More than 5,300 years ago, a civilization emerged along the lush basins of the Indus River in present-day northwest India and Pakistan.
While 4,000 pieces featuring the Indus script, belonging to the Indus Valley Civilization, have been found over the last century, no one has been able to decipher it, prompting officials to offer a $1 million reward for anyone who can crack it.
The Indus script is made up of a mix of signs and symbols. Found on items such as stone seals and small tablets, which don't allow for long texts, the messages are known for being very short. The average is about five signs or symbols on top of a central animal motif and an object next to it, with the longest found being 34 symbols long. Researchers have spotted about 68 symbols across the available materials; however, without a bilingual artifact, like the world-famous Rosetta Stone, unraveling the meaning has been nearly impossible, says MyModernMet.
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, reports 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.”
Photo credit: ALFGRN via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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