History & Archaeology
The Script Nobody Can Read: Why the World’s Most Intriguing Ancient Mystery Remains Unsolved After so many Years
Over 4,000 inscriptions. More than a century of scholarship. AI, machine learning, a million-dollar prize, and an international conference with the Prime Minister and Home Minister in attendance. The Harappan script still has not been deciphered. Here is why — and why the question matters so much more than a history puzzle should.
Sometime around 2600 BCE, in a city of 40,000 people with flush toilets and standardised brick sizes, someone pressed a small soapstone seal into wet clay and made a mark. The seal was square, about 2.5 centimetres across, and it bore symbols — a row of signs above the image of a humped bull or a unicorn or a tiger seated before what might be an altar. The mark dried. The person who made it lived, worked, traded, and died. Their city was buried. Their civilisation faded. And the symbols on that seal, reproduced across thousands of similar objects from a Bronze Age urban culture that stretched across modern Pakistan and northwest India, waited.
They are still waiting.
The Harappan or Indus script — the writing system of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which thrived between roughly 3300 and 1300 BCE — is one of the last great undeciphered writing systems in the world. More than a century after Sir John Marshall announced the discovery of the civilisation to the world in 1924, and nearly 4,000 years after the last Harappan city fell silent, the symbols on those seals have not yielded their meaning to anyone.
In September 2025, more than 1,100 scholars, researchers, engineers, computer scientists, linguists, and students gathered in New Delhi for an international conference organised by the Union Ministry of Culture and the Archaeological Survey of India, dedicated entirely to the question of the script. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah attended — signalling that this is not merely an academic puzzle. The political significance of this undeciphered system of writing runs as deep as its cultural weight.
It has still not been cracked.
First: What Makes a Script Decipherable?
To understand why the Harappan script has resisted every attempt at decipherment, it helps to understand what made other ancient scripts eventually yield. Deciphering an unknown script is not one problem. It is a sequence of at least five problems that must be solved in order, with each step depending on the previous one.
The Five Steps to Decipherment
Step 1. Establish that the symbols actually constitute a writing system — not decorative marks or an inventory system.
Step 2. Identify and separate individual signs from the symbol stream — work out where one sign ends and another begins.
Step 3. Reduce the full set of observed symbols to a minimal core inventory by identifying allographs — variant forms of the same sign, the way printed “a” and cursive “a” are the same letter.
Step 4. Assign phonetic or semantic values to each sign.
Step 5. Match those values to a known or reconstructable language.
Source: Fabio Tamburini, ‘Decipherment of Lost Ancient Scripts as Combinatorial Optimisation,’ 2023
For the Harappan script, scholars are still arguing about Step 1.
The Three Reasons It Is So Hard
1. There Is No Rosetta Stone
The single most powerful tool in the history of decipherment is a multilingual inscription — the same text written in a known and an unknown script, side by side. The Rosetta Stone gave scholars a Greek text alongside Egyptian hieroglyphics and demotic script; Jean-François Champollion used it to crack hieroglyphics in 1822. The Behistun Inscription in Iran gave scholars a trilingual cuneiform text that unlocked ancient Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian writing in the early 19th century.
The Harappan civilisation had robust trade links with Mesopotamia — Indus seals and goods have been found in ancient Mesopotamian sites, and Mesopotamian records mention a land called “Meluhha” which most scholars identify as the Indus Valley. But despite decades of excavation, not a single bilingual inscription connecting the Harappan script to any known writing system has been found. The civilisation left no Rosetta Stone. Without one, every attempt at decipherment is essentially guesswork elevated by method.
2. An Unknown Script Writing an Unknown Language
Scholar Andrew Robinson, in his influential book Lost Languages (2008), divides undeciphered scripts into three categories: an unknown script writing a known language; a known script writing an unknown language; and an unknown script writing an unknown language. The Harappan script falls into the third — the hardest category, with the fewest reference points.
What Is Linguistic Decipherment? (Simply Explained)
Why “Reading” a Script Is Not the Same as “Understanding” It
Decipherment has two separate components that are often confused. The first is reading — working out the sound or phonetic value that each symbol represents. The second is understanding — working out what the language those sounds constitute actually means. A script can be read without being understood: scholars can accurately pronounce Linear B symbols (the script of Mycenaean Greek), but only because Michael Ventris recognised in 1952 that the underlying language was an archaic form of Greek — a language he already knew. If the Harappan language turns out to be a form of proto-Dravidian, or Sanskrit, or something entirely unrelated to any surviving language, the same symbols that can be read phonetically might remain semantically opaque for decades more.
