Indus script

Indus script
Type	Undeciphered Bronze Age writing
Languages	Unknown (see Harappan language)
Time period	3500–1900 BC
Direction	Right-to-left
ISO 15924	Inds, 610

Unicorn seal of Indus Valley, Indian Museum

Seal impression showing a typical inscription of five characters

Collection of seals

The Indus script (also known as the Harappan script) is a corpus of symbols produced by the Indus Valley Civilization during the Kot Diji and Mature Harappan periods between 3500 and 1900 BC. Most inscriptions are extremely short. It is not clear if these symbols constitute a script used to record a language, and the subject of whether the Indus symbols were a writing system is controversial. In spite of many attempts at decipherment, it is undeciphered, and no underlying language has been identified. There is no known bilingual inscription, and the script does not show any significant changes over time.

The first publication of a seal with Harappan symbols dates to 1875, in a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, over 4,000 inscribed objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. In the early 1970s, Iravatham Mahadevan published a corpus and concordance of Indus inscriptions listing 3,700 seals and 417 distinct signs in specific patterns. The average inscription contains five signs, and the longest inscription is only 17 signs long. He also established the direction of writing as right to left.

Some scholars, such as G.R. Hunter, S. R. Rao, John Newberry, Krishna Rao, Subhash Kak have argued that the Brāhmī script has some continuity with the Indus system. This idea has been met with much skepticism though, with noted expert Iravatham Mahadevan stating in a 1998 interview, "I do not at all believe in this theory." Even by 1877, Cunningham, supposing that the Harappa seal he had published a few years earlier dated no later than 500 or 400 BC, attempted to interpret the 6 unknown characters in the seal as precursors of Brāhmī, even offering a tentative reading. Others such as F. Raymond Allchin have somewhat cautiously supported the possibility, and even many supporters of the consensus theory that Brāhmī probably derives from Aramaic influence do not entirely rule out the possibility of some Indus script influence, pending the discovery of new evidence that might illuminate the murky early history of Brāhmī.

Another possibility for continuity of the Indus tradition is in the megalithic culture graffiti symbols of southern and central India (and Sri Lanka), which probably do not constitute a linguistic script but may have some overlap with the Indus symbol inventory.

Corpus

Early examples of the symbol system are found in an Early Harappan and Indus civilisation context, dated to possibly as early as the 35th century BC. In the Mature Harappan period, from about 2600 BC to 1900 BC, strings of Indus signs are commonly found on flat, rectangular stamp seals as well as many other objects including tools, tablets, ornaments and pottery. These signs were applied in many ways, including carving, chiseling, painting and embossing, and the objects themselves were also made of many different materials, such as soapstone, bone, shell, terracotta, sandstone, copper, silver and gold.

Late Harappan

After 1900 BC, the systematic use of the symbols ended, after the final stage of the Mature Harappan civilization. A few Harappan signs have been claimed to appear until as late as around 1100 BC (the beginning of the Indian Iron Age). Onshore explorations near Bet Dwarka in Gujarat revealed the presence of late Indus seals depicting a 3-headed animal, earthen vessel inscribed in what is claimed to be a late Harappan script, and a large quantity of pottery similar to Lustrous Red Ware bowl and Red Ware dishes, dish-on-stand, perforated jar and incurved bowls which are datable to the 16th century BC in Dwarka, Rangpur and Prabhas. The thermoluminescence date for the pottery in Bet Dwaraka is 1528 BC. This evidence has been used to claim that a late Harappan script was used until around 1500 BC.

Characteristics

Inscription of ten characters from Dholavira

The characters are largely pictorial but includes many abstract signs. The inscriptions are thought to have been mostly written from right to left, but sometimes follows a boustrophedonic style. The number of principal signs is about 400, comparable to the typical sign inventory of a logo-syllabic script.

Decipherability question

An opposing hypothesis that has been offered by Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, is that these symbols were nonlinguistic signs which instead symbolised families, clans, gods, and religious concepts. In a 2004 article, Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel presented a number of arguments that the Indus script is nonlinguistic, principal among them being the extreme brevity of the inscriptions, the existence of too many rare signs (increasing over the 700-year period of the Mature Harappan civilization), and the lack of the random-looking sign repetition typical of language.

Asko Parpola, reviewing the Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel thesis in 2005, states that their arguments "can be easily controverted". He cites the presence of a large number of rare signs in Chinese, and emphasizes that there is "little reason for sign repetition in short seal texts written in an early logo-syllabic script". Revisiting the question in a 2007 lecture, Parpola takes on each of the 10 main arguments of Farmer et al., presenting counterarguments for each. He states that "even short noun phrases and incomplete sentences qualify as full writing if the script uses the rebus principle to phonetize some of its signs".

A 2009 paper published by Rajesh P N Rao, Iravatham Mahadevan, and others in the journal Science challenged the argument that the Indus script might have been a nonlinguistic symbol system. The paper concludes that the conditional entropy of Indus inscriptions closely matches those of linguistic systems like the Sumerian logo-syllabic system, Rig Vedic Sanskrit etc., though they are careful to stress that this does not by itself imply that the script is linguistic. A follow-up study presented further evidence in terms of entropies of longer sequences of symbols beyond pairs. Sproat in turn claims that there exist a number of misunderstandings in Rao et al., including a lack of discriminative power in their model, and argues that applying their model to known non-linguistic systems such as Mesopotamian deity symbols produces similar results to the Indus script. Rao et al.'s argument against Sproat's claims, and Sproat's reply, were published in Computational Linguistics in December 2010. The June 2014 issue of Language carries a paper by Sproat that provides further evidence that the methodology of Rao et al. is flawed.

