Indian Governor Offers $1 Million to Anyone Who Can Decipher This 5,300-year-old Writing System

January 24, 2025 journo

An Indian state governor has offered a $1 million reward to anyone who can prove definitively they’ve deciphered the script of the Indus Valley Civilization.

One of the oldest urban societies in history, the Indus Valley, or Harappan people began building settlements in the Indus River Valley in Pakistan/India 5,500 years ago.

They left behind a script and language that have yet to be deciphered, and M.K. Stalin, the Chief Minister (equivalent to a US governor) of Tamil Nadu, has offered a massive bounty to any codebreakers who are able to do so.

Mr. Stalin announced the prize after a recent scientific publication linked a variety of graffiti marks found on ancient Tamil pottery to the Harappan script, and believes there may be a connection with these two ancient lands.

If there were, it would be almost as remarkable a discovery as the ability to read the various seal stamps and symbols on Harappan artifacts, as Tamil Nadu is the southernmost state on the Indian subcontinent, thousands of miles away from the Harappan heartland.

Numerous efforts by linguistic scholars have been made to try and gain some understanding of how to read the language, but all have failed. According to the BBC, many modern IT workers and AI pioneers are contacting the government of Tamil Nadu claiming they have cracked to code, so to speak, but scholars are doubtful machine learning and algorithms alone can make any headway.

The total research base is around 4,000 inscribed or stamped artifacts of pottery, sandstone, and copper, consisting of around 68 symbols. Most of these bear only very brief inscriptions—between 5-6 characters—with the single longest measuring 34 symbols.

Does this brevity mean the Harappan script is logographic such as Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphics? Some have attempted to link Harappan to Sumerian, or even more obscure writing systems like proto-Elamite, but according to scholars publishing around the turn of the 21st century, there’s as yet no substantial connection between Harappan and anything else.

This isn’t necessarily unusual in history, as many societies invented their own writing systems, and researchers would probably be happy to grant that the Harappans did the same. It’s just that, without any translatory document, such as the famous Rosetta Stone, granting that means accepting that there’s no way to read it at this time; and where’s the fun in that?

Throughout the history of linguistics, scholars have often had to try and figure out whether ancient writing systems were printed versions corresponding to the spoken lingua franca of the society, or were purely writing systems.

All these questions and more face any intrepid techies, archaeologists, and scholars who want to try and grab that $1 million prize, as well as the honor of solving one of the biggest outstanding mysteries in human communication.

Cash prizes, ancient documents, and artificial intelligence featured in the news last year when a Silicon Valley tech entreprenuer offered $750,000 to anyone who could figure out how to decipher carbonized scrolls from a library in the Roman city of Pompeii. Burid under mountains of ash and pummis, they were preserved, but any attempt to unroll them resulted in instant dissolving of the documents.

ON THE TOPIC OF LANGUAGES: Teacher Finds ‘Amazing’ Stone Carved With Ancient Celtic Script While Digging in His Garden

A trio of young students shared the reward for achieving different degrees of success in somehow identifying the written Greek from the burnt papyrus.

A separate linguistic team studying the decoded texts provide this sentence—from an Epicurean philosopher writing almost 2,000 years ago: “…as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.”

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