Decoding ancient scripts is a remarkable journey into humanity’s past, unearthing forgotten tales and cultures. The cryptic symbols, etched onto stone, parchment, or clay, often remain as the only ...

Researchers have managed to decode an ancient script that scholars have been unable to understand for decades. In a study published in the journal Transactions of the Philological Society, a team of ...

Deciphering a previously unknown script could unlock a better understanding of the ancient Kushan Empire of Central Asia. The unknown Kushan script was found in the 1950s, but only understood this ...

Indiana Jones wannabes, your time has come. A local government in India is offering a $1 million prize to the first person who cracks the code of an ancient script found in the ruins of one of the ...

Over the past century, archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,600 Proto-Elamite inscriptions, but only about 43 in Linear Elamite, scattered widely across Iran. Illustration by Meilan Solly / ...

A fish under a roof. A stick figure without a head. A series of lines that look like a garden rake. These symbols are part of an entirely undeciphered script from a sophisticated ancient civilization ...

A tablet bearing a previously unknown ancient script has been discovered in the Caucasus region, a study has reported. The book-sized tablet—made of basalt, a type of volcanic rock—features 60 signs, ...

In 1908, an archaeologist in Crete discovered a small clay disk bearing unknown symbols. Now known as the Phaistos disk, it remains a modern enigma. The Phaistos disk from circa 1700 B.C. The signs ...

I found the article “Cracking the code”, on the use of AI to read the ancient Mesopotamian script cuneiform, extremely interesting (6 August, p 40). It has got me wondering if such AI could be used, ...

Since farmers began digging up ancient bone fragments in the fields around the Yellow River in eastern China over 100 years ago, researchers have been poring over the mysterious script found on them.

Suppose that you stumbled upon ancient scripts—at least, you are pretty sure that it is writing because the characters are laid out in rows, like modern writing, but the characters are completely ...