Across the globe, a race is under way to crack some of the last mysterious forms of writing that have never been translated. Can new technology help scholars rewrite history?
locked. It is windowless and lit from above by a fluorescent bulb. In the hallway outside—two stories beneath the city of London—attendants in dark suits patrol silently, giving the scene an air of cinematic drama.
We’re in the downtown safety deposit center where the Iranian British art collector Kambiz Mahboubian, keeper of one of the world’s great troves of Near Eastern ancient art, houses some of his more precious pieces under lock and key. Sitting across from me at a small table, Mahboubian reaches gingerly into a green plastic shopping bag from Waitrose & Partners, the British supermarket chain. From it, he produces a silver beaker covered with friezes long ago hammered out in high relief. As he places the teakettle-size vessel on the table, I can see on it the image of a helmeted, barrel-chested man with a long, braided beard, his arms held outward in a gesture of devotion. Mahboubian motions for me to take a closer look. “Can I pick it up?” I ask him. “Of course,” he replies. Neat rows of engraved symbols wrap around the object—asterisks, triangles with antenna-like appendages, hatched diamonds, lightning bolts. As I hold the beaker to the light, I catch a slight tremble in my hands: The metal is so soft and pliable that I fear it will break apart in my fingers. The beaker dates to the Early Bronze Age, meaning the craftsman who meticulously scratched these symbols into silver did so roughly 4,300 years ago. What they all mean has been a riddle that’s baffled archaeologists and historians. For more than a century, linguists were baffled by a Bronze Age script called Linear Elamite, used by citizens of Elam, in what is present-day Iran. Then archaeologist François Desset, above in his office in Liège, Belgium, stepped in with a new idea.The characters belong to a system of writing called Linear Elamite, which took root between 2700 and 2300 B.C. in a powerful kingdom called Elam, in what is now southwestern Iran. The Elamite writing system endured for several hundred years before it was swept aside by another script and lost to history. Then, just over a century ago, French archaeologists excavating the Elamite capital of Susa discovered 19 inscriptions written in stone and clay. The long sequences of signs clearly meant something. But what? For decades, philologists studying the symbols in a quest to understand Linear Elamite made little progress for one big reason: The corpus of written material consisted of only about 40 inscriptions. The code-cracking researchers who piece together ancient languages generally rely on an abundance of symbols to spot repetitions, patterns, and sign clusters, the raw data that provide clues to grammar, syntax, names, and places.One such scholar who fell into the seemingly impossible mission of making sense of Linear Elamite was François Desset, a French archaeologist whose curiosity turned into a 20-year journey to decipher the writing system. His recent headline-making claims of success have both galvanized public attention and incited skeptics. They’ve also underscored the idea that we might be at a pivotal moment in the study of these ancient scripts. Today roughly a dozen forms of writing remain undeciphered. And a new generation of scholars has set forth, often with the aid of new technology, to reveal the last secrets of the ancients. Decipherers have used AI in recent years to locate archaeological sites, restore illegible texts, and analyze linguistic patterns to make inferences about grammar and vocabulary. But while AI has sped up the translations of languages and writings already known to a handful of scholars, the technology has yet to demonstrate the creativity needed to decode hitherto unknown scripts. Indeed, creativity is what Desset summoned when he set out to understand Linear Elamite. His first conclusion was that he needed to find more examples of the script. Around 2004, he heard about the Mahboubian collection—the stockpile of Near Eastern treasures that the family claims had initially been acquired by Mahboubian’s grandfather, a physician turned archaeologist named Benjamin Mahboubian. The collection included 10 silver vessels and fragments, known asdecorated with images and covered by Linear Elamite inscriptions. The family has long maintained that Benjamin Mahboubian uncovered the art himself in a tomb in Kamfiruz, in southwestern Iran. “He found them all in one place,” Kambiz Mahboubian told me, “and then he sent them all to Paris,” where they remained with relatives before making their way to London.But experts have challenged the authenticity of the kunanki. The family has no documents proving their provenance. The Mahboubians fled Tehran just before the toppling of the shah in 1979, and arrived in London, where they became prominent art