Tag: Indus valley

Ancient British Language Discovered: Pictish Symbols are Scotland’s Hieroglyphs

New research has shown that the symbols used by the ancient Picts were an actual written language not symbology. The Picts lived in Scotland from AD 300-843, and were a society ruled by kings. Historians know of them through the artefacts they left behind and via the writings of the people whom they had contact with, such as the Romans. In AD 843 they became incorporated into the larger Kingdom of Alba.

There are only a few hundred surviving Pictish stones. Some of them have symbols carved onto them like a relief. Christian motifs, such as a cross, can also be seen ona numberof them.

Researchers have long grappled with the question of what they represent. Are theymere symbols? Or are they full-fledged texts (albeit un-deciphered) which communicate a written language?

This kind of debate is common among scholars trying to unravel ancient symbols. The Indus Valley Script, used in the South Asia 4,000 years ago, is another example of an un-deciphered script that could be either symbols or language, and it was recently proposed that eggshells discovered in Africa could also demonstrate an unknown early language.

Is There Order in the Chaos of Symbols?

A team of language experts, led by Professor Rob Lee of Exeter University, used a system of analysis that looks at how random the symbols are.

It is extremely unlikely that the observed values for the Pictish stones would occur by chance

If symbols are being written willy nilly, with little in the way of order, than its unlikely that they can be a written language. Imagine a writing systemwhere there are no rules how could anyone hope to communicate information?

On the other hand if there is order to the symbols, if things are being written in the same way over and over again, then there is a good chance that it does communicate written language.

Measuring the amount of randomness in an un-deciphered script is tricky because thereare usuallya limited number of examples (only a few hundred for the Pictish language) and quite often these havent been compiled together and published. This means that researchers have to work with small datasets, making this analysis tricky.

Next Step: Crack the Code

Working with the symbols available to them, the team was able to determine that there is some predictability in the Pictish symbols, enough so that it seems likely to be a written script. It is extremely unlikely that the observed values for the Pictish stones would occur by chance, the researchers said in a paper published recently in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

The next step is to expand their dataset and get a record of every Pictish symbol ever recorded. Researchers can then hone in on the language and, hopefully, decipher it.

Demonstrating that the Pictish symbols are writing, with the symbols probably corresponding to words, opens a unique line of further research for historians and linguists investigating the Picts and how they viewed themselves, said the team.

What we need now of course is a Scottish version of the Rosetta Stone or the Behistun Inscriptions to help researchers decipher the language. If the Pictish code can be cracked, we could be about to learn a lot more about the ancient people of Scotland, and open up our understanding of ancient Britain.

Buried Alive? The World’s Oldest Leper Found in India

It’s a sombre tale; one of death, disease and live burial. But the body of a man found in Rajasthan, India reveals much more than an ancient horror story. The disovery in the town of Balathal, 40km north-east of Udaipur, is tying together some of the mysteries surrounding the tribes of the Indus Valley, who lived in the shadows of the mighty Harappans.

The unfortunate man is thought to have been aged between 25 and 45, and predates the earliest-known human leprosy case by around 2,000 years. The previous oldest was an Egyptian dating to 400-250 BC, though the Ebers Papyrus mentions the disfiguring disease as early as 1,550 BC.

The man, who belonged to the agricultural Ahar-Banas culture, may also have met a gruesome ritualistic end. Though bodies in the Harappan region were usually cremated, diseased frames were consigned to the earth – and it was frequent practice to bury those with afflictions alive. The man was buried in the cross-legged samadhi yoga posture, which appears to uphold this morbid notion.

So there’s the death and disease – what of the leper’s little-known tribal provenance? Rarely anything is found from the Ahar-Banas group, and they are regularly confused with their much more illustrious Harappan contemporaries from the twin cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro.

Yet they were much more than jealous next-door neighbours. Converting from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture around the mid-fifth millennium BC, the Ahars had pottery and copper by the fourth millennium BC, and had created complex road, housing and fortification systems by 2,500 BC. They are even the proud owners of the world’s first burned brick, found in Gilund in 2001.

“Gilund is emerging as an urban centre of the Aharites,” Vasant Shinde of Deccan College told India Today. “The Harappans did help them flourish but the farmers retained their culture intact,” says S.P. Gupta, Chairman of the Archaeological Society of India. The skeleton shows that as well as the Harappans, the Ahars took cultural lines from their neighbours in south and central India. Cow dung ash found in his pit are believed to have come from mounds towards south Deccan and north Dharwar. How much more do you want from one skeleton?

Computer Helps Decode Harappan Grammar

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 texts 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.

Recent evidence suggests that the fertile Indus River basin could have been home to an empire larger and older than its more famous contemporaries in the Middle East, and thus be one of the cradles of civilisation. Up to now excavations in the Indus River Valley have provided us with roughly 5,000 seals, tablets and amulets, filled with about 500 different symbols, all created somewhere between 2600 and 1900 BC. But what do these tell us?

Rao imagines he could write in “flawless Harappan”, even though he may have no idea what the assembled sequences might mean.

