An international team of linguists and computer scientists has announced the successful decipherment of fragmented birch-bark manuscripts written in the ancient Sharada script. Using a custom-built AI neural network trained on North Indian epigraphy, the project revealed the text to be a lost 8th-century treatise on spherical trigonometry, used specifically for calculating the precise positions of planets relative to the Gilgit horizon.
The manuscript, recovered from a high-altitude cave in the Karakoram range, contains mathematical proofs for sine and cosine functions that predate similar Arabic translations. This research confirms that the Gilgit region served as a major intellectual hub where Indian mathematical advancements were documented and preserved before migrating across the Silk Road into Central Asia and eventually Europe.