dealers. Desset, eager to get his eyes on what he imagined to be Linear Elamite, reached out to the Mahboubians, who ignored his approaches for years. Then a British Museum curator they trusted made an introduction. In 2015, the kunanki, which had been stored in the London vault, were delivered by a security team to the home of Mahboubian’s sister, Roya, where Desset was at last permitted to inspect them. What Desset found amazed him. Laid out before him, he could see rows of symbols wrapping around beakers, cups, and fragments of broken vessels. He was elated as he snapped hundreds of photographs—documenting everything while suspecting he might never see the artifacts again. He told me that he thought, “Maybe this will be the last time; I should get all the information possible.” Desset says that the visit to Roya Mahboubian’s home had vastly increased the number of symbols available to him. And he hoped that among the symbols he might find the missing link he had yearned for—the break that would allow him to solve one of archaeology’s most vexing puzzles.and again, there are moments when history seems to lift its veil and the secrets of long-lost scripts are freshly revealed. In the early 1800s, the discovery of the famed Rosetta stone ignited a competition between Englishman Thomas Young and Frenchman Jean-François Champollion to decrypt Egyptian hieroglyphs, the sacred writing of the pharaohs. Three decades later, the excavation of 2,500-year-old riverside palaces in northern Iraq set off a race between the Victorian scholars Henry Rawlinson and Edward Hincks to understand Assyro-Babylonian. Their breakthroughs captivated millions, stirred patriotic fervor, and made accessible the science, medicine, history, mythology, and quotidian life of some of the ancient world’s greatest civilizations. Deciphering ancient writing reveals how people understood the world, organized their societies, and thought about love and death. The work reanimates the voices of kings and ordinary citizens alike, exposing dreams, insecurities, obsessions, and even humor. It makes the ancients human. And the scholarship under way now to recover and decipher some of the oldest and most mysterious writing is reshaping our view of how languages spread—and, in the case of Linear Elamite, how early writing itself might have begun. Of course, the scripts that remain undeciphered occupy that category for a reason: They present extraordinary challenges. For instance, linguists have been working for a century to decipher Rongorongo, a collection of glyphs carved mostly into wood by the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island. Success has eluded the experts. Similarly, the ancient writing known as Etruscan, used from the seventh to the first century B.C. and found inscribed on clay tablets in Italy, has defied attempts to crack it for generations. Perhaps the most famous decipherer of ancient scripts, French linguist Jean-François Champollion decoded Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822.Champollion tracked his progress in notebooks like the one above, eventually solving the linguistic mystery by consulting the Rosetta stone—which contains a decree carved in three different writing systems.But the progress that is seemingly being made on several ancient systems—among them, a form of writing referred to as the Indus script; a system of writing called Linear A; and certainly, the advancements that François Desset captained on Linear Elamite—provide instructive insight on how new tools and fresh ideas might soon reveal some of history’s longest held secrets. One drizzly morning in Chennai, India, the bustling capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, I rode in an auto-rickshaw out along the Bay of Bengal, traveling past a beach covered with wooden fishing boats and tin-roofed shacks. We turned onto a side street and stopped before a yellow concrete building marked “The Indus Research Centre.” Inside, I found Sukumar Rajagopal, a software engineer and amateur decipherer who has been working for more than 18 years on the Indus script. He was hunched over a pile of academic papers, immersed in what he calls “my obsession.” Rajagopal describes himself as an irrepressible problem solver. He was 20 years into a software engineering career when he first grew intrigued by the ancient script, joining a long line of would-be decoders—professionals and amateurs alike who’ve tackled the Bronze Age script, perpetually optimistic that the critical breakthrough is right around the corner. Just last year, interest in the long-running project was given a major boost after the chief minister of Tamil Nadu offered a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who solved the mystery and could prove it. Not surprisingly, the bounty has ratcheted up the stakes in the hunt for solutions. Back in the 1920s, when archaeologists found the script, they recognized its importance right