Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marcia for RADIOI, and today I will
Speaker 1: be reading National Geographic Magazine dated January twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher. As a reminder, RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of
Speaker 1: the article I began last time, entitled Decoding the Lost
Speaker 1: Scripts of the Ancient World by Joshua Hammer. Based on
Speaker 1: what they knew of other ancient forms of writing, they
Speaker 1: also theorized that the script could have been built upon
Speaker 1: an underlying language that in some form might still be spoken.
Speaker 1: This is one of the great tools used in the
Speaker 1: detective work of ancient philology. Figure out the sounds that
Speaker 1: the characters make, string them together, and you might conjure
Speaker 1: up the meanings as well. By comparing scraps and pieces.
Speaker 1: By triangulating what is known with what his mysterious, researchers
Speaker 1: can inch their way toward clarity. After some hunting, Mahadevan
Speaker 1: and Parpola agreed that the Indus Script was likely built
Speaker 1: on Proto Davidian, a nascent form of language that many
Speaker 1: philologists believe dominated the Indian sub continent. During the early
Speaker 1: Bronze Age, the ancient language was lost, but vestiges remain
Speaker 1: in modern Tamil and other Southern Indian tongues. Parpola then
Speaker 1: zeroed in on the most prevalent sign in the script,
Speaker 1: a fish like character that the professor believed was a
Speaker 1: logogram in Tamil. Parpola knew the word for fish is min,
Speaker 1: but min has a second meaning star. All early scripts
Speaker 1: had the reebis principle. Parpola, now retired and living in Helsinki,
Speaker 1: told me using a pictogram or symbol for its sound,
Speaker 1: not its meaning. For example, in the world's first writing system,
Speaker 1: Sumerian cuneiform scribes combined the pictogram for barley, which has
Speaker 1: the phonetic value she, with the symbol for milk, which
Speaker 1: connotes she the sound ga to make shiga, which has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with barley or milk, but meant pleasing.
Speaker 1: Following these principles, Parpola, over several years in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties and early seventies, searched for other clues. He
Speaker 1: found in the indiscript another symbol that showed a fish
Speaker 1: divided down the middle by a vertical line. The line
Speaker 1: he proposed stood for passu, the ancient Tamil word for half,
Speaker 1: but Passu also means green. If the fish connoted min,
Speaker 1: he now had Aribis Pasu min or green star, which
Speaker 1: he took to mean the planet Mercury. Pushing further, Parpola
Speaker 1: found what he thinks are ribuses for Saturn, Venus and
Speaker 1: other stars. He also located what he believes were a
Speaker 1: few purely phonetic signs. What did it all signify? Because
Speaker 1: the inscriptions are so short, Parpola believes that they contained
Speaker 1: no grammar, no full sentences, no elements of real writing.
Speaker 1: He posits that they never were intended to communicate messages,
Speaker 1: but rather were used as the markers of citizens who
Speaker 1: were named after celestial objects, like many rulers of the age,
Speaker 1: including those in Assyria and Babylonia. Of course, decoding works
Speaker 1: like this that rely on interpretation and speculation prompts disagreement.
Speaker 1: Mahadavan parted ways with his colleague on many of Parpola's readings,
Speaker 1: beginning with the fish sign, which Mahadivan believed had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with astronomy. It was he contended the sign
Speaker 1: for a sea nymph, a creature prevalent in Indian mythology,
Speaker 1: but the brevity of the inscriptions and the uncertainty about
Speaker 1: the language meant that neither scholar could say he solved
Speaker 1: the riddle. Raja Gopal, for one, thought that Parpolo was
Speaker 1: on the right track. A few years ago, he began
Speaker 1: to fixate on one seal that consisted of a row
Speaker 1: of five rotating swastikas, a sacred symbol in many ancient religions,
Speaker 1: followed by two parallel vertical lines. Parpola had claimed that
Speaker 1: the double line formed part of a rebus for the
Speaker 1: planet Venus. When combined with the fish, he said it
Speaker 1: made vinin min or bright star, but the swastikas remained
Speaker 1: an enigma. Raja Gopal told me he was consumed by
Speaker 1: the mystery of the sequence and thought about it constantly.
