Are you good with codes? Museum will pay who decipher millennial symbols

Do you have a talent for breaking codes? So what do you think about earning no less than $ 15, 000 - around $ 47, 000! - per deciphered character? According to Michael Waters of Atlas Obscura, this is the amount that the National Museum of Chinese Writing in Anyang, Henan Province, is offering to anyone who can translate ancient symbols engraved into oracles made of bones and whose meaning has never been meaningful. uncovered.

Undecipherable code?

According to Michael, the oracles consist of tortoise shells and ox shoulder blades with symbols that were recorded three thousand years ago during the Shang Dynasty, and represent the earliest written records of Chinese civilization. The artifacts were discovered by Chinese farmers in the 1920s in Anyang, and since then excavations at the site have allowed about 200, 000 of them to be found.

Of this total, around 50, 000 units have some kind of engraved symbol, and of the approximately 5, 000 characters identified in the bones, around 2, 000 were deciphered. However, after several decades of work, Chinese linguists "stuck" with translations last year - and admitted that there are approximately 3, 000 signs whose meaning they simply can't figure out.

So, because of the high cost of the project and the time it takes experts to figure out what the symbols mean, the museum decided to "open" the translation to the world and offer the small jackpot of $ 15, 000 for every character that it is (proven to be). ) deciphered.

Opportunity

According to Jason Daley of Smithsonian.com, anyone in any country can try to crack the codes, and the institution will also offer a "bounty" of $ 7, 500. ) for anyone who can provide a definitive explanation for characters whose translation still causes discussion among linguists.

According to Jason, the museum hopes that experts from around the world will participate in the effort, and that unknown characters will even be analyzed by computer systems or any advanced technology that might help. However, the fact that the institution has decided to pay so much money for a deciphered symbol is already an indication that the task will be nothing - nothing - easy.

The problem, as the museum staff explained, is that it is very difficult to verify the symbols, since many represent people or places that existed long, long ago. The cool thing is that, according to linguists, each new character identified as a verb or noun could potentially allow a better understanding of the texts present in the oracles, and thus experts can better understand a part of Chinese history that is still little known. .