Good news! It is always exciting if another old language is deciphered! Let's see what we will learn!
"The Kushan Empire in Central Asia was one of the most influential states of the ancient world. ...
A team of ... 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 period of several years, ... 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. ..."
A team of ... 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 period of several years, ... 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. ..."
From the abstract:
"Several dozen inscriptions in an unknown writing system have been discovered in an area stretching geographically from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to southern Afghanistan. Most inscriptions can be dated to the period from the 2nd century BCE to the 3rd century CE, yet all attempts at decipherment have so far been unsuccessful. The recent discovery of previously unknown inscriptions near the Almosi gorge, Tajikistan, however, allows for a renewed attempt at decipherment. Drawing upon a catalogue of characters and a distributional analysis, we report two identical sequences in the newly found Almosi inscriptions and in the Dašt-i Nāwur trilingual. Based on parallel texts in Bactrian, we suggest to read the name of the Kushan emperor Vema Takhtu in these sequences, accompanied by the title ‘king of kings’ and several epithets. This allows for the deduction of probable phonetic values of 15 different consonantal signs and four vocalic diacritics and the inference that the inscriptions record a previously unknown Middle Iranian language."
Research group deciphers enigmatic ancient script (primary news source) 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 system that sheds new light on its history / publication in the ‘Transactions of the Philological Society’
A Partial Decipherment of the Unknown Kushan Script* (open access)
FIGURE 1 Map of the find sites of the inscriptions
No comments:
Post a Comment