Word: harappan
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...seals and tablets, remains undeciphered, shrouding the ancient culture in mystery. A code-busting artifact with bilingual text, like the Rosetta stone, has yet to be found. By some counts, more than 100 decipherments of the civilization's often anthropomorphic runes and signs - known in the field as the Harappan script - have been attempted over the decades, none with great success. Some archaeologists spied parallels with the cuneiform of Mesopotamia. Others speculated an unlikely link between Harappan signs and the similarly inscrutable "bird-men" glyphs found thousands of miles away in the Pacific Ocean on Easter Island...
...rejected by a team of mathematicians and computer scientists assembled from institutions in the U.S. and India. That team's study, published initially in April in Science and more extensively in August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, employed computer modeling to prove that the Harappan script communicated language, and has reinvigorated attempts to crack what is one of the lingering puzzles of ancient history...