8 Ancient Writing Systems That Haven't Been Deciphered Yet

Mental Floss ^ | Feb 11, 2025 | Arika Okrent |

[BenLurkin]

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the most advanced in the world for over 500 years. More than 1000 settlements sprawled across 250,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan and northwest India from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. It had several large, well-planned cities like Mohenjo-daro, common iconography, and a script no one has been able to understand.

Linguists studying the Indus script don't know anything about the underlying language and there's no multilingual Rosetta Stone, but scholars have analyzed its structure for clues and compared it to other scripts. Most Indologists think it's “logo-syllabic” script like Sumerian cuneiform or Mayan glyphs. But they disagree about whether it was a spoken language or a full writing system; some believe it represented only part of an Indus language.

One team has created the first publicly available, electronic corpus of Indus texts. Another, led by computer scientist Rajesh Rao, analyzed the randomness in the script's sequences [PDF]. Their results indicated it's most similar to Sumerian cuneiform, which suggests it may represent a language.

The Indus Valley script is far from the only one to remain mysterious. Here are eight others you might try your hand at deciphering.

Linear A

Cretan Hieroglyphics

Wadi el-Hol Script

Sitovo Inscription

Olmec Writing

Singapore Stone

Rongorongo

Proto-Elamite

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin.

[17th Miss Regt]

Imagine way in the future, when they unearth the text of Kamala’s speeches.

The speeches are on scrolls that look empty. They will only be able to see the writing when they treat the scrolls with a dilute solution of ranch dressing. And the revealed text will still be indecipherable.

[Dr. Sivana]

Not to mention the IRS Tax Code.

And health insurance policies!

[M Kehoe]

Call Big Balls

5.56mm

[Right Brother]

😂

[null and void]

Upper Paleolithic writing recovered from Magdalenian cave sites (top) compared to characters in three early written languages: (b) Indus valley signs, (c) Greek and (d) Runic. Settegast (p. 28) after Forbes and Crowder, 1979.

[SunkenCiv]

Hey, nice! Nice find, and I’m stealin’ it. ;^)

[null and void]

As intended!