Deciphering the Indus seals

January 31, 2017 10:18 PM

Over a century after Cunningham’s discovery, the Indus seals remain undeciphered, their messages lost to us. Are they the letters of an ancient language? Or are they just religious, familial, or political symbols? Those hotly contested questions have sparked infighting among scholars and exacerbated cultural rivalries over who can claim the script as their heritage. But new work from researchers using sophisticated algorithms, machine learning, and even cognitive science are finally helping push us to the edge of cracking the Indus script.
posted by Chrysostom (13 comments total)

Bronze age Pokemon cards.
posted by threecheesetrees at 11:28 PM on January 31, 2017 [3 favorites]

The crying shame is that this society cannot have only used their script to write seals. It is like suggesting we only use ours to send text messages. But their literature may well have been recorded on material which rotted and so we're left with an extremely impoverished outlook on them, assuming we ever learn to read the seals at all.

Indian civilization is so vast and varied, so ancient, that to have some insight into its earliest stages would be a huge boon to humanity.
posted by Emma May Smith at 11:47 PM on January 31, 2017 [6 favorites]

After looking for clues in the Somerton Man's pockets, which led me to the Voynich manuscript, I just cracked it. It reads...Half-Life 3 confirmed.
posted by Literaryhero at 12:32 AM on February 1, 2017

we're left with an extremely impoverished outlook on them

You're assuming it is a script, but I agree. Then there's our total ignorance all the other similarly sophisticated cultures that just didn't happen to make seals...

Interesting to draw a comparison with problems in AI/philosophy where John Searle and others deny that you can get semantics from syntax, and Quine implies that radical translation is impossible in principle. In the absence of some crib or correspondence, a contextless set of symbols is hopelessly intractable.
posted by Segundus at 1:50 AM on February 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Indian civilization is so vast and varied, so ancient, that to have some insight into its earliest stages would be a huge boon to humanity.


Ah, we'd just find a way to ruin it.
posted by thelonius at 3:13 AM on February 1, 2017

As Mefi's own languagehat so aptly puts it, that edge is a long way from the crack, and the crack is purely hypothetical.
posted by minus273 at 3:16 AM on February 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

It looks like currency.
("^F money" finds nothing probative, "^F currency" produces something in the comments.)

In any case, the whole "true inheritors of India" thing strikes me as profoundly fraught.
posted by Horkus at 6:25 AM on February 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

>if we do assume the animal had just one horn, it would be just as easy to then assume the animal had only one front leg and one back leg and one ear

BRB, found my archaeology dissertation thesis.
posted by ardgedee at 7:26 AM on February 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

The crying shame is that this society cannot have only used their script to write seals. It is like suggesting we only use ours to send text messages.

Well...

A huge proportion of the cuneiform documents that we have are effectively warehouse inventory lists. Tax tallies. The like. When literacy is a rare and expensive technology, it tends to get used for the most specialized purposes. If you have a vigorous oral storytelling tradition, writing down stories may not be your first choice of deployment.

I mean, I know little to nothing about this society, but it is definitely the case that societies can use scripts primarily for what we would regard as tedious administrative purposes.
posted by praemunire at 10:15 AM on February 1, 2017 [9 favorites]

They might be used in clay working. They are press in forms, to create pattern on tiles. Maybe they have no meaning, except for an aesthetic for edging tiles. OK, OK never mind. At least try reading them backwards.
posted by Oyéah at 11:57 AM on February 1, 2017

"Later, while escorting Witzel through India, Wells would show him a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Ten reasons you don’t know what you’re talking about” while in the back of a cab."

I'll be sure to add that manoeuvrer to my toolkit!
posted by Matt Oneiros at 12:03 PM on February 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

A huge proportion of the cuneiform documents that we have are effectively warehouse inventory lists. Tax tallies. The like. When literacy is a rare and expensive technology, it tends to get used for the most specialized purposes. If you have a vigorous oral storytelling tradition, writing down stories may not be your first choice of deployment.

Our societies mostly use writing for records and short term information storage, and writing isn't rare or expensive to us. It's just the nature of the thing and the nature of society. But literature in cuneiform still exists and we value it accordingly.
posted by Emma May Smith at 1:01 PM on February 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Our societies mostly use writing for records and short term information storage, and writing isn't rare or expensive to us. It's just the nature of the thing and the nature of society.

I think it's fair to say that over the course of history the proportion of writing devoted to other purposes as against that devoted to administrative and trade records (and similar) has risen substantially. (In the present day, I suppose we would have to restrict that to writing intended for routine human use.) To be fair, there is probably a survival bias.

literature in cuneiform still exists and we value it accordingly

Sure. But it's still mostly "five hundred units of corn to the granary." I'm simply saying that you can't infer from the existence of a script a significant body of written what-we-would-call-literature. Which is not a judgment on the literary capabilities (or general interest and sophistication) of the society in question.
posted by praemunire at 8:30 PM on February 1, 2017 [1 favorite]