Research group deciphers enigmatic ancient 'unknown Kushan script'

Phys dot org ^ | July 13, 2023 | University of Cologne

[SunkenCiv]

...A team of early career researchers at the University of Cologne has succeeded in decoding a script that has been puzzling scholars for more than 70 years: the so-called "unknown Kushan script." ...Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann and Natalie Korobzow examined photographs of inscriptions found in caves as well as characters on bowls and clay pots from various Central Asian countries in order to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

On 1 March 2023, they first announced their partial decipherment of the unknown Kushan script at an online conference of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tajikistan. Currently, about 60% of the characters can be read, and the group is working to decipher the remaining characters...

So far, several dozen mostly short inscriptions are known, most of them originating from the territory of the present-day states of Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. There is also a longer trilingual that was found by French archaeologists in the 1960s at Dašt-i Nāwur in Afghanistan: on a boulder at 4,320 m altitude on Mount Qarabayu, approximately 100 km southwest of Kabul.

The writing system was has been known since the 1950s, but had never been successfully deciphered. In 2022, a short bilingual was found carved into a rock face in the Almosi Gorge in northwestern Tajikistan, approximately 30 km from the capital Dushanbe. In addition to the unknown Kushan script, it also contains a section in the already known Bactrian language.

This discovery led to renewed attempts by several researchers to decode the script—independently of one another. In the end, the linguists at the University of Cologne succeeded in partially deciphering the writing system in collaboration with the Tajik archaeologist Dr. Bobomullo Bobomulloev, who was instrumental in the discovery and documentation of the bilingual.

[SunkenCiv]

Probably why they found the inscription in the image above at more than 4300 meters elevation. :^)