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India announces a $1 million prize for decoding the 5300-year-old Indus Valley script.
The government of the state of Tamil Nadu, in south-east India, is offering the €960,000 reward to anyone who can decipher the writing of the Indus Valley civilisation. The BBC reported that MK Stalin, the chief minister of the Tamil Nadu state, recently made the prize announcement following the publication of a study revealing similarities between the Indus signs and inscriptions found on local pottery [...]. Made up of signs and symbols, the writing consists of around 4,000 short inscriptions, most of them engraved on small objects such as seals and pottery. Theories link the script to early Brahmi scripts, Indo-Aryan languages and Sumerian.A problem might be sorting out the authentic artefacts with inscriptions from the much larger number of extant ones that do not actually come from controlled archaepological excavations (including in museum collections) with fake ones.
Decyphering the script would allow researchers to gain further knowledge on governance and beliefs. However, despite numerous efforts by linguists and archeologists, the Indus script remains shrouded in secrecy.
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