Speaker 1: I was going down a rabbit hole. One morning in
Speaker 1: November twenty twenty, while sitting in his home office in Chennai,
Speaker 1: he chanced upon a Nassau website that traced the trajectory
Speaker 1: of Venus as it moved across the morning and evening skies.
Speaker 1: He stopped and stared at his computer screen. The double
Speaker 1: snakelike pattern formed by the planet's path looked just like
Speaker 1: the swastika he had been studying. I got the goosebumps,
Speaker 1: he says, with that he was often running The inscription
Speaker 1: he theorized had to be a celestial omen signifying the
Speaker 1: completion of Venus's eight year cycle as it orbited the
Speaker 1: Sun and returned to the same position in the sky.
Speaker 1: He looked for similar astronomical depictions. Another seal he proposed
Speaker 1: showed the alignment of three planets. Half of the seals
Speaker 1: he now believes identify celestial events. Raja Gopal theorizes that
Speaker 1: they were written so that Indus valley priests could dispatch
Speaker 1: these seals to villages to provide guidance for the timing
Speaker 1: of crop plantings and harvest festivals. Raja Gopal now claims
Speaker 1: to have deciphered with confidence seventy seals out of forty
Speaker 1: two hundred. He finds it difficult to pull himself away.
Speaker 1: I will take some seal and keep obsessing, and somehow
Speaker 1: I get an idea and push it forward. He told
Speaker 1: me many times, I hit a dead end and then
Speaker 1: I got to spin the next hypothesis and try again.
Speaker 1: Not everybody accepts his interpretations and The public attention around
Speaker 1: raj Rajagopal's progress has only highlighted how tricky this work
Speaker 1: can be. At a twenty twenty three Indescript conference in Chennai,
Speaker 1: a fellow decipherer stood up during his lecture and ridiculed him.
Speaker 1: Another amateur scholar in Chennai, Sumangali Kidambi ven Katisan, says
Speaker 1: that Raja Kobal's celestial theory is misguided and that most
Speaker 1: seals were simply shipping instructions bronze age versions of d
Speaker 1: h L waybills. Van Katissan says he has found his
Speaker 1: own Dravidian based rebuses, which are nothing like Rajagopal's. One
Speaker 1: inscription Van Keitasan told me consists of a combination of
Speaker 1: logograms and phonetic signs and refers to the highlands of Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: He translates it to read very clever trapper velapon of
Speaker 1: the Triple Mountain sends by boat along the Big River
Speaker 1: by care to the tiller of land. The range of
Speaker 1: disagreement in the volume of theories underscore the intensity of
Speaker 1: the enduring debate, as well as the idea that would
Speaker 1: be code breakers may never reach a consensus. Even the
Speaker 1: Dravidian hypothesis itself is challenged. Some scholars argue that the
Speaker 1: underlying language of the Indus script is Sanskrit, the basis
Speaker 1: of Hindi. One decipher claimed to have identified ribuses for
Speaker 1: the gods Shiva and Indra mentioned in the ancient Sans
Speaker 1: religious texts known as the rig Veda. Like nearly everything
Speaker 1: in India, ethnocentrism is fueling the debate. Many Tamils want
Speaker 1: to bolster claims that their ancestors, not northern Hindi speakers,
Speaker 1: created India's first urban civilization a few hundred miles southwest
Speaker 1: of Chennai. Archaeologists recently found glyphs scratched into clay tablets
Speaker 1: at Ki Ladi, a twenty six hundred year old site,
Speaker 1: that match signs from Mohenjo Daro. This, the insist, is
Speaker 1: evidence of a connection between the Dravidian culture of southern
Speaker 1: India and the original settlers of the Indus Valley. Of
Speaker 1: the fifty different signs, we have twenty nine perfect matches.
