At Smithsonian Magazine, history correspondent Eli Wizevich reports that officials of the southern Indian state Tamil Nadu are offering $1 million to anyone who can decode an enigmatic ancient script. The script originates in the Indus Valley civilization which flourished from roughly 5300 through 2500 BCE.

That civilization

… left behind artifacts and archaeological sites that have kept scholars busy for centuries—many featuring a mysterious script that nobody has been able to read. “The reason behind its demise remains a mystery, as do the rules and beliefs of the society, all possibly locked behind their yet-to-be deciphered language,” as Regina Sienra writes for My Modern Met. “Officials Are Offering $1 Million to Anyone Who Can Decode This Ancient Script,” January 30, 2025

The featured image above is a seals with signs and symbols of the Indus Valley civilization, awaiting decipherment, courtesy Gary Todd via Wikimedia Commons under CC0 1.0.

A couple of constraints:

The Indus script is especially perplexing because it tends to occur in short inscriptions, usually around five symbols long, according to Artnet’s Min Chen. The absence of a bilingual artifact like the Rosetta Stone only exacerbates the difficulty…

[Computer scientist Rajesh P.N.] Rao thinks that previous efforts to infuse the script with spiritual and religious meaning ignore the fact that the script has mostly been found on objects of commerce, according to BBC News. The typical layout includes signs running across the top of a seal with an animal figure underneath. “Decode This Ancient Script”

The job will likely be done using AI:

Scholars like Rao have increasingly turned to computer science and machine learning tools to identify patterns in the arrangement of these signs and symbols.

Using a data set of Indus signs, for instance, Nisha Yadav, a computer scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, determined that 67 signs account for about 80 percent of the written script.

“We still don’t know whether the signs are complete words, or part of words or part of sentences,” Yadav tells BBC News. “Our understanding is that the script is structured and there is an underlying logic in the writing.” “Decode This Ancient Script”

Meanwhile, at ZME Science, science journalist Tibi Puiu reports on how AI is enabling researchers to read an ancient Roman scroll that was “burned to a crisp” 2000 years ago when Mt. Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum: “Using a combination of 3D X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence, researchers have digitally “unrolled” a number of these scrolls, revealing text that hasn’t been read in nearly two millennia. Most recently, they opened a new scroll, known as PHerc. 172, housed at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries. It is one of three Herculaneum scrolls in the library’s collection, donated in the 19th century by Ferdinand IV, the king of Naples and Sicily.”(February 5, 2025)

Good thing the Bodleian kept the charred scroll. One of these days, the new technologies will likely result in a really significant find.