Anyone who can decode 5,000-year-old stone slab can get £800,000 | World | News

Do you think you can work out what’s on these ancient seals? If you can prove it, you could be in line for a whopping $1million (£832m) reward.

Archaegological sites and artefacts left behind by the Indus Valley Civilisation, which emerged more than 5,300 years ago in what is now northwest India and Pakistan, have long been a source of intriguige – and frustration – to researchers.

The civilisation had flourished for centuries and built one of the world’s first urban societies, but the cause of its downfall, as well as the secrets hidden in the written material it left behind, remain a mystery.

Archaeologists still don’t have a deep understanding of the rules and beliefs of the society, and its thought cracking the mysteries of the Indus Valley Script in which messages written on enigmatic seals written could hold the key.

In a bid to finally get some answers, Muthuvel Karunanidhi “MK” Stalin, the chief minister of southern India‘s Tamil Nadu state, announced the life-changing cash reward for anyone who can decipher it.

“We have not been able to clearly understand the writing system of the once flourishing Indus Valley,” Stalin said, as per Divya Chandrababu of 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.”

The announcement was made after a new study by K Rajan and R Sivananthan said it had found “parallels” between Indus script symbols and south Indian graffiti marks from in pottery excavated in Tamil Nadu.

The research team these links said suggested “a kind of cultural contact”, but despite the new clues and considerable efforts by linguistics experts, the meaning behind the Indus’ written language is still hidden.”The Indus script is perhaps the most important system of writing that is undeciphered,” says Asko Parpola, a leading Indologist.

Asko Parpola, a leading Indologist, says, “The Indus script is perhaps the most important system of writing that is undeciphered,” as per BBC News.

Bilingual artefacts which contain two languages can be used to translate lost languages, with the most famous example being the Rosetta Stone, which led to the decipherment of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, no such artefact has yet been found for the Indus script.

Some researchers are using computer science to tackle the riddle, deploying machine learning techniques to analyse it in a bid to spot structures and patterns as per the outlet.

Nisha Yadav, a researcher the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai is among them and is collaborating with others to applying statistical and computational methods to the enigma.

The team say interesting patterns have been found using a digitised data set of Indus signs from the script, but Ms Yadav stressed: “We still don’t know whether the signs are complete words, or part of words or part of sentences”.

Many claim they have already cracked it, but researchers are confident that it won’t be solved quickly.