Speaker 1: Ramesh Masthong, Kikhilandi's chief archaeological officer, told me as he
Speaker 1: escorted me around a football size field excavation pit in
Speaker 1: a grove of coconut homes in rural Tamil Nadu. But
Speaker 1: if Sanskrit is in fact the underlying language beneath the
Speaker 1: Indus script, Rajocobal and many others will be sent back
Speaker 1: to the drawing board, and that million dollar reward will
Speaker 1: seem further away than ever. The great hope among philologists
Speaker 1: today is that the breakthroughs lurking right around on the
Speaker 1: corner will be ushered in thanks to tools and technologies
Speaker 1: that their predecessors never dreamed of. Francesco Parono Katiafoko, a
Speaker 1: forty five year old professor of linguistics at chan Jiaotong
Speaker 1: Liverpool University in China, has devoted more than half his
Speaker 1: life to trying to decipher another Bronze Age script called
Speaker 1: linear A. The writing system was used by the Minoan
Speaker 1: civilization of Crete, the predecessor of the Mycenaean Greeks, from
Speaker 1: about eighteen hundred to fourteen fifty BC. The problem has
Speaker 1: been that the Minoans seemingly employed a language unrelated to
Speaker 1: any dialect of ancient Greek or apparently any other known
Speaker 1: language from that time period. When he began studying the
Speaker 1: writing in nineteen ninety nine, Parono Kaciafoko noticed that the
Speaker 1: system used many of the same characters as a Cretan
Speaker 1: syllabari called linear B deciphered by English scholar Michael Ventris
Speaker 1: half a century earlier. But the characters of linear A
Speaker 1: formed words that bore no resemblance to those of linear B.
Speaker 1: If you try to read the corresponding symbols, it's not Greek,
Speaker 1: parono Qutciufoko told me, it's Gibberish. Where parpoulus quest to
Speaker 1: understand the Indus script had led him to philological research
Speaker 1: into ancient Dravidian perono Kochiufoko took a different path. In
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, he assembled a team of sixteen mathematicians, engineers,
Speaker 1: and linguists and designed what they called the linear A
Speaker 1: Decipherment Program. The team fed into the computer the vocabularies
Speaker 1: and grammatical structures of deciphered ancient languages across the Mediterranean
Speaker 1: area Ancient Egyptian, Luian, Assyro, Babylonian, Aramaic, Amharic, and Hittite,
Speaker 1: to name just a few, and asked the program to
Speaker 1: compare the words with possible transliterations of linear A. They
Speaker 1: hoped that the comparison would find similar etymological roots. But
Speaker 1: after three years the machine, as Perno Kacchavoko called it,
Speaker 1: had found no matches, and twenty twenty funding for the
Speaker 1: project ran dry. The pandemic shuttered the university and the
Speaker 1: project was put on hold. Computer programs he had come
Speaker 1: to believe aren't totally up to the task. Now, Perno
Speaker 1: Kutchafoko's team is using a modified version in the hope
Speaker 1: that it will produce better results. Artificial intelligence. Parono Kuchifoko says,
Speaker 1: we'll probably never be able to decipher an undeciphered language
Speaker 1: because it's not able to produce original thought or intuitive connections.
Speaker 1: What it could do, he explains, is speed up the
Speaker 1: deciphering process by recognizing patterns and making statistical calculations about
Speaker 1: the appearances of certain characters in unknown texts. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, researchers from MIT and Google's Deep Mind tested
Speaker 1: AI tools on previously deciphered linear and were impressed by
Speaker 1: the ease with which the programmes worked. The system guided
Speaker 1: about sixty percent right, says Andreas Fools, an engineer at
Speaker 1: Berlin's Technical University, one of those attempting to decipher both
Speaker 1: the Indus script and the mysterious writing on what's known
Speaker 1: as the Feistos disc, an ancient clay saucer found on
Speaker 1: crete that contains a spiraling inscription in an unknown writing.
