Data mining ancient scripts to investigate their relationships and origins

Abstract

This paper describes a data mining study of a set of ancient scripts in order to discover their relationships, including their possible common origin from a single root script. The data mining uses convolutional neural networks and support vector machines to find the degree of visual similarity between pairs of symbols in eight different ancient scripts. Among the surprising results of the data mining are the following: (1) the Indus Valley Script is visually closest to Sumerian pictographs, and (2) the Linear B script is visually closest to the Cretan Hieroglyphic script.