How AI is Resurrecting a 200-Year-Old Unsolved Mystery the British Empire Tried to Destroy
For almost 200 years, the Singapore Stone has been one of the Southeast Asian’s unsolved inscription mysteries. It was once a massive sandstone monolith at the mouth of the Singapore River, with an undecipherable inscription which is thought to be the result of the sophisticated maritime Nusantara writing system with Indic influence. But this silent witness to history was destroyed, in 1843, when the British colonial expansion works blew it apart, to open up the river passage.
What remains today are not the stone surfaces themselves, but rather a group of “mediated witnesses” such as sketches, rubbings and facsimiles created by 19th-century antiquarians. This loss brings about a huge methodological problem: how can one study a text if the text itself does not exist? The most important question is how do we not impose contemporary ideas onto a damaged and incomplete record?
These are the questions that underpin my research. Unlike the conventional approach to decipherment, which is usually based on “inspired guesswork,” I created a computational, component-based method that allows the existing 19th-century facsimiles to be measured as a data set. What is created is a “witness-first computational epigraphy framework”: a repeatable system of physically removing marks from a text, while simultaneously removing the subjective component of reading its meaning.