Speaker 1: In those experiments, the AI was primed with the knowledge
Speaker 1: that Linear b was an ancestor of ancient Greek. It
Speaker 1: turns out that AI is excellent at comparing a script
Speaker 1: to other members of the same linguistic family, but when
Speaker 1: asked to decode a script written in an unknown language
Speaker 1: that has no relationship to other tongues, AI still struggles. This,
Speaker 1: says Francois des Si, the philologist unraveling Linear Elamite, is
Speaker 1: because the technology, at least currently lacks the ability to
Speaker 1: think creatively to come up with something out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: On a recent morning in Francis Laire Valley, I met
Speaker 1: Dsse at his apartment in the city of Ongar's tussl
Speaker 1: haired and goateed. He was happy to describe for me
Speaker 1: that moment in twenty fifteen when he finally got to
Speaker 1: see the Mabubian families prized Kunanki for years, though his
Speaker 1: efforts to decipher linear Elamite had been stymied by the
Speaker 1: paucity of inscriptions. Unlike hieroglyphs which covered temples and tombs
Speaker 1: along the Nile, or Akkadian Kineiform inscribed on palace walls
Speaker 1: and clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamian cities, linear elamite was rare.
Speaker 1: Writing didn't seem to play the same central role for
Speaker 1: the Elamites. Dass says, after much floundering and frustration, he
Speaker 1: found himself in Roya Mabubian's elegant North London apartment, examining
Speaker 1: an academic gold mine seven hundred and fifty nine linear
Speaker 1: elamite signs engraved on ten cups and fragments, plus inscriptions
Speaker 1: in Cuneiform. I was thinking eureka, he told me. But
Speaker 1: I was also skeptical. Everybody in the academic world was
Speaker 1: sure it was all fake. But to say, nurse to
Speaker 1: conviction that the Kunnki had to be authentic. No forger
Speaker 1: could have strung together so many linear elamite signs that
Speaker 1: actually contained bits of coherent text. Later tests by a
Speaker 1: metallurgists in Italy confirmed that the Kununki were made of
Speaker 1: a ninety percent silver ten percent copper alloy, consistent with
Speaker 1: other vessels from the period. Even though philologists had long
Speaker 1: ago determined that the language spoken in ancient Elam had
Speaker 1: no known relatives. To say, did have one tool at
Speaker 1: his disposal, something that for centuries had aided those who
Speaker 1: study antiquity. Sometimes, when a message was committed to writing
Speaker 1: on a templet or a piece of art, the same
Speaker 1: or similar information was in described in several languages and
Speaker 1: scripts at once. This practice helped the scribes reach the
Speaker 1: largest audience possible. Thousands of years later, that habit has
Speaker 1: helped philologists who can compare deciphered writing with the adjacent
Speaker 1: undeciphered script to say had just such a bilingual inscription
Speaker 1: that he hoped could provide clues to some of linear
Speaker 1: Elamite's phonetic values. Archaeologists at SUSA in nineteen o three
Speaker 1: had turned up a limestone artifact called the tabreu aulon
Speaker 1: now on display at the Louver. The kings of Elam
Speaker 1: had often inscribed linear Elamite side by side with inscriptions
Speaker 1: in Akkadian Cuneiform, the writing of nearby Mesopotamia, which had
Speaker 1: been deciphered in the eighteen fifties. In nineteen o five,
Speaker 1: the German linguist ber Dinand Bork noticed a sequence of
Speaker 1: four linear Elamite characters on the tabre au leon that
Speaker 1: appeared twice. The adjacent Acadian text also had four characters
Speaker 1: that showed up with the same frequency. These kittiidformed signs
Speaker 1: formed part of two names, Puzzuer Sushniak, the last king
Speaker 1: of Elam's Awand dynasty, and the Elamite god in Sushnak.
