A picture of the inscriptions recently found on a rock face in Tajikistan. Researchers have partially deciphered the "unknown Kushan script" — a writing system that has puzzled linguists since it was ...

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the most advanced in the world for over 500 years. More than 1000 settlements sprawled across 250,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan and northwest India ...

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 ...

Archaeologists say they have uncovered evidence of what may be the world's oldest known alphabet. The alphabetic writing system was identified on finger-length clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in ...

Starting in the the 1950s, archaeologists conducting excavations in central Asia have discovered several dozen inscriptions in a mysterious script. The writing system was coined “ecriture inconnue” in ...

A tantalizing $1 million prize has been announced for anyone who can crack one of history’s most elusive puzzles: the Indus Valley Script (IVS). This ancient writing system, created by one of the ...

As civilizations die, so do their forms of writing, top scholars of ancient cultures found in the first study to examine the extinction of writing systems. The research also showed that ancient ...

SANTA CRUZ — While a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, UC Santa Cruz history professor Elaine Sullivan unearthed ancient artifacts in Syria marked with an alphabetic script whose meaning ...

The room we are in is locked. It is windowless and lit from above by a fluorescent bulb. In the hallway outside—two stories beneath the city of London—attendants in dark suits patrol silently, giving ...