Mysterious symbols: $1 million prize to unlock secrets of Indus Valley script

Proceeding from a latest article, CNN features that some cryptic symbols, part of an ancient script from the mysterious Indus Valley civilization, have baffled researchers for over a century. Now, with a $1 million prize on the line, the race to decode this unsolved puzzle has heated up.

Symbols such as "a fish beneath a roof," "a headless stick figure," and "a set of lines resembling a garden rake" are part of an ancient, undecoded script from the Indus Valley civilization. These enigmatic characters continue to puzzle researchers and have sparked intense debates, even leading to death threats against scholars and offering cash rewards for a breakthrough.

The most recent incentive comes from the chief minister of an Indian state, who announced a prize of $1 million to anyone who can crack the script of the Indus Valley civilization, which once thrived in what is now Pakistan and northern India.

“A really important question about the pre-history of South Asia could potentially be settled if we are able to completely decipher the script,” said Rajesh P. N. Rao, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, who has been working on the script for over a decade.

Decoding the script could unveil crucial details about a Bronze Age civilization thought to rival the likes of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Some believe that the Indus Valley civilization was home to millions of people, with cities designed with advanced urban planning, standardized measurements, and an extensive trade network.

However, cracking the script could be more than just an archaeological breakthrough—it could help answer politically charged questions about the identity of the Indus Valley people and their descendants, an issue central to the ongoing debate about the origins of modern India and its indigenous populations.

“Whichever group is trying to claim that civilization would get to claim that they were among the first to have urban planning, this amazing trade, and they were navigating seas to do global trade,” Rao said. “It has a lot of cachet if you can claim that, ‘Those were our people who were doing that.’”

While the script has remained unsolved since it was first published in 1875, ongoing archaeological excavations of key cities like Mohenjo-daro, located in Pakistan’s Sindh province, have provided insight into the culture. These cities were planned with a grid system similar to modern cities like New York and Barcelona and featured groundbreaking drainage and water management systems—an innovation “unparalleled in history,” according to one study.

Between the second and third millennia BC, Indus merchants traded goods such as copper, pearls, spices, and ivory across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. The civilization also produced gold and silver jewelry, built distant settlements, and established colonies. But by around 1800 BC—over 1,000 years before Rome’s rise—the civilization collapsed, likely due to factors like climate change, including prolonged droughts and erratic rainfall, which devastated agriculture.

Despite the archaeological advancements, what we know about the Indus Valley is still limited compared to the wealth of information available about its contemporaries, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Maya. The primary obstacle to unlocking the mysteries of the civilization is the undeciphered script found on various artifacts, including pottery and stone seals.

Several factors make decoding the script especially difficult. For one, there are only about 4,000 known inscriptions, compared to an estimated 5 million words from ancient Egyptian. Additionally, many of these relics are small, with stone seals measuring just one square inch and inscriptions typically consisting of only four or five symbols.

Another major challenge is the lack of bilingual artifacts that might help in translating the script, much like the Rosetta Stone did for ancient Egyptian and Greek. Without these, researchers are left with no names of recognized rulers or known historical events that could offer vital clues, similar to how the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy aided in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Despite these challenges, some aspects of the script are generally agreed upon by experts. It is widely believed that the script was written from right to left, and many scholars suspect it was used for both religious and economic purposes, such as marking goods for trade. Additionally, some interpretations of the symbols have gained broader acceptance, such as a headless stick figure representing a person.

As the search for answers continues, the mystery of the Indus Valley script persists, with both scholars and the public eagerly awaiting the breakthrough that could reveal the long-lost language of one of the world’s most advanced ancient civilizations.

By Naila Huseynova