The world's most ancient language is currently being deciphered to help unravel a mystery.
The most ancient written language system in the world that has not yet been deciphered is getting a closer look.
Academic Scholars at Oxford University in England are studying the remnants of a writing system known as proto-Elamite that is over 5 thousand years old.
The language originates from the region in the Middle East that now lies in the territory of southwestern Iran.
Using a device called the Reflectance Transformation Imaging System for Ancient Documentary Artifacts, the researchers are intricately lighting and taking detailed pictures of the stone tablets in an effort to view markings not seen before, and uncover their hidden meaning.
The hi-tech images of the tablets will be available online for other academic linguistic scholars to see, and posit theories about their possible meanings.
Doctor Jacob Dahl of Oxford University has been fascinated with the carvings for a decade, and is looking forward to a breakthrough.
He has discovered that there are no human representations used in the written language, and that this may be the first language to use syllable structure to build words, rather than having a symbol for each word.
