Historical ‘Unknown’ Script Is Last but not least Deciphered

Scientists have partially deciphered the “unknown Kushan script” — a producing system that has puzzled linguists given that it was first identified in the 1950s.

The researchers decoded the historic text utilizing rock facial area inscriptions that have been discovered near the Almosi Gorge in northwest Tajikistan in 2022, which contain sections in an extinct but recognized language named Bactrian.

“We have labored out that the so-identified as ‘Kushan script’ was utilized to document a formerly unknown Middle Iranian language,” guide examine author Svenja Bonmann, a comparative linguist at the College of Cologne in Germany, stated in a movie posted by the university on July 13. “In other terms, we have deciphered the script.”

This Middle Iranian language was probable a single of the official languages of the Kushan Empire, which sprawled throughout Central Asia and northwestern India in between 200 B.C. and A.D. 700. At the height of its electricity, in the 2nd century A.D., the Kushans co-existed with the Roman Empire. Historical Eurasian nomads that initially settled in the Kushan Empire — identified as the “Tocharians” by Greco Roman authors — might also have spoken the language, which the scientists have proposed to connect with “Eteo-Tocharian.” (“Eteo” is a prefix utilised by modern scholars that means “accurate” or “primary.”)

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The script connected with this Kushan language has remained elusive partly mainly because numerous texts didn’t withstand the exam of time, Bonmann reported. “Most of what was created at the time was most likely recorded on organic and natural resources, these kinds of as palm-tree leaves or the bark of birch trees. Natural content decomposes pretty promptly, which implies practically none of it stays.”

Figures carved into cave partitions and painted on to ceramics, even so, have survived across Central Asia and provide clues about the Kushan language. Archeologists have uncovered many dozen inscriptions given that the late 1950s, generally in existing-working day Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.

“Researchers have worked on this for decades, generally in France and Russia, but they had been fulfilled with tiny success,” Eugen Hill, a professor of comparative linguistics at the College of Cologne who did not take part in the review, reported in the video.

An Iranian language

In a analyze revealed July 12 in the journal Transactions of the Philological Modern society, Bonmann and her colleagues examined the recently learned “bilingual” inscriptions and decoded the Kushan script applying very similar techniques to those formerly employed to decipher other historical languages.

“The most effective-scenario circumstance is to have a parallel textual content — a so-termed bilingual or trilingual — that presents approximately the exact same this means, but in two or three distinctive scripts or languages,” Bonmann mentioned.

In this situation, the researchers were equipped to get the job done out the Kushan indicating making use of parallel inscriptions in Bactrian carved into rocks located at Almosi Gorge and at Dašt-i Nāwur, in Afghanistan, in the 1960s.

“We experienced parallel texts and we understood that the factors they contained had been possible to arrive up in our script,” Bonmann stated. “Step by stage, we ended up in a position to read much more and more Iranian phrases, so it became crystal clear that this was an Iranian language.”

Words that referred to Kushan emperor Vema Takhtu as the “king of kings” in the texts from Tajikistan and Afghanistan tipped the researchers off about the phonetic values of specific figures that experienced, till then, remained a thriller. Their observations suggest the Kushan script data a language that designed mid-way between Bactrian and a language known as Khotanese Saka that was spoken in historical western China.

The discovery sheds mild on far more than 50 % of the 25 to 30 signals employed in the Kushan script, according to the study. The group hopes that by re-examining regarded inscriptions and exploring for extra illustrations, they can decipher the remaining people and go through the enigmatic script in its entirety.

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