Home News

Artificial Intelligence Is Cracking 4,000-Year-Old Indus

Valley Mystery
January 30, 2017

Short Bytes: The Indus Script is one of the oldest and least understood writing systems in the
world. Recently, researchers have used AI Methods like Markov models to decipher the script
and understand it. This may be the beginning of applying AI to understand our past.

he Indus Valley civilisation was one of the oldest civilizations in the world dating
T back to 3500 BCE. Since its discovery in 1872, in British India, it has come under
the limelight of the archaeological world due to its completely preserved cities
and artifacts. Being one of the most advanced civilizations of South Asia, they had well-
planned cities, well-constructed roads, toilets, advanced water management and drainage
systems.
Indus Valley Scripts

The Harappan region of the Indus Valley civilization had a structured form of communication
as well as a writing system. Many of these written symbols along with embossed animals
have been found in the form of seals.

Indus Seal

The seals are unique and inspire many questions What are these symbols? Are they a script
of their language? Are they just some symbols representing Gods or family names? This
decades-old befuddling cipher does not seem to have any bilingual texts to compare and
translate. Now, researchers have now turned to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to try to figure out
the relationship between these symbols and their structure.

Using AI Methods

Every language has a sequential structure. We, humans, try to formalize and order our way of
communication. AI Methods are good at learning such patterns and structures. Therefore, the
field of applying AI methods to understand the human communication is called Natural
language Processing.

Researchers, Nisha Yadav from TIFR, and Rajesh Rao from the University of Washington, have
used such AI Methods to discover the hidden structure of the Indus Scripts . Their method is
similar to how Googles Autocomplete works.
 Autocomplete in Search Engines

In most linguistic systems, words or symbols follow each other in a semi-predictable manner.
Researchers call this semi-predictability conditional entropy. They tried to use models called
as Markov Models to find the probability of a symbol occurring after a set of symbols. For
example, in a word, Q is very frequently followed by u in English language.

Indus Script

The researchers compared similar relations in linguistic systems like Vedic Sanskrit and non-
linguistic systems like DNA sequence. They found that the structure of the Indus script was
much more similar to linguistic systems. They intend to use this to complete missing
inscriptions and further understand it. Other researchers have used image processing
techniques to identify known Indus scripts from images for helping archaeologists to easily
analyse them.
But, some speculations regarding a structured writing system does not necessarily mean that
it is a language script. However, they all seem to agree that new discoveries and cooperation
amongst interdisciplinary researchers can lead to the further understanding of the Indus
script.

What are your views on this and the Indus valley civilization? Can AI completely figure it out?
Share your thoughts in the comments.

Also Read: What Is Deep Learning?

Anand Krish
Research Student working on Robotics and Deep
Learning

FOSSBYTES DEALS
LEAVE A REPLY
Comment:

Name:

Email:

Website:
 Post Comment

Latest Articles

Arduino Enthusiasts Master The Hacker Board Using This Arduino E-Book...
July 12, 2017

How To Fix 100% Disk Usage In Windows 10?

July 12, 2017

Worlds First Wireless Charging Laptop Launched By Dell

July 12, 2017

LeakerLocker Android Ransomware Threatens To Expose Personal Data To All Your...

July 12, 2017

How Much Time Do We Need To Spend To Prepare For...

July 12, 2017

Contact us: admin@fossbytes.com

About Us

Advertise With Us

Contact Us

Fossbytes Team

Fossbytes Videos
Privacy Policy

Review Guidelines

2017 Fossbytes Media Pvt Ltd. All Rights Reserved.