Experts see breakthrough in cracking world's oldest writing

Academics from Oxford University believe they may be on the verge of a "breakthrough" in finally cracking the world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which has preserved its secrets for 5,000 years. The international research project may be on to a lost bronze age middle eastern society where slaves lived on near-starvation rations, the British Broadcasting Co. reported. "I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough," said Wolfson College fellow Jacob Dahl, a director of the Ancient World Research Cluster. Dahl and his colleagues are using a device taking highly detailed images of the symbols cut into clay tablets. The device is helping the researchers decode a writing system dubbed proto-Elamite, used between 3200 and 2900 B.C. in a region now southwest of Iran. Crowdsourcing Dahl brought the image-making device on the Eurostar to the Louvre Museum in Paris, which holds the most important collection of this proto-Elamite writing. The device uses a Reflectance Transformation Imaging System, involving 76 separate photographic lights and computer processing to capture every groove on the clay tablets' surface. A resulting virtual image can then be manipulated as if being examined from all possible angles. But here is where crowdsourced analysis comes in: these images will be publicly available online, with the aim of using a kind of academic crowdsourcing. Dahl said the sharing of theories by posting the images online should accelerate this process of decoding the writing. So far Dahl has deciphered 1,200 separate signs, but admitted much is still unknown - even such basic words as "cow" or "cattle." "It's an unknown, uncharted territory of human history," he said. Proto-elamite Proto-Elamite is a writing system developed in an area that is now in south-western Iran, adopted about 3200 B.C. and was borrowed from neighboring Mesopotamia. It was written from right to left in wet clay tablets, more than 1,000 of which have survived. Most of the texts were brought by 19th century French archaeologists to the Louvre. Dahl noted an unusual absence of scholarship, with no evidence of any symbols or learning exercises to preserve the accuracy of the writing. "It's an early example of a technology being lost. The lack of a scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and the writing system may eventually have become useless," he said. Worse, the writing is not like other ancient writing styles - no bilingual texts and few helpful overlaps. Yet, Dahl said one of the important historical significances of this proto-Elamite writing is that it was the first recorded case of one society adopting writing from another neighboring group. But when the proto-Elamites borrowed the concept of writing from the Mesopotamians, they made up a different set of symbols. Agricultural society So far, the writings had suggested to researchers a simple agricultural society, with a ruling household. Below them was a tier of middle-ranking figures. Further below was a majority of workers treated like "cattle with names." Dahl said the people's diet included barley, which may have been crushed into a form of porridge, and they drank weak beer. The researchers also learned the amount of food received by these farm workers was barely above starvation level, though those with higher status enjoyed yogurt, cheese and honey, and kept goats, sheep and cattle. Dahl said the tablets also had many images of animals and mythical creatures, but has yet to find representations of the human form of any kind. — LBG, GMA News