Quiz: Tales from The Script

First part of a quiz on the way languages are written

1. The Edicts of Ashoka and other writings from that era (3rd to 1st century BCE) were written in a script [Pic 1] whose meaning had been lost over time. James Prinsep, a young British administrator who had come to India in 1819 to work as an assay master at the Calcutta Mint, took it up as a challenge. Due to the repeating nature of certain sets of characters, he theorised that those were references to people who had helped fund the creation of the artefacts. From that assumption, he deduced the meaning of one set of characters (underlined in red in Prinsep’s notes below). He used that insight to then decipher the entire script.
(a) What script is this?
(b) What was the short word that the repeating characters underlined in red in Pic 1 depict?

Pic 1

2. The key to deciphering a certain ancient pictographic script (a system of writing with images) was the object shown in Pic 2. It contained an edict with the same text written in three scripts – Greek, Demotic, and a third script, whose name is Greek for ‘sacred symbols’.
(c) What is the third script?
(d) Which ancient civilisation was it prevalent in?
(e) What is the name of the artifact in Pic 2 that helped scholars decipher the language? A popular language learning software has the same 2-word name.

Pic 2

3. A large part of the credit for cracking the code of the pictographic language [Pic 3] used by the [X] culture goes to Tatiana Prouskouriakoff. An American architect of Russian ancestry, she went in the 1930s to the jungle-enveloped Piedras Negras (‘black stone’ in Spanish), a major site of the culture, and spent some 20 years meticulously reconstructing the drawings on tablets that existed at that and other sites. Later, analysing the writing, she had the brilliant insight that the tablets captured the history of a succession of rulers.
(f) What culture’s language did Ms Prouskouriakoff help decipher?

Pic 3

4. The earliest known writing system, this script [Pic 4] was used to write texts in the Sumerian language of ancient Mesopotamia. The characters were etched into clay tablets using a stylus of some sort. Because of the shape of the characters, the script was given a name derived from the Latin for ‘wedge’.
(g) What is the script known as?
(h) The name Mesopotamia derives from the Greek for ‘two rivers’. In between which two rivers did the civilization exist from before 3100 BCE till about the 3rd century CE?
(i) In which modern-day country does this region fall?

Pic 4

Answers
1(a) Brahmi
1(b) Danam (meaning ‘donation’)
2(c) Hieroglyphics
2(d) Egyptian
2(e) Rosetta Stone
3(f) Mayan
4(g) Cuneiform
4(h) Tigris and Euphrates
4(i) Iraq

References
• James Prinsep cracking the Brahmi script
https://thedialectics.org/the-man-who-cracked-the-code-james-prinsep-and-the-ancient-scripts/

• Rosetta Stone
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rosetta-stone-hieroglyphs-champollion-decipherment-egypt-180980834/

• Mayan script
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mayacode/time-nf.html

• Cuneiform
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/cracking-the-code-the-odyssey-of-deciphering-cuneiform

This is the first part of a 2-part quiz, the second part of which will appear in the Vol 5 No 3: Oct-Dec 2025 issue of Comixense magazine