Speaker 1: From these parallel sign patterns, Bork deduced that the Elamite
Speaker 1: characters must be su Chi, Nah, and K. That gave
Speaker 1: him pooh, Zu and R as well, for a total
Speaker 1: of seven characters. From there, the decipherment stalled. The trouble
Speaker 1: was for decades, there just wasn't that much linear Elamite
Speaker 1: in existence. Could de Say's new trove change everything. Early
Speaker 1: one morning in spring twenty seventeen, he sat before his
Speaker 1: laptop in his apartment near the University of Tehran where
Speaker 1: he was teaching. The screen glowed with linear Elamite characters,
Speaker 1: which to Say had copied by hand and digitized from
Speaker 1: the photos he had taken. His eyes settled on a
Speaker 1: four sign pattern from one of the Kunanki. It showed
Speaker 1: up repeatedly. He recognized the first sign in the sequence
Speaker 1: immediately it was she as Bork had first seen in
Speaker 1: Pasur Sushnak. Then came three unknown signs, the last two
Speaker 1: of which were identical. In a flash, to Say could
Speaker 1: see it. The duplicated sign was ha, which formed the
Speaker 1: last syllables of sie ha Ha, an early second millennium
Speaker 1: b c elamite king. Minutes later, the Say spotted another
Speaker 1: repeated sequence with one recognizable sign R in Kineiform texts.
Speaker 1: He knew Silkha was often mentioned with who is most
Speaker 1: likely his father? E PARTI. In fifteen minutes, to Say
Speaker 1: had acquired the values of five signs. Thrilled, he plugged
Speaker 1: the sounds into the texts and spotted other names, leading
Speaker 1: to as identification of more signs. For the next few years,
Speaker 1: to Say continued making progress. He had assumed from the
Speaker 1: start of his studies that linear elamite, like all other
Speaker 1: writing systems from the early Bronze Age, was mixed. I
Speaker 1: was looking for logograms, saying where the hell are they?
Speaker 1: He said, But as is knowledge of the signs deepened,
Speaker 1: to Say took what he calls a creative leap. Linear Elamite,
Speaker 1: he now perceived was a purely phonetic script with seventy
Speaker 1: seven signs, including five vowels and twelve consonants. Until now,
Speaker 1: is widely accepted among linguists that the oldest purely phonetic
Speaker 1: alphabet was protor proto Siniactic, a Middle Bronze Age script
Speaker 1: from the Sinai Peninsula which appeared five hundred years after
Speaker 1: linear Elamite. Desay's analysis, if verified by other philologists, could
Speaker 1: force a radical reconstruction of the history of writing and
Speaker 1: human progress. It would reorder the chronology of phonetic writing,
Speaker 1: shifting the focus away from the Levant to the Iranian plateau.
Speaker 1: It would also elevate the previously overlooked Elamite kingdom to
Speaker 1: a primary place in human intellectual development. Seven years after
Speaker 1: that encounter in London, in twenty twenty two, to Say
Speaker 1: and for colleagues authored an article in Zeitschrift for a
Speaker 1: Syriologui and for Denayitious Archaeology Journal for a Syriology and
Speaker 1: Near Eastern Archaeology, a respected journal published in Berlin. The
Speaker 1: phonetic values of every linear Elamite character they declared had
Speaker 1: been deciphered at last. The claim was remarkable. If true,
Speaker 1: it represents the first time that all the sounds of
Speaker 1: an ancient script have been figured out in decades, but
Speaker 1: to say in his team, he admits heavn't accomplished a
Speaker 1: one hundred percent decipherment of the writing system. According to
Speaker 1: most philologists, real decipherment occurs only when a script's sounds
Speaker 1: and its meaning are both understood. Champollion had determined the
Speaker 1: meaning of hieroglyphs after sounding out some wordsords and recognizing
Speaker 1: that the language must be a direct ancestor of Coptic Egyptian.
