By New York Post (World News) | Created at 2025-01-25 00:45:06 | Updated at 2025-01-26 07:29:12
1 day ago
Indiana Jones wannabes, your time has come.
A local government in India is offering a $1 million prize to the first person who cracks the code of an ancient script found in the ruins of one of the world’s earliest civilizations.
The writing was discovered on pottery and tablets from an Indus Valley civilization called the Harappan, which declined suddenly and disappeared without an traceable evidence of war, famine or natural disaster.
A local government in India has offered a top prize of $1 million to the first person who can crack the code of an ancient script found in the ruins of the Indus Valley civilization known as Harappan. De Agostini via Getty ImagesEvidence of the society was discovered more than a century ago in present-day northwest India and Pakistan, but archaelogists are baffled as to its writings.
MK Stalin, chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadum where the writings were found, recently announced that $1 million pot will be given to the first person who cracks the code, according to the BBC.
“”The Indus script is perhaps the most important system of writing that is undeciphered,” said Asko Parpola, a leading Indologist, to the outlet.
Rajesh Rao, a computer scientist and Indus script scholar, says he receives emails every week from people claiming they’ve figured out the ancient script.
According to Rao, most of these attempts rely on theories that the script has magical and spiritual meanings, ignoring that it mostly appears on stone seals used for trade or commerce.
Rao and other computer scientists are beginning to use computer science to build machine learning scripts to analyze ancient languages and try to find meaning in them.
