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Scripts of the Ancient World by Joshua Hammer. 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 his mysterious, researchers can inch their way toward clarity. After some hunting, Mahadevan and Parpola agreed that the Indus Script was likely built on Proto Davidian, a nascent form of language that many philologists believe dominated the Indian sub continent. 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 fish like character that the professor believed was a logogram in Tamil. Parpola knew the word for fish is min, but min has a second meaning star. All early scripts had the reebis 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 she the sound ga to make shiga, which has nothing to do with barley or milk, but meant pleasing. Following these principles, Parpola, over several years in the late nineteen sixties and early seventies, searched for other clues. He found in the indiscript another symbol that showed a fish

divided down the middle by a vertical line. The line he proposed stood for passu, the ancient Tamil word for half, but Passu also means green. If the fish connoted min, he now had Aribis Pasu min or green star, which he took to mean the planet Mercury. Pushing further, Parpola found what he thinks are ribuses 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 contained 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 works like this that rely on interpretation and speculation prompts disagreement. Mahadavan parted ways with his colleague on many of Parpola's readings, beginning with the fish sign, which Mahadivan 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. Raja Gopal, for one, thought that Parpolo 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. When combined with the fish, he said it made vinin min or bright star, but the swastikas remained an enigma. Raja Gopal told me he was consumed by the mystery of the sequence and thought about it constantly.

I was going down a rabbit hole. One morning in November twenty twenty, while sitting in his home office in Chennai, he chanced upon a Nassau website that traced the trajectory of Venus as it moved across the morning and evening skies. He stopped and stared at his computer screen. The double snakelike pattern formed by the planet's path looked just like

the swastika he had been studying. I got the goosebumps, he says, with that he was often running The inscription he theorized had to be a celestial omen signifying the completion of Venus's eight year cycle as it orbited the Sun and returned to the same position in the sky. He looked for similar astronomical depictions. Another seal he proposed showed the alignment of three planets. Half of the seals

he now believes identify celestial events. Raja Gopal theorizes that they were written so that Indus valley priests could dispatch these seals to villages to provide guidance for the timing of crop plantings and harvest festivals. Raja Gopal now claims to have deciphered with confidence seventy seals out of forty two hundred. He finds it difficult to pull himself away. I will take some seal and keep obsessing, and somehow

I get an idea and push it forward. He told me many times, I hit a dead end and then I got to spin the next hypothesis and try again. Not everybody accepts his interpretations and The public attention around raj Rajagopal's progress has only highlighted how tricky this work can be. At a twenty twenty three Indescript conference in Chennai, a fellow decipherer stood up during his lecture and ridiculed him.

Another amateur scholar in Chennai, Sumangali Kidambi ven Katisan, says that Raja Kobal's celestial theory is misguided and that most seals were simply shipping instructions bronze age versions of d h L waybills. Van Katissan says he has found his own Dravidian based rebuses, which are nothing like Rajagopal's. One inscription Van Keitasan told me consists of a combination of logograms and phonetic signs and refers to the highlands of Afghanistan.

He translates it to read very clever trapper velapon of the Triple Mountain sends by boat along the Big River by care to the tiller of land. The range of disagreement in the volume of theories underscore the intensity of the enduring debate, as well as the idea that would be code breakers may never reach a consensus. Even the Dravidian hypothesis itself is challenged. Some scholars argue that the underlying language of the Indus script is Sanskrit, the basis

of Hindi. One decipher claimed to have identified ribuses for the gods Shiva and Indra mentioned in the ancient Sans religious texts known as the rig Veda. Like nearly everything in India, ethnocentrism is fueling the debate. Many Tamils want to bolster claims that their ancestors, not northern Hindi speakers, created India's first urban civilization a few hundred miles southwest

of Chennai. Archaeologists recently found glyphs scratched into clay tablets at Ki Ladi, a twenty six hundred year old site, that match signs from Mohenjo Daro. This, the insist, is evidence of a connection between the Dravidian culture of southern India and the original settlers of the Indus Valley. Of the fifty different signs, we have twenty nine perfect matches.

