A group of German students have for the first time deciphered an ancient script dating back thousands of years to the Kushan Empire, nearly 70 years after it was first identified. It records a previously completely unknown Middle Iranian language.
The researchers proposed the name Eteo-Tocharian to describe the newly identified language, which is believed to have been, at one point, one of the official languages of the Kushan Empire.
A team of "early career researchers" at the University of Cologne has identified about 60% of the characters and is working to decipher the remaining characters, according to an article published in the journal Transactions of the Philological Society.
Since the 1950s, archaeological excavations in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan have led to the discovery of several dozen inscriptions in an unknown writing system. Inscriptions varied in size, from fragments of two and three characters to longer inscriptions with several lines of text.
Most of the writing samples were found clustered in what was the ancient Iranian civilization of Bactria, which bordered the Hindu Kush and the Hisar mountain range. But the language was neither Bactrian nor Saka Khotanese, another language spoken in western China.
The discovery was made when researchers were able to identify the name of the Kushan emperor Vema Takhtu in the longest inscription, written in three languages. The inscription is known as Dašt-i Nāwur Trilingual.
The three scripts in the trilingual Dašt-i Nāwur include the unknown script and two others more commonly used in the area at the time – Greek script for the Bactrian language and Kharoṣṭhī script for Gāndhārī.
Another recent discovery of two new inscriptions in the unknown script also proved essential to researchers. The new inscriptions include one "probably bilingual with Bactrian" which "allows the substitution of plausible phonetic values for various signs of the unknown script".
“This discovery led to multiple attempts by multiple researchers to decode the script – independently of each other,” the researchers said in a press release. Previous research has shown that the unknown script, believed to have been used between 200 BC and 700 AD, bears a superficial similarity to Gāndhārī, but could not be translated.
Linguists were able to decipher the language using a methodology that has been used to decipher previously unknown scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone.
Source: Artnet News