3. The Inscriptions Are Extremely Short
Of the approximately 3,500 to 4,000 seals and inscribed objects that have been identified, the average inscription contains just five signs. The longest known Harappan inscription has 26 characters. This is not a lot to work with. Compare this to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which covered entire temple walls, or Mesopotamian cuneiform, which filled clay tablets with economic records, astronomical observations, and literature including the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Harappan inscriptions — brief, contextually ambiguous, and mostly appearing on objects of uncertain purpose — provide the bare minimum of material for analytical work. Its symbols number over 400 but lack a bilingual key, making decipherment difficult. The script is brief and appears on commercial and ritual objects.
What We Know: The Key Facts About the Script
The Harappan Script — What Scholars Agree On
- Civilisation dates: approximately 3300–1300 BCE, at its urban peak around 2600–1900 BCE
- Geographic spread: over 800,000 sq km across modern Pakistan and northwest India — the world’s largest Bronze Age urban culture by area
- Number of inscribed objects found: approximately 3,500–4,000 seals plus pottery, tablets, and other artefacts
- Number of distinct signs: estimates range from 400 to 425 (Asko Parpola identified 425; S.R. Rao identified 62)
- Average inscription length: 5 signs
- Longest known inscription: 26 signs
- Writing direction: most likely right to left
- No bilingual inscription has ever been found
- The underlying language remains unknown
The Competing Theories:
The question of what language underlies the Harappan script is not merely academic. It is entangled with some of the most contested questions in South Asian history: where Sanskrit came from, whether the Aryan migration theory is correct, and who can claim the deepest roots in the Indian subcontinent. As one conference document put it, decipherment debates often reflect present-day cultural politics as much as ancient realities.
Theory 1: Sanskrit / Vedic [S.R. Rao]
The earliest notable Indian attempt was by archaeologist S.R. Rao, who in 1982 postulated that the script contained 62 signs and linked the Indus language to Sanskrit and the Vedic civilisation. As Andrew Robinson wrote, Rao seemed “determined to prove that the Indus language was the ancestor of Sanskrit, the root language of most modern languages of North India, and that Sanskrit was therefore not the product of Indo-Aryan invasions from the west via Central Asia but was instead the expression of indigenous Indian genius.”
At the September 2025 conference, some researchers went further, claiming the script contained Rig Vedic mantras and identifying references to the Puranas — texts that historians note were composed over a thousand years after the Harappan civilisation ended.
If Sanskrit were proven to be the underlying language, it would support the argument that the Vedic and Harappan civilisations were continuous — a claim with enormous implications for the Aryan migration debate and for the political case that Vedic culture is entirely indigenous to the subcontinent.
Theory 2: Proto-Dravidian [Asko Parpola]
The most developed and widely cited scholarly hypothesis is that the underlying language is a form of proto-Dravidian — an ancestor of the Dravidian language family that today includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. Its most prominent proponent is Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola, who has spent decades on the script and identified 425 distinct signs.
What Is the “Rebus Principle”?
How Pictograms Can Represent Sound, Not Meaning
The rebus principle is a writing technique in which a pictogram represents a word that sounds like the depicted object — not the object itself. The clearest modern example is the way a bee and a leaf might together represent “belief” — not because anyone is writing about bees and leaves, but because the sounds match. Ancient writing systems widely used this technique to extend a limited set of pictures into a system that could represent abstract words and grammatical elements.
Parpola used this principle to interpret the fish sign — one of the most common symbols on Indus seals. He argued it is unlikely to represent actual fish. In Dravidian languages, the word for fish (min or meen) is a homophone of the word for star. So the fish sign, in Parpola’s reading, represents “star” — and building on this, he claimed to have found the Old Tamil names of all planets written into the Indus inscriptions. This interpretation, while ingenious, requires acceptance of the Dravidian language hypothesis as a prior — which is exactly what remains disputed.
Support for the Dravidian hypothesis comes from an unexpected quarter: Brahui, a Dravidian language spoken today by roughly three million people in Balochistan, Pakistan — geographically at the heart of the Indus Valley Civilisation’s territory.