Ramesh Masthong, Kikhilandi's chief archaeological officer, told me as he escorted me around a football size field excavation pit in a grove of coconut homes in rural Tamil Nadu. But if Sanskrit is in fact the underlying language beneath the Indus script, Rajocobal and many others will be sent back to the drawing board, and that million dollar reward will

seem further away than ever. The great hope among philologists today is that the breakthroughs lurking right around on the corner will be ushered in thanks to tools and technologies

that their predecessors never dreamed of. Francesco Parono Katiafoko, a forty five year old professor of linguistics at chan Jiaotong Liverpool University in China, has devoted more than half his life to trying to decipher another Bronze Age script called linear A. The writing system was used by the Minoan civilization of Crete, the predecessor of the Mycenaean Greeks, from

about eighteen hundred to fourteen fifty BC. The problem has been that the Minoans seemingly employed a language unrelated to any dialect of ancient Greek or apparently any other known language from that time period. When he began studying the writing in nineteen ninety nine, Parono Kaciafoko noticed that the system used many of the same characters as a Cretan syllabari called linear B deciphered by English scholar Michael Ventris

half a century earlier. But the characters of linear A formed words that bore no resemblance to those of linear B. If you try to read the corresponding symbols, it's not Greek, parono Qutciufoko told me, it's Gibberish. Where parpoulus quest to understand the Indus script had led him to philological research

into ancient Dravidian perono Kochiufoko took a different path. In twenty seventeen, he assembled a team of sixteen mathematicians, engineers, and linguists and designed what they called the linear A

Decipherment Program. The team fed into the computer the vocabularies and grammatical structures of deciphered ancient languages across the Mediterranean area Ancient Egyptian, Luian, Assyro, Babylonian, Aramaic, Amharic, and Hittite, to name just a few, and asked the program to compare the words with possible transliterations of linear A. They

hoped that the comparison would find similar etymological roots. But after three years the machine, as Perno Kacchavoko called it, had found no matches, and twenty twenty funding for the project ran dry. The pandemic shuttered the university and the project was put on hold. Computer programs he had come to believe aren't totally up to the task. Now, Perno Kutchafoko's team is using a modified version in the hope

that it will produce better results. Artificial intelligence. Parono Kuchifoko says, we'll probably never be able to decipher an undeciphered language because it's not able to produce original thought or intuitive connections. What it could do, he explains, is speed up the deciphering process by recognizing patterns and making statistical calculations about

the appearances of certain characters in unknown texts. In twenty twenty three, researchers from MIT and Google's Deep Mind tested AI tools on previously deciphered linear and were impressed by

the ease with which the programmes worked. The system guided about sixty percent right, says Andreas Fools, an engineer at Berlin's Technical University, one of those attempting to decipher both the Indus script and the mysterious writing on what's known as the Feistos disc, an ancient clay saucer found on crete that contains a spiraling inscription in an unknown writing. In those experiments, the AI was primed with the knowledge

that Linear b was an ancestor of ancient Greek. It turns out that AI is excellent at comparing a script to other members of the same linguistic family, but when asked to decode a script written in an unknown language that has no relationship to other tongues, AI still struggles. This, says Francois des Si, the philologist unraveling Linear Elamite, is because the technology, at least currently lacks the ability to think creatively to come up with something out of nowhere.

On a recent morning in Francis Laire Valley, I met Dsse at his apartment in the city of Ongar's tussl haired and goateed. He was happy to describe for me that moment in twenty fifteen when he finally got to see the Mabubian families prized Kunanki for years, though his efforts to decipher linear Elamite had been stymied by the

paucity of inscriptions. Unlike hieroglyphs which covered temples and tombs along the Nile, or Akkadian Kineiform inscribed on palace walls and clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamian cities, linear elamite was rare. Writing didn't seem to play the same central role for

the Elamites. Dass says, after much floundering and frustration, he found himself in Roya Mabubian's elegant North London apartment, examining an academic gold mine seven hundred and fifty nine linear elamite signs engraved on ten cups and fragments, plus inscriptions in Cuneiform. I was thinking eureka, he told me. But I was also skeptical. Everybody in the academic world was sure it was all fake. But to say, nurse to

conviction that the Kunnki had to be authentic. No forger could have strung together so many linear elamite signs that actually contained bits of coherent text. Later tests by a metallurgists in Italy confirmed that the Kununki were made of a ninety percent silver ten percent copper alloy, consistent with other vessels from the period. Even though philologists had long ago determined that the language spoken in ancient Elam had

