Posted on 03/23/2024 10:52:36 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The civilization of Indus River Valley is considered one of the three earliest civilizations in world history, along with Mesopotamia and Egypt. Bigger geographically than those two as it unfolded starting in 3300 BCE across what is now Pakistan and India, the Indus civilization boasted uniform weights and measures, skilled artisans, a multifaceted system of trade and commerce, and upwards of 500 symbols and signs for communicating.
But one question has vexed scholars for decades and hindered attempts to learn more about this civilization: Were those characters a language or more akin to pictograms? Even as some experts begin to translate the right-to-left script found in Indus inscriptions, there is little agreement.
"That's a controversy which is not yet settled," said Debasis Mitra, a professor of computer science who is now connected to this quest thanks to a novel grant he was awarded from the National Endowment for the Humanities: "Ancient Script Digitization and Archival (ASDA) of Indus Valley Artifacts using Deep Learning."
Graduate student assistant Deva Atturu, who will defend his master's thesis in April, is assisting Mitra with conducting the grant-funded research. Just this month he and Mitra virtually attended the South Asian Archaeology Conference 2024 from the University of Chicago, where Atturu presented on their work...
The process uses an automated script recognition (ASR) system to extract coded sequences of graphemes from a dataset of more than 1,000 photographs of Indus seals. Using two-staged artificial neural networks, the ASR has achieved 88% success in detecting graphemes.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
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