The existence of a Dravidian language in this region, isolated from the main Dravidian-speaking areas of south India, suggests that Dravidian languages may once have been far more widespread across the subcontinent. India’s leading Indus script researcher, the late Iravatham Mahadevan, supported the Dravidian hypothesis, as have several Western scholars.
Theory 3: Tribal and Austro-Asiatic Languages [Prakash N. Salame]
Scholars such as Prakash N. Salame claim up to 90 percent decipherment through Gondi, a proto-Dravidian language, while Prabhunath Hembrom explores Santali connections. Both proposals face scepticism due to methodological gaps. Others have linked the script to Ho, a language of the Jharkhand region. These claims, often made with passionate certainty, have not persuaded the mainstream of the field.
Theory 4: Not a Script At All [Steve Farmer]
The most disruptive hypothesis came in a 2004 paper by historian Steve Farmer, computer linguist Richard Sproat, and Indologist Michael Witzel. They argued that the Harappan symbols are not a script in any linguistic sense.
Their evidence: the inscriptions are too short to encode a language, there is too much repetition of the same short sequences, and the signs may function more like religious or political emblems — heraldic or ritual markers rather than phonetic notation.
Parpola and others criticised the paper sharply at the time. But its conclusions have since found additional support. Linguist Peggy Mohan, author of Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through Its Languages, told that the signs resemble a hallmarking system — like the personalised marks that dhobis in India still use today to identify their customers’ laundry.
“Even today dhobis in India have their own signs which are useful for them but they are not what you would call language,” she said.
A software engineer named Bahata Mukhopadhyay has suggested the script encoded rules for taxation and commerce, rather than spoken language — aligning with the Farmer-Sproat-Witzel view.
Enter the Machines: AI and the Million-Dollar Prize
In early 2025, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin announced a prize of one million dollars for anyone who could credibly decipher the Harappan script. The announcement was partly political — the Dravidian hypothesis, if confirmed, would provide enormous cultural validation for the Tamil-speaking south — but it also reflected the genuine global excitement around the possibility that AI-powered analysis might finally break the deadlock.
A March 2025 study using a hybrid CNN-Transformer model explored visual patterns in Harappan inscriptions and found symbol frequency and co-occurrence that align with known scripts, but the researchers concluded that further linguistic context is needed.
Computer scientist Rajesh PN Rao at the University of Washington has used statistical analysis to argue that the script shows the conditional entropy patterns characteristic of linguistic systems — consistent with it being a script — rather than the patterns of non-linguistic symbol systems. His work counters the Farmer-Sproat-Witzel hypothesis, though it does not identify the language.
India has also turned to young entrepreneurs in AI and machine learning, with a pan-India competition identifying 40 participants and 10 researchers to contribute to decipherment efforts — part of the broader “Gyan Bharatam Mission” announced at the September 2025 conference to preserve and study manuscript heritage.
The difficulty is that AI tools are powerful at pattern recognition but are still dependent on the same fundamental limitation: without an anchor — a known language, a bilingual text, a confirmed phonetic value for even one sign — there is no way to validate any reading.
A machine that finds statistical patterns in the Harappan corpus can tell you which signs cluster together, which sequences are most common, and how the entropy of the sign distribution compares to known languages. It cannot tell you what the signs mean.
Why It Matters Beyond History
The stakes of decipherment go far beyond academic curiosity. If the Harappan script is ever genuinely cracked, it would answer questions that lie at the heart of India’s self-understanding as a civilisation.
Was the language Sanskrit? Then the Vedic and Harappan traditions were not separate civilisations but continuous ones, and Sanskrit is indigenous to the subcontinent in a way that the Indo-Aryan migration theory denies.
Was it proto-Dravidian? Then the Harappan people were the ancestors of south India’s linguistic communities, and the narrative of Dravidian culture being peripheral to “mainstream” Indian civilisation is historically backwards.
Was it something else entirely — a language unrelated to anything that survived — or was it not a language at all, but a system of marks? Then the Harappan civilisation, the world’s largest Bronze Age urban culture, is in some sense permanently opaque: we can see its cities and measure its drainage systems, but we cannot read its mind.
That is the condition we are currently in. A century of scholarship, four thousand seals, 400-odd symbols, AI models, international conferences attended by prime ministers, a million-dollar prize, and still — silence.
The seal is still waiting.
Source: Indian Express
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.