away. Researchers had been working at two sites—Mohenjo Daro and Harappa—along the Indus River in what is now Pakistan when they located 2,400 small pieces of soapstone, as well as a few bits of ivory and clay, all engraved with what looked like both abstract characters and recognizable objects such as fish, water buffalo, plants, and humanlike stick figures. The British archaeologist leading the excavation, Sir John Marshall, theorized that they were looking at evidence of one of the world’s first literate societies, the achievements of which were, he wrote, “far in advance of anything to be found at that time in Babylone or on the banks of the Nile.” If Marshall suspected that he was on the brink of unlocking something extraordinary, those hopes eventually fizzled. The inscriptions on the soapstone seals are frustratingly—maddeningly—short. Ninety percent of them consist of fewer than four characters; the longest has only 14. “What could you possibly communicate with that?” asks Rajagopal. In 2004, three noted scholars in the field published a paper titled “The Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization.” In it, they posited that the signs say nothing at all. More recently, the Indus Research Centre has become a gathering point for linguists and a locus of modern investigation into the script. Rajagopal began volunteering there in 2009. He had always nurtured a deep admiration for the great philologists of the past. “If there were a shrine for Champollion, I would be seen worshipping there,” he told me, referring to the decipherer of hieroglyphics. Now he was working among Champollion’s intellectual descendants, including Iravatham Mahadevan, an Indian epigraphist who helped establish the organization. Rajagopal told me that Mahadevan, who died in 2018, took him under his wing. “He converted what was a hobby in my head into a formal discipline.” In the 1970s, Mahadevan, along with a colleague named Asko Parpola, a professor of Indology at the University of Helsinki, compiled separate lists of about 400 unique signs from the Indus script. The characters had been glimpsed on thousands of objects found across half a dozen archaeological sites. Next, they tried to determine what they were looking at. Philologists know that all systems of writing fall into one of four categories. Some types use alphabets, composed generally of 25 to 35 signs denoting consonants and vowels that form words. Other writing depends on what’s called a syllabary, which is a symbol used to represent a combination—consonant-vowel, vowel-consonant, or consonant-vowel-consonant—that comes together to form words. A third form of writing is known as logographic and is composed of a galaxy of unique signs, often numbering in the high thousands, each standing for an object, an action, or an idea. The final category includes hybrid systems like hieroglyphics or Japanese that mix logograms and a phonetic alphabet. Access to an abundance of signs doesn’t guarantee that linguists can decipher a script. The late 19th-century discovery of Etruscan letters on the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy greatly increased the number of known inscriptions, and yet the writing system is still an enigma.If the Indus script was indeed real writing and not random combinations of characters, Mahadevan and Parpola figured it likely belonged in the hybrid category as a mix of distinct word components, or phonemes, and logograms. Based on what they knew of other ancient forms of writing, they also theorized that the script could have been built upon an underlying language that in some form might still be spoken. This is one of the great tools used in the detective work of ancient philology: Figure out the sounds that the characters make, string them together, and you might conjure up the meanings as well. By comparing scraps and pieces—by triangulating what is known with what is mysterious—researchers can inch their way toward clarity.hunting, Mahadevan and Parpola agreed that the Indus script was likely built on “Proto-Dravidian,” a nascent form of language that many philologists believe dominated the Indian subcontinent during the Early Bronze Age. The ancient language was lost, but vestiges remain in modern Tamil and other southern Indian tongues. Parpola then zeroed in on the most prevalent sign in the script: a fishlike character that the professor believed was a logogram. In Tamil, Parpola knew, the word for “fish” isBut min has a second meaning: “star.” “All early scripts had the rebus principle,” Parpola, now retired and living in Helsinki, told me: using a pictogram or symbol for its sound, not its meaning. For example, in the world’s first writing system, Sumerian cuneiform, scribes combined the pictogram for barley, which has the phonetic value “she,” with the symbol for milk, which connotes the sound “gah,” to make “she-gah,” which had nothing to do with barley or milk but meant “pleasing.” Carved