The Rosetta Stone allowed 19th century scholars to translate symbols left by an ancient civilization and thus decipher the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics. But the symbols found on many other ...

The Indus Valley Civilization built advanced cities, developed complex trade networks, and left behind thousands of inscriptions—but their language remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in ...

Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this ...

Indiana Jones wannabes, your time has come. A local government in India is offering a $1 million prize to the first person who cracks the code of an ancient script found in the ruins of one of the ...

The government of Tamil Nadu, a state in India, has announced a $1 million reward for anyone who can successfully decipher the Indus script, one of the greatest unsolved linguistic mysteries of the ...

Reprint of an article in Scientific Americans, March 1983. From African presence in early Asia, edited by Runoko Rashidi, a special issue of the Journal of African civilizations. siris_sil_694382 ...

Figure 1. 'Unicorn' stamp seal and modern impression. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access/Public domain In my previous post, I discussed the Indian subcontinent's first civilization and ...

In the mid-1850s, a few years after the British annexation of the Punjab, some railway builders stumbled upon an ancient mound of terracotta bricks at Harappa in the valley of the Ravi. Despite ...