ancient script

Everyone makes them (some of us more compulsively than others): scribbled on post-it notes, or kept mentally in our imaginations – we all make lists. And we're not the only ones either; lists have been around for a long time – possibly since the first writing systems and certainly since Sumerian scribes began to keep accounts in the fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia. So what is it about the beauty of a list – its numerical order, hierarchy, completeness – that makes them such a part of how we like to categorise, order and understand the world?

Some scholars consider the ancient Harappan pictograms of the Indus Valley in South Asia to be random. Not so, says Rajesh Rao of the University of Washington. He calculated the conditional entropy - a measure of randomness - of the script and found that it is most likely a language. Next, Rao will analyze the text’s structure using simple statistical software.

The ancient twin cities of the Indus Valley - Harappa and Mohenjo-daro - are part of one of the oldest civilizations known to man. They were huge metropolises holding over 30,000 people each. A series of symbols dating to around 2,500 BC has also been found in the area, yet historians are still unable to draw any meaning from them which could be construed as symbolic of an alphabet in the area.