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By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent
The world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which has so far defied
attempts to uncover its 5,000-year-old secrets, could be about to be decoded by
Oxford University academics.
This international research project is already casting light on a lost bronze
age middle eastern society where enslaved workers lived on rations close to the
starvation level.
"I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough," says Jacob
Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World
Research Cluster.
Dr Dahl's secret weapon is being able to see this writing more clearly than
ever before.
In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies
and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and
flashing out light.
This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high
quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This
is Indiana Jones with software.
It's being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used
between around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modern
Iran.
And the Oxford team think that they could be on the brink of understanding this
last great remaining cache of undeciphered texts from the ancient world.
Tablet computer
Dr Dahl shipped his image-making device on the Eurostar to the Louvre Museum in
Paris, which holds the most important collection of this writing.
Jacob Dahl at the Ashmolean Museum Jacob Dahl wants the public and other
academics to help with an online decipherment of the texts
The clay tablets were put inside this machine, the Reflectance Transformation
Imaging System, which uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights and
computer processing to capture every groove and notch on the surface of the
clay tablets.
It allows a virtual image to be turned around, as though being held up to the
light at every possible angle.
These images will be publicly available online, with the aim of using a kind of
academic crowdsourcing.
He says it's misleading to think that codebreaking is about some lonely genius
suddenly understanding the meaning of a word. What works more often is patient
teamwork and the sharing of theories. Putting the images online should
accelerate this process.
But this is painstaking work. So far Dr Dahl has deciphered 1,200 separate
signs, but he says that after more than 10 years study much remains unknown,
even such basic words as "cow" or "cattle".
He admits to being "bitten" by this challenge. "It's an unknown, uncharted
territory of human history," he says.
Extinct language
But why has this writing proved so difficult to interpret?
Dr Dahl suspects he might have part of the answer. He's discovered that the
original texts seem to contain many mistakes - and this makes it extremely
tricky for anyone trying to find consistent patterns.
Continue reading the main story
TABLET TECHNOLOGY
Proto-Elamite is the name given to a writing system developed in an area that
is now in south-western Iran
It was adopted about 3200BC and was borrowed from neighbouring Mesopotamia
It was written from right to left in wet clay tablets
There are more than a thousand surviving tablets in this writing
The biggest group of such texts was collected by 19th Century French
archaeologists and brought back to the Louvre
While other ancient writing, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian and
Mesopotamian, have been deciphered - attempts with proto-Elamite have proved
unsuccessful
He believes this was not just a case of the scribes having a bad day at the
office. There seems to have been an unusual absence of scholarship, with no
evidence of any lists of symbols or learning exercises for scribes to preserve
the accuracy of the writing.
This first case of educational underinvestment proved fatal for the writing
system, which was corrupted and then completely disappeared after only a couple
of hundred years. "It's an early example of a technology being lost," he says.
"The lack of a scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and
the writing system may eventually have become useless."
Making it even harder to decode is the fact that it's unlike any other ancient
writing style. There are no bi-lingual texts and few helpful overlaps to
provide a key to these otherwise arbitrary looking dashes and circles and
symbols.
This is a writing system - and not a spoken language - so there's no way of
knowing how words sounded, which might have provided some phonetic clues.
Dr Dahl says that one of the really important historical significances of this
proto-Elamite writing is that it was the first ever recorded case of one
society adopting writing from another neighbouring group.
But infuriatingly for the codebreakers, when these proto-Elamites borrowed the
concept of writing from the Mesopotamians, they made up an entirely different
set of symbols.
Why they should make the intellectual leap to embrace writing and then at the
same time re-invent it in a different local form remains a puzzle.
But it provides a fascinating snapshot of how ideas can both spread and change.
Mr One Hundred
In terms of written history, this is the very remote past. But there is also
something very direct and almost intimate about it too.
You can see fingernail marks in the clay. These neat little symbols and
drawings are clearly the work of an intelligent mind.
Inside dome of imaging device A set of 76 lights are used in the capturing of
images of surface marks in the ancient tablets
These were among the first attempts by our human ancestors to try to make a
permanent record of their surroundings. What we're doing now - my writing and
your reading - is a direct continuation.
But there are glimpses of their lives to suggest that these were tough times.
It wasn't so much a land of milk and honey, but porridge and weak beer.
Even without knowing all the symbols, Dr Dahl says it's possible to work out
the context of many of the messages on these tablets.
The numbering system is also understood, making it possible to see that much of
this information is about accounts of the ownership and yields from land and
people. They are about property and status, not poetry.
This was a simple agricultural society, with a ruling household. Below them was
a tier of powerful middle-ranking figures and further below were the majority
of workers, who were treated like "cattle with names".
Their rulers have titles or names which reflect this status - the equivalent of
being called "Mr One Hundred", he says - to show the number of people below
him.
It's possible to work out the rations given to these farm labourers.
Dr Dahl says they had a diet of barley, which might have been crushed into a
form of porridge, and they drank weak beer.
The amount of food received by these farm workers hovered barely above the
starvation level.
However the higher status people might have enjoyed yoghurt, cheese and honey.
They also kept goats, sheep and cattle.
For the "upper echelons, life expectancy for some might have been as long as
now", he says. For the poor, he says it might have been as low as in today's
poorest countries.
The tablets also have surprises. Even though there are plenty of pictures of
animals and mythical creatures, Dr Dahl says there are no representations of
the human form of any kind. Not even a hand or an eye.
Was this some kind of cultural or religious taboo?
Dr Dahl remains passionate about what this work says about such societies,
digging into the deepest roots of civilisation. This is about where so much
begins. For instance, proto-Elamite was the first writing ever to use
syllables.
If Macbeth talked about the "last syllable of recorded time", the
proto-Elamites were there for the first.
And with sufficient support, Dr Dahl says that within two years this last great
lost writing could be fully understood.