no known relatives. To say, did have one tool at his disposal, something that for centuries had aided those who study antiquity. Sometimes, when a message was committed to writing on a templet or a piece of art, the same or similar information was in described in several languages and scripts at once. This practice helped the scribes reach the

largest audience possible. Thousands of years later, that habit has helped philologists who can compare deciphered writing with the adjacent undeciphered script to say had just such a bilingual inscription that he hoped could provide clues to some of linear Elamite's phonetic values. Archaeologists at SUSA in nineteen o three had turned up a limestone artifact called the tabreu aulon

now on display at the Louver. The kings of Elam had often inscribed linear Elamite side by side with inscriptions in Akkadian Cuneiform, the writing of nearby Mesopotamia, which had been deciphered in the eighteen fifties. In nineteen o five, the German linguist ber Dinand Bork noticed a sequence of four linear Elamite characters on the tabre au leon that appeared twice. The adjacent Acadian text also had four characters

that showed up with the same frequency. These kittiidformed signs formed part of two names, Puzzuer Sushniak, the last king of Elam's Awand dynasty, and the Elamite god in Sushnak. From these parallel sign patterns, Bork deduced that the Elamite characters must be su Chi, Nah, and K. That gave him pooh, Zu and R as well, for a total of seven characters. From there, the decipherment stalled. The trouble was for decades, there just wasn't that much linear Elamite

in existence. Could de Say's new trove change everything. Early one morning in spring twenty seventeen, he sat before his laptop in his apartment near the University of Tehran where he was teaching. The screen glowed with linear Elamite characters, which to Say had copied by hand and digitized from the photos he had taken. His eyes settled on a four sign pattern from one of the Kunanki. It showed

up repeatedly. He recognized the first sign in the sequence immediately it was she as Bork had first seen in Pasur Sushnak. Then came three unknown signs, the last two of which were identical. In a flash, to Say could see it. The duplicated sign was ha, which formed the last syllables of sie ha Ha, an early second millennium b c elamite king. Minutes later, the Say spotted another repeated sequence with one recognizable sign R in Kineiform texts.

He knew Silkha was often mentioned with who is most likely his father? E PARTI. In fifteen minutes, to Say had acquired the values of five signs. Thrilled, he plugged the sounds into the texts and spotted other names, leading to as identification of more signs. For the next few years, to Say continued making progress. He had assumed from the start of his studies that linear elamite, like all other

writing systems from the early Bronze Age, was mixed. I was looking for logograms, saying where the hell are they? He said, But as is knowledge of the signs deepened, to Say took what he calls a creative leap. Linear Elamite, he now perceived was a purely phonetic script with seventy

seven signs, including five vowels and twelve consonants. Until now, is widely accepted among linguists that the oldest purely phonetic alphabet was protor proto Siniactic, a Middle Bronze Age script from the Sinai Peninsula which appeared five hundred years after linear Elamite. Desay's analysis, if verified by other philologists, could force a radical reconstruction of the history of writing and

human progress. It would reorder the chronology of phonetic writing, shifting the focus away from the Levant to the Iranian plateau. It would also elevate the previously overlooked Elamite kingdom to a primary place in human intellectual development. Seven years after that encounter in London, in twenty twenty two, to Say and for colleagues authored an article in Zeitschrift for a Syriologui and for Denayitious Archaeology Journal for a Syriology and

Near Eastern Archaeology, 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 to say in his team, he admits heavn't accomplished a one hundred 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 wordsords and recognizing that the language must be a direct ancestor of Coptic Egyptian. Hinks 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 Kunangi, Dissey 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 silverbeaker, he suggests, was an offering given by a ruler to the Elamite supreme god E pala Ishan mighty Lord. The inscription reads, in part,

I am the servant of napiaetia. Dissey found the words kare, which he translates as devotion or worship, and zeeni a divine blessing bestowed by a god on his royal subject. Other words including zempt for king, hurt for people, and shock for sun also became clear in context. It shines a little light on this long vanished place, he says, today, of the eighteen hundred sixty three linear Elamite signs that exist in the Corpus des Asis, he is able to

sound out eighteen hundred ten 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. Jak Abdahl and Oxford professor considered one of the world's foremost scholars of Mesopotamia, dispute Desay'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 Dessay's claims of victory are wildly premature. I have little patience for des say. Dal told me much of it is complete rubbish. Dessay 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 BC and represents the earliest stage of civilization in Iran. The writing consists of four hundred to eight hundred characters, the hall mark of a lago graphic syllabic system.

