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Computers Help Decode Ancient Texts

Eric Bland, Discovery News

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For Asko Parpolo, a professor at the University of Helsinki and an expert on the Indus Valley script, the PNAS research helps prove that the symbols are indeed an early written language. It does little, however, to decipher the text.

The written of the ancient inhabitants of the Indus Valley might never be decoded, according to Parpolo, but computer modeling of unknown languages could help reveal their meaning as well, said Marcelo Montemurro, a scientist at the University of Manchester.

Using modern texts to validate this theory, Montemurro and his colleagues used computers and information theory to find the main topic of written works including Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Not surprisingly, words like species, selection and islands were some of the top ten words in Origin of Species.

Montemurro now wants to test his model on an undeciphered 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," said Montemurro.

The technique "separates words like 'a' and 'the' that are frequent but not functional from words that presumably convey the overall meaning of the texts," said Montemurro. With the most significant symbols identified, scientists could then study those symbols intensively to decipher the language more quickly.

For now, however, the Indus Valley script and the Voynich manuscript, along with many other ancient texts, remain indecipherable, but scientists are hopeful that computers will eventually decode the symbols on them.

"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," said Rao.

"I am however optimistic that given a few more years, we 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."

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