TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Do you enjoy solving puzzles? What would you do if given a foreign code to decipher but no guide to grammar and no dictionary?
That is exactly the problem faced by archeologists and linguists with regard to a number of ancient writing systems that remain a mystery to this day, despite technological advances. They tell of advanced civilizations whose writing we cannot understand.
Svenja Bonmann is a specialist in historical-comparative linguistics at the University of Cologne in western Germany. Her research involves trying to decipher ancient languages and reconstruct their structures.
"I find it very appealing to be faced with an intellectual puzzle that is so challenging that even the brightest minds have failed to solve it," she said. "Such written records give us access to a culture that has long since disappeared." She adds that it was as if these writing systems were a time machine, allowing her to interact with a foreign culture, at least passively.
Not enough text to work from
Bonmann's current research focuses on the Epi-Olmec writing system once used on Mexico's southern coast. Though certain inscriptions and symbols indicate an early writing system, the corpus of texts is so small and the context so uncertain that deciphering it is very difficult.
The script of the Indus Valley civilization, also called the Harappan civilization, in what is now northwest India and Pakistan is equally mysterious. It appears on hundreds of seals and shards of pottery but almost always in extremely short sequences — whether it represents a fully developed language or rather a system of symbols is still debated.
The Rongorongo script discovered on Chile's Easter Island is also very abstract. It consists of inscriptions, or glyphs, that depict birds, people or ornamental shapes. Only a few wooden tablets, some of which are damaged, bear the inscriptions.
More is known about the Minoan civilization centered on the Greek island of Crete. But of its three writing systems, only Linear B, an early form of Greek, has been deciphered. Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A remain a mystery.
The famous Phaistos Disc, a clay object with spiral-shaped symbols that were likely stamped into the clay before firing, was discovered on Crete in the early 20th century. Dating back to around 1700 B.C., the script is spectacular but difficult to decipher as the piece is unique.
Etruscan, an ancient language spoken in central Italy, also remains a mystery. Although the alphabet is legible because it is derived from Greek, the language itself has hardly any recognizable relatives. This makes it difficult to understand what is written on the inscriptions.
Proto-Elamite is the earliest known writing and administrative tradition in the area that later became Elam, now Iran. The signs are well catalogued but the tablets are often fragments, with the content resembling administrative notes. It does not fit into any known language family.
Need for a Rosetta Stone
All these scripts have one fundamental problem: They have no equivalent Rosetta Stone, a famous artifact on which the same text appears in three different scripts, which enabled scholars who could read Ancient Greek to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. Without such a key, it remains difficult to assign characters to sounds, syllables or words.
But it's not impossible, said Bonmann, as the deciphering of Linear B showed. "You don't necessarily need bilingual texts but what you do need is some kind of continuity with historical times. For example, place names or names of rulers or gods. Then you can definitely do it."
But it is difficult when there are only a few very short texts available, as it is difficult to identify patterns and test hypotheses. The same applies when the sites where an object bearing a language has been found, are destroyed or poorly documented. "You are always working with fragments or scraps of the past," said Bonmann. She added that fortunately in Europe there was a comparatively large amount of evidence but in places such as central America a lot had been lost. Here, she explained, researchers had to work with the little "that the conquistadors left behind."
She explained that a crucial factor in deciphering a language was whether it could be assigned to a known language family. If not, there were no sound systems, word structures or typical grammatical patterns against which to test hypotheses.
How can artificial intelligence help?
More and more, artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to try to break codes. It can check character strings for patterns, distinguish between variants, supplement damaged sections and count frequencies.
But Bonmann said that so far, AI has reached its limits when dealing with very small amounts of text. Artificial intelligence requires large amounts of data for pattern recognition. "In my opinion, it is relatively unlikely that programs will be developed in the foreseeable future that can operate with so little data."
Furthermore AI primarily combined already known information rather than truly "thinking up" something new, she said. "AI simply varies certain phrases and words, thereby suggesting intelligence. But in reality, this is merely a simulation of intelligence. The program does not truly think."
This sometimes results in interpretations that appear elegant but are scientifically unsound. And there is a danger that computing systems will reflect the unconscious expectations of researchers. For example, if they "discover" relationships between language families that occur particularly frequently in the material used to train AI, Bonmann warns.
This is perhaps precisely what makes these writing systems so appealing: They show that even in the age of seemingly advanced technology some voices from the past remain silent — at least for now.
"As far as we know, humans are the only species with a sense of history. We think about where we come from and where we are going," Bonmann said. For her, reflecting on past societies, how they functioned and why they disappeared is at the core of what it means to be human.
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