Breakthrough in world's oldest undeciphered writing

Here is an interesting article written on the BBC recently about the oldest undeciphered writing. Enjoy.   By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent Experts working on proto-Elamite hope they are on the point of 'a breakthrough' The world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which has so far defied attempts to uncover its 5,000-year-old secrets, could be about to be decoded by Oxford University academics. This international research project is already casting light on a lost bronze age middle eastern society where enslaved workers lived on rations close to the starvation level. "I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough," says Jacob Dahl, fellow ofWolfsonCollege,Oxfordand director of the Ancient World Research Cluster. Dr Dahl's secret weapon is being able to see this writing more clearly than ever before. In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out light. This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This is Indiana Jones with software. It's being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modernIran. And theOxfordteam think that they could be on the brink of understanding this last great remaining cache of undeciphered texts from the ancient world. Tablet computer Dr Dahl shipped his image-making device on the Eurostar to theLouvreMuseuminParis, which holds the most important collection of this writing. Jacob Dahl wants the public and other academics to help with an online decipherment of the texts The clay tablets were put inside this machine, the Reflectance Transformation Imaging System, which uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights and computer processing to capture every groove and notch on the surface of the clay tablets. It allows a virtual image to be turned around, as though being held up to the light at every possible angle. These images will be publicly available online, with the aim of using a kind of academic crowdsourcing. He says it's misleading to think that codebreaking is about some lonely genius suddenly understanding the meaning of a word. What works more often is patient teamwork and the sharing of theories. Putting the images online should accelerate this process. But this is painstaking work. So far Dr Dahl has deciphered 1,200 separate signs, but he says that after more than 10 years study much remains unknown, even such basic words as "cow" or "cattle". He admits to being "bitten" by this challenge. "It's an unknown, uncharted territory of human history," he says. Extinct language But why has this writing proved so difficult to interpret? Dr Dahl suspects he might have part of the answer. He's discovered that the original texts seem to contain many mistakes - and this makes it extremely tricky for anyone trying to find consistent patterns.

TABLET TECHNOLOGYProto-Elamite is the name given to a writing system developed in an area that is now in south-westernIranIt was adopted about 3200BC and was borrowed from neighbouringMesopotamiaIt was written from right to left in wet clay tabletsThere are more than a thousand surviving tablets in this writingThe biggest group of such texts was collected by 19th Century French archaeologists and brought back to the LouvreWhile other ancient writing, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian and Mesopotamian, have been deciphered - attempts with proto-Elamite have proved unsuccessful

He believes this was not just a case of the scribes having a bad day at the office. There seems to have been an unusual absence of scholarship, with no evidence of any lists of symbols or learning exercises for scribes to preserve the accuracy of the writing. Continue reading on the BBC...