we’re looking at is to have more information about the Indus civilisation itself but this can unfold into a catch 22 situation …
I’m not knowledgeable in this particular case, but in general there’s a lot of quackery around in linguistics, typically by people without any formal linguistic training. It’s on par with global warming denialists / creationists that have engineering degrees or are dentists instead of having studied the relevant fields.
In what direction do you beliee the quackery to be going?
Is the idea of the script representing a language quackery?
In general, if someone outside a certain scientific field claims that everyone in that scientific field got it all wrong, they’re a quack. Or at least misinformed. In this specific case, I (as a total layperson with regards to ancient scripts) have little doubt that someone who is established in the field is more knowledgeable than someone who isn’t. Unless others from inside the field back-up Mr. Farmer, I consider whatever he says as unauthorative.
Many of the most significant discoveries came from complete outsiders. Louis Pasteur was an industrial chemist. Alfred Russell Wallace was a surveyor. The structure of DNA was discovered by physicists. The modern concept of heat was discovered by a brewer (JP Joule) and Linear B script was deciphered by an architect.
They are the exception to the rule, and all from a long time ago.
The other aspects of this civilization are very compelling: they show minimal signs of class differentiation, their city layouts were highly advanced, their angular precision in construction and street layout was very impressive. So yes, this is a civilization I’d be very excited to be able to see the translated works of.
When farming was the High Tech of the World?
Speculating this because of the lack of Rosseta’s …
Looked similar to Futhark ! Viking runes !