Undeciphered writing systems

Undeciphered writing systems are proposed writing systems for which no decipherment has achieved broad acceptance in the specialist literature. Most examples are ancient, but a small number are medieval or modern. In some cases the evidence is too limited to determine whether the marks represent a true writing system, a form of proto-writing, or a set of non-linguistic symbols; modern artistic traditions such as asemic writing likewise imitate the appearance of writing while intentionally withholding stable linguistic meaning.

Difficulties in decipherment commonly arise from one or more of the following: the absence of bilingual texts or other external “anchors” (such as securely identifiable names or dates); uncertain or unknown underlying languages (including possible language isolates); small corpora; and damage or loss of archaeological context needed to test proposed readings against use and genre. In some corpora, an additional difficulty is uncertainty over whether the signs constitute writing at all (as has often been argued for the Vinča symbols).

Various decipherment claims have been proposed for several items listed here (including the Indus script, the Phaistos Disc, and the Isthmian/Epi-Olmec script), but these proposals remain disputed and have not achieved broad acceptance in the scholarly literature unless otherwise noted.