Race to Decipher the 4,000-Year-Old Indus Valley Script

Thousands of years ago, people in a place called the Indus Valley wrote on tiny stone seals and tablets.

Today, nobody knows how to read their writing, so it is like a secret code that has stayed locked for about 4,000 years.

In January 2025, the leader of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu offered a prize of one million dollars to anyone who could crack the code.

Suddenly, many people wanted to try, including professors, computer programmers, and even a 17-year-old student.

A scientist named Rajesh P N Rao got around 200 emails from people who said they had solved it, but their answers were all very different.

Some people now use computers and artificial intelligence to look for patterns in the signs.

One programmer in Texas thinks the writing is an old form of Sanskrit, but other experts disagree and say we need to study the ancient objects more carefully.

A Canadian researcher who worked on the script for decades says we may never fully read it, because some signs appear only once.

No one has been proven correct yet, so the ancient mystery continues.