Despite numerous attempts to decipher the symbols – known as Harappan script – a full translation has long eluded scientists. Some archaeologists think to have found paralles with the cuneiform of Mesopotamia; others speculate an unlikely link between Harappan signs and the birdmen glyphs found thousands of miles away in the Pacific Ocean at Easter Island.

A 2004 paper even suggested that the Indus Valley people were functionally illiterate and the Harappan symbols were political or religious symbols rather than writing.

To start the search for what meaning the text might hold, American and Indian mathematicians and computer scientists input the symbols into a computer program and then ran a statistical analysis of the symbols and where they appear in the texts. Time.com explains:

The group examined hundreds of Harappan texts and tested their structure against other known languages using a computer program. Every language, they suggest, possesses what is known as “conditional entropy”: the degree of randomness in a given sequence. In English, for example, the letter “t” can be found preceding a whole variety of other letters, but instances of “tx” or “tz” are far more infrequent than “th” or “ta.” “A written language comes about through this mix of built-in rules and flexible variables,” says Mayank Vahia, an astrophysicist at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai who worked on the study. Quantifying this principle through computer probability tests, they determined the Harappan script had a similar measure of conditional entropy to other writing systems, including English, Sanskrit and Sumerian. If it mathematically looked and acted like writing, they concluded, then surely it is writing.

Voynich Manuscript - Wikipedia Commons This is just the beginning of ‘deciphering’ the Harappan symbols. The international team hopes to compose a grammar of Indus signs, as they’ve already found that certain placements of characters in the text to be more likely: a “fish” sign most frequently appeared in the middle of a sequence, a U-shaped “jar” sign toward the end.

There are some who say the Indus Valley script can never be deciphered without a bilingual text like the Rosetta Stone or really long texts, but Rao is optimistic that given a few more years, the team may be able to at least narrow down the language family of the script by using computer analysis to gain an in-depth understanding of the underlying grammar.

With the help of the software, Rajesh Rao, associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington imagines he could write in “flawless Harappan” – even though he may have no idea what the assembled sequences might mean.

Marcelo Montemurro, a scientist at the University of Manchester now wants to test the software on the up to know undecipherable medieval text known as the Voynich manuscript: “The text is not long, but these methods can be applied so we can at least obtain a list of special words that would presumably convey the overall meaning of the texts.”

With – amongst others – Proto-Elamite, Linear-A and Olmec still to go, the team won’t run out of Ancient Scripts to decipher anywhere soon! Luckily computing power gives modern-day scientists a huge advantage over their predecessors: not only for ‘breaking the code’ on mysterious ancient languages, but also in making documents thought long-time lost readable again.

How did leprosy spread across the ancient world?

Over the past five weeks two new studies have been released that are giving scholars new clues as to how leprosy became a global scourge.

The first, and most dramatic, find came out at the end of May and reported on the analysis of a 4,000 year old skeleton from the site of Balathal, a Harappa site, in India. The analysis detected the presence of leprosy, making it, by far, the oldest case known. (For comparison the next oldest cases date to nearly 2,500 years ago)

This study means that the troops of Alexander the Great might well have spread the disease after they returned home from their campaign in India a popular idea given historical accounts that describe a disease that sounds like leprosy coming in their wake.

It also makes it possible that the 3,500 year old Ebers Papyrus, in Ancient Egypt, did in fact discuss leprosy.

The second study wasreleased just a weekago online in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Itoffers a possible reason why such virulent outbreaks occurred in the 4th century Byzantine World, and then Middle Ages Europe.

The team was led by G. Michael Taylor of the Centre for Infectious Diseases and International Health at University College, London.

In it the scientists analyze the skeleton of an adult female found in Uzbekistan dating from the 1st 4th century A.D and find that she had leprosy.

Now,while there are other cases of leprosy known inCentral Asia, what is specialaboutthis case isthat the scientists were able to identify the type she had.It turned out that genetically its the same type (type 3) as those that pop up in Europe and in afew instances, China.

This isnt likely to be a coincidence.

You see at the end of the second century B.C. China opened its export market for silk. This quickly mothballed into what we call the Silk Road linking China, Central Asia and Europe in an ancient long-distance trade route. The scientists theorize that this trade route may have aided the spread of leprosy westward to Europe.

The idea certainly seems plausible. Just look at this timeline of the history of leprosy and you can see the overlap between outbreaks in East Asia and Europe.

Type 3 strains have also been reported in China and it is possible that leprosy may have reached Uzbekistan and other regions of Central Asia through the movement of peoples and trade westwards and southwards, eventually reaching Europe, theteam says in the journal article.

This is supported by the observation of (type 3) strains in Iran and some regions of Turkey.

These discoveries leave some important questions to be answered of course.

Why hasnt there been skeletal remains found of someone with leprosy for the period between 2,000 500 B.C? Did the disease die out between them? Or have we simply not found them yet?

Also, are there more “type 3” cases waiting to be found in Central Asia that can solidly prove a Silk Road avenue of spread?