If you visit the Singapore Stone, on display at the National Museum of Singapore, you may be disappointed. This happens because the inscription – carrying an unknown writing system transcribing an unknown language – disappears. But if you like puzzles, this won't discourage you.
The stone is a fragment of a larger slab that once welcomed guests at the mouth of the Singapore River. The British blew it up in 1843 to build a fort. The stone, discovered in 1819, was almost completely lost. A Scottish military officer, Lieutenant Colonel James Low, managed to save three fragments amidst general indifference. He sent them to the Royal Asiatic Society Museum in Calcutta for examination.
They arrived in 1848. Meanwhile, other parts of the stone disappeared on the island. In 1918, the Raffles Museum in Singapore asked Calcutta to return the fragments. Only one was sent back. Nothing is known about the rest, they may have disappeared forever. Despite its name, this sandstone slab is not an ordinary “stone”. It was once part of a monument – an archaic motto measuring three by three meters and containing about 50 lines of text.
Many epigraphs have not survived the ravages of time. Archaeological monuments often disappear over the centuries. It's unhappy, but inevitable. But the Singapore Stone was not just another motto. The writing system on its surface is unique, found nowhere else and never used in any other text. And it remains undeciphered.
Without understanding the text of the motto, we cannot postulate a specific time frame for its creation. Hypotheses range from the 10th to the 13th century, but there is no consensus. Was the motto related to the Majapahit Empire? Or perhaps a gift from the Raja of southeast India, commemorating the deeds of the local legendary hero Badang? No one will know until we can read it.
Writing is one of the main puzzles in deciphering the language of our times. This is a puzzle in cryptography and historical linguistics that apparently has no solution. This challenge can be compared to the mysteries of better-known undeciphered writing systems such as Linear A and Rongorongo.
Despite the almost complete loss of the rest of the slab, the existing fragment and reproductions of missing parts of the full monument provide us with elements to study. Before being blown up, the monument was hand-drawn in 1837 by politician William Bland and philologist James Prinsep. Even Sir Stamford Raffles, the British administrator of the East Indies and founder of Singapore, worked on it, trying to understand its text. After destruction, the three recovered fragments were graphically recreated and then sent to India.
A general, unwritten rule of cryptolinguistics is that the more text we have – for comparison, frequency analysis and pattern recognition – the better our chances of deciphering it. The opposite situation leads to failure. Singapore Stone is no exception. Its unknown writing system transcribing an unknown language represents every glyph breaker's nightmare – the seal of illegibility.
However, human ingenuity has overcome such obstacles before. In 1952, architect Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B, working in an analogous scenario – an unknown writing system (Linear B) and an unknown language (Mycenaean Greek, an archaic version of archaic Greek). Ventris had plenty of texts available, but the task was almost impossible. And yet he managed to do it.
For now, the stone is noiseless and lonely. But with my research team at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, I am trying to find his voice.
My colleagues and I are working on Read-y Grammarian, an artificial intelligence program that can “learn” the remaining characters of an epigraph and guess and work out the missing parts of its text. Unlike humans, the program does not contain interpretation errors (cognitive errors resulting from the researcher's beliefs). Mitigating these biases is a fundamental requirement of language decoding research.
If we can recover reliable lyrics for the record, more material will be available for comparison, frequency analysis and pattern recognition – which will be the first step towards deciphering and hearing the stone's voice for the first time.
Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Xi'an Jiaotong University-Liverpool
This article has been republished from Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read original article.
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