The Indus Valley civilization was one of the most in advance in the world for over 500 years . More than 1000 settlements sprawl across 250,000 substantial nautical mile of what is now Pakistan and northwest India from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE . It had several big , well - plan cities likeMohenjo - daro , common iconography , and a script no one has beenable to understand .
Linguists studying the Indus script do n’t know anything about the underlie language and there ’s no multilingualRosetta Stone , but student have analyzed its structure for clues and compared it to other scripts . Most Indologists think it ’s “ logo - syllabic ” script like Sumerian cuneiform orMayanglyphs . But they disaccord about whether it was a spokenlanguageor a full committal to writing system ; some conceive it represent only part of an Indus speech .
One team has create the first publicly uncommitted , electroniccorpusof Indus texts . Another , pass by computer scientist Rajesh Rao , analyzed the randomness in the hand ’s sequences [ PDF ] . Their results designate it ’s most interchangeable to Sumerian cuneiform , which suggests it may typify a voice communication .
The Indus Valley handwriting is far from the only one to remain cryptic . Here are eight others you might try your hand at deciphering .
Linear A
In 1893 , British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans buy some ancient stones with mysterious inscriptions on them at a flea marketplace in Athens . On a ulterior misstep to the archeological site at Knossos on the island of Crete , he recognized one of the symbol from his stones and start a study of the engraved tablets being uncovered at various sites on the island . He find out two different systems , which he name Linear A and Linear B. The latter was trace in the early fifties ( it turned out to represent an early form of Greek ) , while Linear A has stillnot been trace .
Cretan Hieroglyphics
The excavations on Crete also revealed athird typeof composition system , with symbol that attend more picture - the likes of than those of the linear scripts . Some of these symbols are similar to elements in Linear A. It is seize that the hieroglyphical script get into Linear A , though the two systems were both in utilization during the same time period .
Wadi el-Hol Script
In the nineties , a pair of Yale archaeologistsdiscovereda graffiti - covered cliff wall at the Wadi el - Hol ( Gulch of Terror ) in Egypt . Most of the inscriptions were in systems they could recognize , but one of them was unfamiliar . It look like an early passage from ahieroglyphicto an alphabetical system , but it has n’t yet been deciphered .
Sitovo Inscription
In 1928 a group of woodcutters found some markings carved into a Bulgarian cliffside . They think the marks indicate hidden treasure , but none was found . Still , Word catch around and soon some archaeologists had a looking .
after , the point of the expedition was executed for being a hush-hush agent for the Soviets in Bulgaria , and one of the pieces of grounds used against him was a foreign coded substance he had sent to Kiev — actually a written matter of the cliffside inscription he had sent to colleagues for scholarly comment . It is not clear what language the lettering represents . Thracian , Celtic , Sarmato - Alanian , and Slavic are some of the theory scholars have argued for , while others have suggested is that it ’s simply a natural rock shaping .
Olmec Writing
The Olmec were an ancient Mexican civilisation best roll in the hay for the statues they left behind : the so - called “ colossal head . ” In 1999 , their piece of writing system was disclose when route builders unearthed an engraved stone tablet . The tablet shows 62 symbols ; some look like corn or bugs , and some are more abstractionist . It has been dated to 900 BCE , which makes it theoldest exampleof writing in the Western Hemisphere .
Singapore Stone
Agiant engraved slabmade of sandstone had lain at the mouth of the Singapore River for 700 years or so when , in 1819 , workers expose it while clearing away woodland . A few bookman got a looking at it before it was fellate to act to make distance for a British fort . The parts that did n’t end up in the river were eventually used for route paving , though some fragments were saved . The script has n’t been decrypt , but there have been various suggestions for what language it might defend : ancient Ceylonese , Tamil , Kawi , Old Javanese , or Sanskrit .
Rongorongo
When missionaries arrived in Easter Island in the 1860s , they foundwooden tabletscarved with symbolic representation . They asked the Rapa Nui what the inscriptions meant , and were told that nobody know any longer , since Peruvian encroacher had pour down all the wise valet . The Rapa Nui used the tablets as firewood or sportfishing reels , and by the end of the 19th century they were near all gone . Rongorongo is written in alternate directions ; you show a bank line from left to right , then sour the lozenge 180 degrees and read the next line .
Proto-Elamite
This ancient authorship system was used more than 5000 year ago in what is now Iran . Written from right to go forth , the script is unlike any other ancient handwriting ; while the proto - Elamites come along to have borrowed the musical theme for a written words from their Mesopotamian contemporary , they apparently invented their own symbols — and did n’t nark to keep caterpillar track of them in an unionised elbow room , expert Jacob Dahl state theBBCin 2012 . Around that time , he and his Oxford fellow asked for help from the world in deciphering proto - Elamite . They turn high - quality paradigm of clay tablets treat in the symbols , hoping that crowdsourcing could decipher them , and the movement is on-going .
Read More Fascinating Stories About Language :
A variation of this story was issue in 2015 ; it has been updated for 2025 .
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