A 2,000-year-old code that once looked like random scratches on parchment has finally given up its secret, turning a handful of obscure Dead Sea fragments into a new window on one of antiquity’s most ...

Across the globe, a race is under way to crack some of the last mysterious forms of writing that have never been translated.

Researchers have managed to decode an ancient script that scholars have been unable to understand for decades. In a study published in the journal Transactions of the Philological Society, a team of ...

A team of early-career researchers at the University of Cologne has succeeded in decoding a script that has been puzzling scholars for over seventy years: the so-called ‘unknown Kushan script’. Over a ...

An introduction to writing -- The riddle of the Sphinx: the decipherment of Egyptian writing -- Ahura Mazda came to my aid: the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform -- In cuneiform on six bricks: the ...

For decades, a handful of Dead Sea fragments written in an unknown alphabet sat in scholarly limbo, legible in shape but mute in meaning. Now a researcher has finally cracked that hidden script, ...

The author is assistant professor (History) at the Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, Delhi University. It has been roughly more than 100 years, since the discovery of the mighty civilization on the banks ...

The Rosetta Stone is the most famous of ancient inscriptions; it unlocked the meaning of thousands of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions. The undeciphered Phaistos Disc, discovered by an Italian ...

When the Spanish conquered the Maya empire in the 16th century, they forced their new subjects to convert to Christianity and speak and write in Spanish. But long before the Maya used the Roman ...

The Kushan Empire in Central Asia was one of the most influential states of the ancient world. A research team at the University of Cologne's Department of Linguistics has now deciphered a writing ...