primarily into wood by the Rapa Nui people and found on Easter Island, these undeciphered glyphs make up a script called Rongorongo that has puzzled scientists since the 19th century. Though Rongorongo’s origins are obscure, new radiocarbon dating traces at least one wood piece back to the 15th century.Following these principles, Parpola, over several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, searched for other clues. He found in the Indus script another symbol that showed a fish divided down the middle by a vertical line. The line, he proposed, stood forthe ancient Tamil word for “half.” But pasu also means “green.” If the fish connoted “min,” he now had a rebus:Pushing further, Parpola found what he thinks are rebuses for Saturn, Venus, and other stars. He also located what he believes were a few purely phonetic signs. What did it all signify? Because the inscriptions are so short, Parpola believes that they contain no grammar, no full sentences, no elements of real writing. He posits that they never were intended to communicate messages but rather were used as the markers of citizens who were named after celestial objects, like many rulers of the age, including those in Assyria and Babylonia. Of course, decoding work like this that relies on interpretation and speculation prompts disagreement. Mahadevan parted ways with his colleague on many of Parpola’s readings, beginning with the fish sign, which, Mahadevan believed, had nothing to do with astronomy. It was, he contended, the sign for a sea nymph, a creature prevalent in Indian mythology. But the brevity of the inscriptions and the uncertainty about the language meant that neither scholar could say he solved the riddle. Rajagopal, for one, thought that Parpola was on the right track. A few years ago, he began to fixate on one seal that consisted of a row of five rotating swastikas, a sacred symbol in many ancient religions, followed by two parallel vertical lines. Parpola had claimed that the double line formed part of a rebus for the planet Venus , a respected journal published in Berlin. The phonetic values of every Linear Elamite character, they declared, had been deciphered at last. The claim was remarkable. If true, it represents the first time that all the sounds of an ancient script have been figured out in decades. But Desset and his team, he admits, haven’t accomplished a 100 percent decipherment of the writing system. According to most philologists, real decipherment occurs only when a script’s sounds and its meaning are both understood. Champollion had determined the meaning of hieroglyphs after sounding out some words and recognizing that the language must be a direct ancestor of Coptic Egyptian; Hincks and Rawlinson were able to understand Akkadian cuneiform after perceiving that the underlying language closely resembled Hebrew. But the language of Linear Elamite—known simply as Elamite—remains largely a mystery. Thanks to the inscriptions on the kunanki, Desset has managed to tease out not just the names of places and kings but also a smattering of titles, epithets, common nouns, adjectives, and verbs. One silver beaker, he suggests, was an offering given by a ruler to the Elamite supreme god. “I Pala-išan … mighty lord,” the inscription reads in part, “I am the servant of Napireša.” Desset found the wordsfor “son,” also became clear in context. “It shines a little light on this long-vanished place,” he says. Today, of the 1,863 Linear Elamite signs that exist in the corpus, Desset says he is able to sound out 1,810 of them—the rest have eroded into illegibility—but, he acknowledges, he can make sense of only a few words. “I am still facing a lot of problems with the translation,” he told me. He faces critics too. Jacob Dahl, an Oxford professor considered one of the world’s foremost scholars of Mesopotamia, disputes Desset’s assertion that Linear Elamite is a purely syllabic script. “That part of the decipherment is certainly not correct,” he told me. “I would suspect there were logograms as well.” He also says that so much about the script remains unknown—the meaning of many words, the grammar, the values of certain signs—that Desset’s claims of victory are wildly premature. “I have little patience for Desset,” Dahl told me. “Much of it is complete rubbish.” Desset has tried to shrug off the criticism. Since the announcement of the Linear Elamite decipherment, he told me, escorting me to the door of his apartment, “I have found new friends, and I have found new enemies.” His next undertaking is an attempt to decipher Proto-Elamite, a precursor to Linear Elamite that first appeared in the fourth millennium B.C. and represents the earliest stage of civilization in Iran. The writing consists of 400 to 800 characters, the hallmark of a logographic-syllabic system. “It is a total mystery,” he says. Just the kind of challenge that code breakers love.
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