When a French officer reported the discovery of a trilingual stele in the Egyptian desert sand in 1799, the French did what any colonial power of their time would have done: They created the artefact known today as the Rosetta Stone, which is the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs should be sent out of his country of origin as quickly and secretly as possible. That could not happen to what could be called the Rosetta Stone of the Kuschana: The “stone”, discovered in the spring of 2022 in Tajikistan’s Hissar Mountains, is a massive boulder.
Unlike in the early days of modern science, scholars are no longer required to ponder over hand-drawn facsimiles by candlelight. Soon after its discovery, high-resolution photographs of the inscription reached the most well-known experts on Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages, who immediately set about deciphering it. Several dozen artefacts with this unknown script were already known, now the linguists had a bilingual inscription, which also contained legible Bactrian. Success was still a long time coming. The inscription did not reach a team from Cologne until six months after its discovery, and not directly, but via the social network Twitter. “We’re not well-known experts,” says Jakob Halfmann. But in the end it was his team who succeeded in deciphering it.
Halfmann is a research associate at the University of Cologne, as are Svenja Bonmann and Natalie Korobzow. Together they succeeded in deciphering a writing system that had been waiting to be deciphered for over 70 years. The script was in use in parts of Central Asia from the second century BC for at least 900 years and is now attributed to the so-called Kushana Empire. Its ruling dynasty descended from the Yuezhi, a Central Asian tribal confederation that invaded and settled in Bactria around 140 BC. The region, lying mostly in the north of present-day Afghanistan, had been ruled by Persians and Macedonians for centuries. Now the Kuschana gradually asserted themselves as part of the Yuezhi tribe and gained control of the area.
It was previously unclear which of the many languages of the Kuschana Empire was involved
The Kushana steadily expanded their territory until, in the second century AD, it stretched from what is now Tajikistan to northern India and western China. It was now one of the most powerful empires in the ancient world, also benefiting from its location in the middle of the Silk Road routes. Long-distance trade brought valuable goods into the empire; Cultures, ideas and religions mixed. The Kushana Empire became a multi-ethnic state entity whose culture was shaped by Hellenistic, Hindu and ancient Iranian influences. Apparently it was due to the secure trade routes of the Kuschana, which enabled a direct transfer from India to China, that Buddhism was able to reach the Middle Kingdom.
In the Kushana Empire, people spoke a variety of languages. There was room for speculation as to which of these the previously illegible font was intended to express. The research team has now discovered that not only is the writing new, the language was also previously unknown. “No one really expected that,” says Svenja Bonmann. For the time being, the researchers give the new, central Iranian language the name “Eteo-Tocharian”. It was probably used by the ruling dynasty itself and was at times one of the administrative languages of the empire.
The linguists did not succeed in deciphering the coup out of luck. “As far as I know, we proceeded much more systematically than other working groups,” says Bonmann. Together they got photos of all known inscriptions, made an inventory of characters and researched very thoroughly which candidates were suitable for the language. They had been familiar with the unknown script for some time, and the researchers had begun a systematic approach years before the newly discovered bilingual. “As far as we can see, nobody else has done so much preparatory work,” says Bonmann, who, like the rest of the trio, has outstanding language skills for the region: Bonmann wrote her dissertation on ancient and middle Iranian languages, while Jakob Halfmann on modern Indo -Iranian languages PhD. Natalie Korobzow, on the other hand, has expertise in Semitic scripts and languages.
The researchers had also already dealt intensively with a poorly documented trilingual inscription that had been published more than 50 years ago. “The newly discovered inscription helped to put the two together and to partially decipher the writing,” says Halfmann. 60 percent of the writing system are now methodically secured, for the remaining 40 they have strong assumptions. With every further inscription that the trio scrutinizes, it becomes clear: their decipherment was correct.
Now the hope lies in the fact that there are still more artefacts with the Kuschana script lying around in archives that have just not yet been recognized as such. The decoding of the script, which has been received almost universally positively by the linguistic community, could then trigger a surge in new discoveries. What is certain is that the research team from Cologne will not only find out about them via their Twitter feed.