It is a total mystery, he says, just the kind of challenge that code breakers love, bringing dead words to life. Archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Susa in nineteen o three uncovered the Tabra Leon, which had a four thousand year old bilingual inscription in known a Kadian cuneiform and

undeciphered linear elamite. Though this was a promising first step, the dearth of signs stalled decipherment until twenty fifteen, when Francois de Say gained rare access to silver beakers with hundreds of new L E signs and piece together what could be the world's first phonetic writing system. Here's how he did it. Identifying proper nouns. Early on, linguists determined that the table leon bore the same names in L E and a kate Acadian kineiform king Pussur Sashnak and

the Elamite king Ishnek. The tablet's linguistic patterns were a jumping off point for de Say to later identify other names and royal titles decoding phrases. When to Say secured access to a private collection of beakers with both a Kadian kineiform and L E signs that had never been

seen publicly, had more pieces to the puzzle. This allowed him to string together one of the first sentenced fragments, a huge breakthrough in cracking L E. Whence the script was deciphered to Say, says, it was possible for him to actually read lines of L E like the text carved into stone blocks from Suza, offering an ode to

Pusar Sushnak and a warning to his enemies. Next the industrial waste site that glitters like a glacier in northwest India, A field full of marble debris has another worldly allure by Puja Chianghwai Waila. The first time Atul Kharasya saw a YouTube video of the dumping grounds in Kishargach, he knew he had to visit the place, a pearly white landscape shining like a snow field atop a hot dry

plain in northwest India. It was a six hour train ride from his home in Delhi, But for Charisiya, a travel influencer who makes scenic the social media media villages videos for a living, the trip paid off with an Instagram reel that racked up a quarter million likes. Kishagar's peculiar attraction is built on a byproduct from its marble processing industry, marble slurry, a mix of water and fine

particles of calcium, carbonate and other minerals. Tanker trucks deliver loads of it each day to the city's outskirts hauled in from more than twelve hundred facilities that cut, grind and polished stone from the quarries that proliferate in the surrounding state of Rajasthan. As water evaporates from the slurry in the semi arid climate, the mineral particles recrystallized to

form bone white mounds and terraces. Tourists started showing up to admire them about a decade ago after a popular comedian shot a movie scene at the site, says Sampat Rai Sharma, CEO of the Kishkar Marble Association KMA, which manages the yard. Then came Instagrammers and YouTubers, engaged couples with hired photographers, even Bollywood crews. As the crowds grew,

the KMA rebranded the spot the Kishnagarch Snowyard. Soon vendors were offering everything from snacks to horse rides to a dinghy for plying the electric blue waters of the artificial lake. But even as hashtag dumping yard Kishangar has trended among the travelers, some researchers have raised questions over the site's

health and ecological impacts. Environmental scientist Lakshmi Kant Sharma of the Central University of Rajasthan says a study he led in twenty twenty three and twenty four, currently under peer review, revealed worrying effects in areas surrounding the dump site. Air quality tests, he says, registered levels of particulate matter beyond the World Health organizations recommended limits, while soil samples showed high salinity and heavy metal contamination and groundwater samples exceeded

limits for chemicals like chlor ride and iron. A different study published in February twenty twenty five found naturally occurring asbestos fibers in marble dust from another rasash San slurry yard. For his part, the K m as Sharma disputes such studies validity and says his organization has received no health related complaints and while several Indian newspapers have reported the Kuraje study preliminary findings, at least one vendor suggests it

has an affected visitation. Gurad Yain manages snow Moments, which opened to kiosk at the yard two years ago, to rent photo back drops and props. We do thirty to thirty five shoots a month. Jane says the demand is creasing increasing day by day. This concludes readings from National Geographic magazine for to Day Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, keep on listening and have a great day.