The Singapore Stone's Carvings Have Been Undeciphered for Centuries: Now We're Trying to Crack the Puzzle

The article derives from a long-running Research Project (in the past years at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and, now, at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China) I am conducting, aimed at 'returning' the missing text of the Singapore Stone, a monument (possibly dating back to the 10th - 13th centuries), a sandstone slab originally located at the mouth of the Singapore River, which was blown up by the British in 1843. Only 3 fragments survived. They were sent to Calcutta, to be studied. In 1918, only 1 fragment was returned to the Lion City (the actual 'Singapore Stone', preserved at the local National Museum). The epigraph is unique, because its writing system, still undeciphered, is not attested anywhere else in the world and is not compatible with any other script currently discovered. This is one of the most impenetrable puzzles in contemporary Crypto-linguistics and Historical Linguistics. The 'fate' of the 2 missing fragments, which were not returned from Calcutta, is an enigma too. My Research Team and I are developing a 'machine' which is able to 'read' and 'learn' the surviving symbols of the extant fragment and the characters from the reproductions of the whole monument and other (now lost) pieces and to 'guess' the possible missing text, to 'recover' the 50/52 lines of the original inscription. If this will happen, we'll have more elements to try to understand what kind of writing system is the stone's script and to perform more comparisons, frequency analyses, and pattern recognitions, which could lead to a possible decipherment.