How researchers are using AI to analyze the undeciphered ancient script of the Indus Valley Civilization, and the challenges of deciphering long-lost languages
Scholars have spent a century trying to decipher ancient Indus script. Machine learning may finally help make sense of it all.
Rest of WorldAlizeh Kohari
Context & Ripple Effects
A century of manual effort has left the Indus script undeciphered, and this piece lands mid-way through a string of machine-learning breakthroughs in exactly this field. DeepMind's Ithaca model showed AI could restore missing text from ancient Greek inscriptions and even suggest where and when they were written; since then, researchers used AI to read the Herculaneum papyri charred by Vesuvius, and a student won a contest reading a carbonized Roman scroll with an ML algorithm.
First-order effects
Indus scholars gain a computational tool for testing sign-sequence hypotheses against a corpus that has resisted human decipherment for a hundred years, shifting the work from individual epigraphers' intuitions toward model-assisted analysis.
Second-order effects
Each success elsewhere — the Herculaneum readings, the Roman scroll contest, Fragmentarium's AI assembly of Gilgamesh tablet fragments — raises pressure on museums and archives to digitize their corpora, because high-quality scans become the raw material every decipherment attempt depends on.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, decipherment consolidates around teams that pair domain experts with ML pipelines, while the same digital-preservation infrastructure — seen in the decade-long push to bring the Tulu script into Unicode and in speech models built for over 200 endangered Indigenous languages — extends to long-dead writing systems as well.
The trend: Ancient-language decipherment is becoming a machine-learning discipline, with each success — Greek inscriptions, the Herculaneum papyri, now the Indus script — pulling more undeciphered corpora into computational analysis.
Researchers feed their algorithm chunks of text in a lost language and in a known related language. Its job is to align words from the lost language with their counterparts in the known language, thus deciphering an ancient mystery https://restofworld.org/...
We know little about the original people of the Indus Valley, who at one point constituted nearly 10% of the world's inhabitants. Esp given how much more we know about their contemporaries, such as the people of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations https://restofworld.org/…
How might AI help decode the ancient Indus script, left to us in 4,000 excavated inscriptions that have puzzled scholars for the past century? Learn more about the relationship between technology and deciphering “long-lost” languages:https://restofworld.org/ ...
In 2019, Luo made headlines when, working with a team of fellow MIT researchers, he brought his machine-learning expertise to the decipherment of ancient scripts. https://restofworld.org/...
If the Indus script were alpha syllabary, AI would be suitable. But the inscriptions are pictorial. “You have to understand historical symbolism in India. How will AI tackle that? How would AI know these symbols represent the fragments of Horus' eye?” https://restofworld.org/...
“A machine understands one, two, three very well. Two plus two equals four, yes. (...) But that this sunset here looks like a beautiful flame — well, it is this sort of abstraction that holds the key to this script.” Fascinating read @restofworld https://restofworld.org/...
The Interactive Corpus of Indus Texts (ICIT) contains data & info about 4,537 inscribed artifacts, 5,509 texts & 19,616 sign occurrences on 707 unique Sindhu-Sarasvati Civiliz seals/symbols. Can AI decode them? Read here of some attempts. https://restofworld.org/... via @restofwo…
An ancient language has defied translation for over a century. Can AI crack the code? Today's feature story from @alizehkohari, with illustrations by @sad_folder and photos by @tim_dunk, is about the researchers trying to decipher the Indus script https://restofworld.org/... http…
Scholars have spent a century trying to decipher ancient Indus script. Machine learning may finally help make sense of it all. https://novalanguages.com/...
Never miss a piece by @AlizehKohari, and especially this exploration of history, linguistics, and technology that asks the question: Can machine learning crack undeciphered scripts? For @restofworld: https://restofworld.org/...
Could machine learning assist researchers in their quests to undeciphered languages, like the Indus script? What historical secrets might be unlocked as a result? https://restofworld.org/... https://twitter.com/...