Officials Are Offering $1 Million to Anyone Who Can Decode This Ancient Script

More than 5,300 years ago, a civilization emerged along the lush basins of the Indus River in present-day northwest India and Pakistan. Its residents, mostly farmers and traders, lived in cities of baked brick, making it one of the world’s earliest urban civilizations.

But around 2500 B.C.E., residents migrated away from big cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro—with estimated peak populations of 80,000 residents combined—and dispersed into smaller villages in the foothills of the Himalayas. Eventually, the Indus Valley civilization faded away.

It left behind artifacts and archaeological sites that have kept scholars busy for centuries—many featuring a mysterious script that nobody has been able to read. “The reason behind its demise remains a mystery, as do the rules and beliefs of the society, all possibly locked behind their yet-to-be deciphered language,” as Regina Sienra writes for My Modern Met.

To encourage the decipherment of the ancient Indus script, the government of Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, announced a massive cash prize for anyone—scholar or amateur—who can crack the code and begin the process of better understanding the enigmatic Indus Valley civilization.

“We have not been able to clearly understand the writing system of the once flourishing Indus Valley,” says M.K. Stalin, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, according to Divya Chandrababu of the Hindustan Times. “The riddle hasn’t been answered for the past 100 years despite several efforts by archaeologists and experts. I announce a cash prize of $1 million to individuals or organizations that decipher the script to the satisfaction of archaeological experts.”

Stalin’s announcement comes on the heels of a recent archaeological study that suggests similarities between the mysterious Indus script and ancient graffiti in Tamil Nadu, on the other side of the country.

In the study, K. Rajan, an archaeologist at Pondicherry University, and R. Sivananthan, the deputy director of the state’s archaeological department, digitized 15,000 graffiti-marked pot shards from 140 archaeological sites in Tamil Nadu and compared them against 4,000 examples of the Indus Valley script. They found that nearly 60 percent of the signs matched and 90 percent shared “parallels,” according to Arun Janardhanan of the Indian Express.

While the study could indicate cultural contact or shed light on the migration of the Indus people across modern-day India, the authors emphasized that their study took a “morphological approach,” rather than a linguistic one. That is, aside from stirring up Tamil Nadu’s interest in the far-flung Indus Valley, it hasn’t brought archaeologists any closer to deciphering the million-dollar script.

The Indus script is especially perplexing because it tends to occur in short inscriptions, usually around five symbols long, according to Artnet’s Min Chen. The absence of a bilingual artifact like the Rosetta Stone only exacerbates the difficulty.

That hasn’t stopped amateurs from giving it their best shot, even before Stalin’s $1 million incentive.

Rajesh P.N. Rao, a computer scientist at the University of Washington who studies the Indus script, tells Soutik Biswas of BBC News that he receives emails every week from enthusiasts who claim “they’ve solved it and that the ‘case is closed.’”

But the case is not closed, and Rao thinks that previous efforts to infuse the script with spiritual and religious meaning ignore the fact that the script has mostly been found on objects of commerce, according to BBC News. The typical layout includes signs running across the top of a seal with an animal figure underneath.

Scholars like Rao have increasingly turned to computer science and machine learning tools to identify patterns in the arrangement of these signs and symbols.

Using a data set of Indus signs, for instance, Nisha Yadav, a computer scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, determined that 67 signs account for about 80 percent of the written script.

“We still don’t know whether the signs are complete words, or part of words or part of sentences,” Yadav tells BBC News. “Our understanding is that the script is structured and there is an underlying logic in the writing.”

Still, the $1 million meaning of the signs and symbols remains elusive.

“What did the Indus people write?” Yadav adds. “I wish we knew.”