Speaker 1: Hinks and Rawlinson were able to understand Akkadian Cuneiform after
Speaker 1: perceiving that the underlying language closely resembled Hebrew, but the
Speaker 1: language of linear Elamite, known simply as Elamite, remains largely
Speaker 1: a mystery. Thanks to the inscriptions on the Kunangi, Dissey
Speaker 1: has managed to tease out not just the names of
Speaker 1: places and kings, but also a smattering of titles, epithets,
Speaker 1: common nouns, adjectives, and verbs. One silverbeaker, he suggests, was
Speaker 1: an offering given by a ruler to the Elamite supreme
Speaker 1: god E pala Ishan mighty Lord. The inscription reads, in part,
Speaker 1: I am the servant of napiaetia. Dissey found the words kare,
Speaker 1: which he translates as devotion or worship, and zeeni a
Speaker 1: divine blessing bestowed by a god on his royal subject.
Speaker 1: Other words including zempt for king, hurt for people, and
Speaker 1: shock for sun also became clear in context. It shines
Speaker 1: a little light on this long vanished place, he says, today,
Speaker 1: of the eighteen hundred sixty three linear Elamite signs that
Speaker 1: exist in the Corpus des Asis, he is able to
Speaker 1: sound out eighteen hundred ten of them. The rest have
Speaker 1: eroded into illegibility, but he acknowledges he can make sense
Speaker 1: of only a few words. I am still facing a
Speaker 1: lot of problems with the translation, he told me. He
Speaker 1: faces critics too. Jak Abdahl and Oxford professor considered one
Speaker 1: of the world's foremost scholars of Mesopotamia, dispute Desay's assertion
Speaker 1: that linear Elamite is a purely syllabic script, that part
Speaker 1: of the decipherment is certainly not correct. He told me,
Speaker 1: I would suspect there were logograms as well. He also
Speaker 1: says that so much about the script remains unknown. The
Speaker 1: meaning of many words, the grammar the values of certain
Speaker 1: signs that Dessay's claims of victory are wildly premature. I
Speaker 1: have little patience for des say. Dal told me much
Speaker 1: of it is complete rubbish. Dessay has tried to shrug
Speaker 1: off the criticism since the announcement of the linear Elamite decipherment.
Speaker 1: He told me, escorting me to the door of his apartment,
Speaker 1: I have found new friends, and I have found new enemies.
Speaker 1: His next undertaking is an attempt to decipher proto elamite,
Speaker 1: a precursor to linear elamite that first appeared in the
Speaker 1: fourth millennium BC and represents the earliest stage of civilization
Speaker 1: in Iran. The writing consists of four hundred to eight
Speaker 1: hundred characters, the hall mark of a lago graphic syllabic system.
Speaker 1: It is a total mystery, he says, just the kind
Speaker 1: of challenge that code breakers love, bringing dead words to life.
Speaker 1: Archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Susa in nineteen o
Speaker 1: three uncovered the Tabra Leon, which had a four thousand
Speaker 1: year old bilingual inscription in known a Kadian cuneiform and
Speaker 1: undeciphered linear elamite. Though this was a promising first step,
Speaker 1: the dearth of signs stalled decipherment until twenty fifteen, when
Speaker 1: Francois de Say gained rare access to silver beakers with
Speaker 1: hundreds of new L E signs and piece together what
Speaker 1: could be the world's first phonetic writing system. Here's how
Speaker 1: he did it. Identifying proper nouns. Early on, linguists determined
Speaker 1: that the table leon bore the same names in L
Speaker 1: E and a kate Acadian kineiform king Pussur Sashnak and
Speaker 1: the Elamite king Ishnek. The tablet's linguistic patterns were a
Speaker 1: jumping off point for de Say to later identify other
Speaker 1: names and royal titles decoding phrases. When to Say secured
Speaker 1: access to a private collection of beakers with both a
Speaker 1: Kadian kineiform and L E signs that had never been
Speaker 1: seen publicly, had more pieces to the puzzle. This allowed
Speaker 1: him to string together one of the first sentenced fragments,
