UN-DECIPHERED WRITING THAT WE MIGHT NEVER FIGURE OUT

THE SINGAPORE STONE

The Singapore Stone is a fragment of a large sandstone slab

that originally stood at the mouth of the Singapore River.

The slab, which is believed to date back to at least the

thirteenth century and possibly as early as the tenth or eleventh

century, bears an un-deciphered inscription. Recent

theories suggest the inscription is either in Old Javanese or

Sanskrit. It is likely that the person who commissioned it

was Sumatran though no scholar can be sure about

anything surrounding the mysterious stone.

RONGORONGO

Rongorongo is a system of glyphs discovered in the

nineteenth century on Easter Island that appears to be writing

or proto-writing. Although some calendrical and what might

prove to be genealogical information has been identified,

not even these glyphs can actually be read.

TUJIA SCRIPT

The Tujia have historically been known as an ethnic minority

(in China) without a written language. However, a succession

of ancient un-deciphered books with glosses presented in

Chinese characters has been found in the Youyang Tujia

habitation straddling the borders of Hunan, Hubei,

Guizhou Province, and Chongqing City.

KHITAN SCRIPTS

The Khitan scripts were the writing systems of the now-extinct

para-Mongolian Khitan language used from the tenth to

twelfth centuries by the Khitan people who established the

Liao dynasty in northeast China. There were two scripts,

large and small. Many experts agree that the scripts have not

been fully deciphered and that more research and further

discoveries are required to proficiently understand them.

ISSYK WRITING

The Issyk inscription is not yet certainly deciphered, and is

probably in a Scythian dialect, constituting one of very

few indigenous epigraphic traces of the language.

THE ALEKANOVO INSCRIPTION

The Alekanovo inscription is a group of un-deciphered characters

found in the fall of 1897 in the Russian village of Alekanovo by

Russian archaeologist Vasily Gorodtsov. The characters were

inscribed on a small clay pot fifteen centimetres high found

at a Slavic burial site. Although the inscription has been

authenticated, we’re not quite sure if this is an organized

writing system people actually used or something else,

perhaps art.

THE QUIPU “WRITING” SYSTEM

Even though there is still much to be learned about the Inca

and their forebears, without a doubt one of the most intriguing

mysteries is their writing system, or the apparent lack thereof.

The quipu “writing” system is the only thing we

inherited from them but have failed to interpret.

MIXTEC WRITING

Mixtec writing is classified as logographic, meaning the

characters and pictures used represent complete words

and ideas instead of syllables or sounds. In Mixtec the

relationships among pictorial elements denote the text’s

meaning, whereas in other Mesoamerican writing the

pictorial representations are not incorporated into the text.

The characters used in Mixtec can be sorted into three types:

pictographic, ideographic, and phonetic. The origin and

accurate interpretation of the Mixtec writing system,

however, remains unknown.

ZAPOTEC WRITING

Rising in the late pre-classic era after the decline of the Olmec

civilization, the Zapotecs of present-day Oaxaca built an

empire around Monte Alban. On a few monuments at this

site archaeologists have found extended text in a glyphic script.

Some signs can be recognized as calendric information but the

script as such remains un-deciphered.