u/JohnMarsden925 — reddlx

I was sad to hear that none of the stolen artwork (13 works) had been returned to the museum in the past 36 years. It sounded like the founder collected it and then displayed it to ensure the general public would have access to it. That’s always been my preference (Indiana Jones mentality) because I hate hearing about billionaires who treat them as investments and make sure no one can ever see them.

The heist occurred in 1990, so the 13 works could be anywhere in the world right now. There were at least 12 suspects in the heist, but some of them were ruled out because they were either nowhere near Boston or in jail. A lot of the suspects also ratted each other out until there were only three men left that were good fits for it. I think Bobby Donati was responsible for both planning and then removing the art from the museum, and Robert Guarante helped with the transportation. At a later date, I think they may have roped in William P. Youngworth III to broker the return of the art. There were lots of suspects who wanted to find the art so they could collect the $10 million reward, but they never provided any concrete evidence that they’d found them.

After investigating for two days, I concluded that the artwork could be anywhere in the world. None of it was currently for sale online (obviously), so it’s a needle-in-a-haystack scenario. William P. Youngworth III may know where it is, but I doubt it because he had 10 million reasons to broker its return. If the artwork hasn’t already been destroyed, I think there are six possible scenarios for what could have happened to it.

1. Storage locker

2. Buried underground in a cemetery

3. Warehouse

4. In a church

5. House/Basement

6. In plain sight

The only storage facility that stood out to me was Public Storage at 87 Warren Street, Randolph, Massachusetts, 02368. It’s about half a mile away from where Youngworth’s antique store used to be, but it’s probably still a one-in-a-million shot. For the other five scenarios, it’s pure guesswork unless the people involved all had access to the same church, house, or warehouse. Bobby Donati said he buried all of it before he was murdered in 1991, but I really hope that’s not the case.

https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/isabella-stewart-gardner-museum-heist

By Joe Glennie

I was happy to hear there's a million dollar prize for deciphering all of the Indus Valley (3500-1300 BCE) symbols. After studying it for the past three days, it's way more complex than I thought it would be. After doing some research on several helpful websites, it sounds like there are at least 500 different symbols, but 67 of them are used 80% of the time. I wish one of those websites had mentioned what the 67 were, but so be it.

So far, I've been able to categorize 246 of the 388 most common symbols. There are 44 human symbols, 22 representing stages of the lunar cycle, 11 triangles, 15 that look like a baseball diamond, 17 fish, 17 with the letter "X," 24 with a diamond ring turned sideways (they reminded me of sprockets from the Jetsons), 18 ovals, 8 inverted U's (might be arches), 29 u/V shapes, and 28 vertical lines (possibly representing the numbers 1 to 12 and/or crop stages). Only six of the symbols appear in Ashoka Brahmi (300 BCE to 400 CE) : ga, la, ta, tha, ra, and ma. I thought the symbols may form the foundation of every language spoken in present day India, but that really wasn't the case.

I'm not sure why so many of the inscriptions are made up of between five and eight symbols. A lot of them have etchings of animals underneath them, so my current theory is that they represent family crests/mottos. I couldn't find any older languages that overlapped with the Indus Valley symbols, so I certainly have my work cut out for me.

After studying the symbols for two weeks, I determined there were about 15 basic symbols (ex. person, the fish might represent food in general, circle represents the sun, diamond represents a star) and 21 descriptive symbols that are added to the basic signs to alter their meaning. I'm struggling to figure out whether the descriptive symbols represent adjectives, verbs, or just individual sounds like the experts suggest. If I can determine what the 21 modifiers represent, it should be pretty easy to figure out what the remaining 520 symbols mean.

Hypothesis: Ashokan Brahmi was a simplified version of the Indus Valley Script

I was really surprised to find out that in Brahmi, adding a vowel after one of the symbols changes it's shape. I The closest thing to modifiers in Ashokan Brahmi were the nine diacritics. Like the modifiers, they are symbols added to other symbols to change their meaning.

So far, the biggest roadblock I've encountered is the 1000 year gap between the end of Indus Valley script and the origin of Brahmi. Vedic Sanskrit (1500-600 BCE) is a perfect chronological match, but I couldn't find any overlap in the symbols.

After trying to directly translate Indus Valley Script to English, I quickly realized that it would be easier to check if Vedic Sanskrit is the midpoint between Indus Valley script and Brahmi. There's overlap for the syllables, but the letters/symbols look nothing alike. I can see why no one has come close to deciphering it.

I'm not able to paste the Indus Valley symbols onto this page. It seems like I'll need to convert Indus Valley symbols to Sanskrit and then to English. The basic signs seem to be root words (the man is nara, the fish is udra, etc.), and the modifiers are either prefixes, suffixes, or different words.

After reading the second chapter of Peter Freund's dissertation at https://www.peterffreund.com/Dissertation/Freund_Dissertation_02_Vedic_Alphabet.pdf regarding the Vedic Sanskrit alphabet, there were a maximum of 52 letters. Luckily for me, a lot of them carried over to Brahmi in simpler representations. To see any similarities, I had to tilt the Vedic Sanskrit letters 90 degrees and ignore the horizontal lines at the top of them.

It doesn't seem like I'm able to add any of the pictures of the Brahmi and Sanskrit symbols I drew by hand, so I'll include all of my translations in a separate post.

I couldn’t find any Indus Valley symbols that included dots, so that eliminates eight Vedic Sanskrit letters.

It looks like someone already tried to translate all of the Indus Valley symbols to Sanskrit on https://indusscript.net. It includes 3673 Indus Valley inscriptions, which I’ll check later to see if my translations are accurate.

To finish my investigation, I relied heavily on "Indus Script: A Study of Its Sign Design" by Nisha Yadav and M. N. Vahia. It was published in SCRIPTA, Volume 3 in June 2011 and can be accessed at https://www.harappa.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Indus-sign-design.pdf . I think they did a great job categorizing the symbols into basic, compound, and composite signs. For signs that are combined to create a new symbol, I think they're supposed to represent one word. For signs that just adjacent to each other, I think they can either represent one or separate words. I also relied on their frequency distribution tables to match some of the modifiers to the remaining Sanskrit letters.

I added the 20 pages of symbols I analyzed over the past three weeks in two different posts. For someone to say they truly solved the 5500 year old mystery, they would need to decipher all 3673 inscriptions to see if they made any mistakes. I doubt every single Indus Valley symbol carried over to Vedic Sanskrit, so that also creates a lot of uncertainty. I enjoyed working on it until I realized how many hours of trial and error it would require to make sure every curved/horizonal/vertical line matched up between the two languages. I hope someone more knowledgeable in the area finds my research useful.