Speaker 1: a huge breakthrough in cracking L E. Whence the script
Speaker 1: was deciphered to Say, says, it was possible for him
Speaker 1: to actually read lines of L E like the text
Speaker 1: carved into stone blocks from Suza, offering an ode to
Speaker 1: Pusar Sushnak and a warning to his enemies. Next the
Speaker 1: industrial waste site that glitters like a glacier in northwest India,
Speaker 1: A field full of marble debris has another worldly allure
Speaker 1: by Puja Chianghwai Waila. The first time Atul Kharasya saw
Speaker 1: a YouTube video of the dumping grounds in Kishargach, he
Speaker 1: knew he had to visit the place, a pearly white
Speaker 1: landscape shining like a snow field atop a hot dry
Speaker 1: plain in northwest India. It was a six hour train
Speaker 1: ride from his home in Delhi, But for Charisiya, a
Speaker 1: travel influencer who makes scenic the social media media villages
Speaker 1: videos for a living, the trip paid off with an
Speaker 1: Instagram reel that racked up a quarter million likes. Kishagar's
Speaker 1: peculiar attraction is built on a byproduct from its marble
Speaker 1: processing industry, marble slurry, a mix of water and fine
Speaker 1: particles of calcium, carbonate and other minerals. Tanker trucks deliver
Speaker 1: loads of it each day to the city's outskirts hauled
Speaker 1: in from more than twelve hundred facilities that cut, grind
Speaker 1: and polished stone from the quarries that proliferate in the
Speaker 1: surrounding state of Rajasthan. As water evaporates from the slurry
Speaker 1: in the semi arid climate, the mineral particles recrystallized to
Speaker 1: form bone white mounds and terraces. Tourists started showing up
Speaker 1: to admire them about a decade ago after a popular
Speaker 1: comedian shot a movie scene at the site, says Sampat
Speaker 1: Rai Sharma, CEO of the Kishkar Marble Association KMA, which
Speaker 1: manages the yard. Then came Instagrammers and YouTubers, engaged couples
Speaker 1: with hired photographers, even Bollywood crews. As the crowds grew,
Speaker 1: the KMA rebranded the spot the Kishnagarch Snowyard. Soon vendors
Speaker 1: were offering everything from snacks to horse rides to a
Speaker 1: dinghy for plying the electric blue waters of the artificial lake.
Speaker 1: But even as hashtag dumping yard Kishangar has trended among
Speaker 1: the travelers, some researchers have raised questions over the site's
Speaker 1: health and ecological impacts. Environmental scientist Lakshmi Kant Sharma of
Speaker 1: the Central University of Rajasthan says a study he led
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three and twenty four, currently under peer review,
Speaker 1: revealed worrying effects in areas surrounding the dump site. Air
Speaker 1: quality tests, he says, registered levels of particulate matter beyond
Speaker 1: the World Health organizations recommended limits, while soil samples showed
Speaker 1: high salinity and heavy metal contamination and groundwater samples exceeded
Speaker 1: limits for chemicals like chlor ride and iron. A different
Speaker 1: study published in February twenty twenty five found naturally occurring
Speaker 1: asbestos fibers in marble dust from another rasash San slurry yard.
Speaker 1: For his part, the K m as Sharma disputes such
Speaker 1: studies validity and says his organization has received no health
Speaker 1: related complaints and while several Indian newspapers have reported the
Speaker 1: Kuraje study preliminary findings, at least one vendor suggests it
Speaker 1: has an affected visitation. Gurad Yain manages snow Moments, which
Speaker 1: opened to kiosk at the yard two years ago, to
Speaker 1: rent photo back drops and props. We do thirty to
Speaker 1: thirty five shoots a month. Jane says the demand is
Speaker 1: creasing increasing day by day. This concludes readings from National
Speaker 1: Geographic magazine for to Day Your reader has been Marsha.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, keep on listening and have a
Speaker 1: great day.