Attempts at decipherment

Further information: Harappan language

Over the years, numerous decipherments have been proposed, but there is no established scholarly consensus. The following factors are usually regarded as the biggest obstacles for a successful decipherment:

• The underlying language has not been identified though some 300 loanwords in the Rigveda are a good starting point for comparison.
• The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being only 17 signs (and a sealing of combined inscriptions of just 27 signs).
• No bilingual texts (like a Rosetta Stone) have been found.

The topic is popular among amateur researchers, and there have been various (mutually exclusive) decipherment claims.

Dravidian hypothesis

The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov surmised that the symbols represent a logosyllabic script and suggested, based on computer analysis, an underlying agglutinative Dravidian language as the most likely candidate for the underlying language. Knorozov's suggestion was preceded by the work of Henry Heras, who suggested several readings of signs based on a proto-Dravidian assumption.

The Finnish scholar Asko Parpola writes that the Indus script and Harappan language "most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family". Parpola led a Finnish team in the 1960s-80s that vied with Knorozov's Soviet team in investigating the inscriptions using computer analysis. Based on a proto-Dravidian assumption, they proposed readings of many signs, some agreeing with the suggested readings of Heras and Knorozov (such as equating the "fish" sign with the Dravidian word for fish "min") but disagreeing on several other readings. A comprehensive description of Parpola's work until 1994 is given in his book Deciphering the Indus Script. The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a late Neolithic (early 2nd millennium BC, i.e. post-dating Harappan decline) stone celt allegedly marked with Indus signs has been considered by some to be significant for the Dravidian identification.

Iravatham Mahadevan, who supports the Dravidian hypothesis, says, "we may hopefully find that the proto-Dravidian roots of the Harappan language and South Indian Dravidian languages are similar. This is a hypothesis [...] But I have no illusions that I will decipher the Indus script, nor do I have any regret".

In May 2007, the Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department found pots with arrow-head symbols during an excavation in Melaperumpallam near Poompuhar. These symbols are claimed to have a striking resemblance to seals unearthed in Mohenjo-daro Pakistan in the 1920s.

"Sanskritic" hypothesis

Indian archaeologist Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao claimed to have deciphered the Indus script. Postulating uniformity of the script over the full extent of Indus-era civilization, he compared it to the Phoenician Alphabet, and assigned sound values based on this comparison. His decipherment results in an "Sanskritic" reading, including the numerals aeka, tra, chatus, panta, happta/sapta, dasa, dvadasa, sata (1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, 100). He notes a number of striking similarities in shape and form between the late Harappan characters and the Phoenician letters, arguing than the Phoenician script evolved from the Harappan script, challenging the classical theory that the first alphabet was Proto-Sinaitic.

John E. Mitchiner, has dismissed some of these attempts at decipherment. Mitchiner mentions that "a more soundly-based but still greatly subjective and unconvincing attempt to discern an Indo-European basis in the script has been that of Rao".

Support for a continuity between Indus and Brahmi has been sought in graphic similarities between Brahmi and the late Harappan script, where the ten most common ligatures correspond with the form of one of the ten most common glyphs in Brahmi. There is also corresponding evidence of continuity in the use of numerals Further support for this continuity comes from statistical analysis of the relationship carried out by Das. According to Subhash Kak, Indus script is likely to have influenced Semitic scripts through the early second millennium BC presence of the Indic people in West Asia.

Encoding

The Indus symbols have been assigned the ISO 15924 code "Inds". It was proposed for encoding in Unicode's Supplementary Multilingual Plane in 1999; however, the Unicode Consortium still list the proposal in pending status.

See also

• Early Indian epigraphy
• Undeciphered scripts
• Bronze Age writing
• Proto-writing

References

• Bryant, Edwin (2000), The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate Oxford University Press.
• Farmer, Steve et al. (2004) The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization, Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies (EJVS), vol. 11 (2004), issue 2 (Dec) [2] (PDF).
• Knorozov, Yuri V. (ed.) (1965) Predvaritel’noe soobshchenie ob issledovanii protoindiyskikh textov. Moscow.
• Mahadevan, Iravatham, Murukan In the Indus Script (1999)
• Mahadevan, Iravatham, Aryan or Dravidian or Neither? A Study of Recent Attempts to Decipher the Indus Script (1995–2000) EJVS (ISSN 1084-7561) vol. 8 (2002) issue 1 (March 8).[3]
• Heras, Henry. Studies in Proto-Indo-Mediterranean Culture, Bombay: Indian Historical Research Institute, 1953.
• Parpola, Asko et al. (1987-2010). Corpus of Indus seals and inscriptions, Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (Academia scientiarum Fennica), 1987-2010.
• Parpola, Asko. Deciphering the Indus script Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Parpola, Asko (2005) Study of the Indus Script. 50th ICES Tokyo Session.
• Parpola, Asko (2008) Is the Indus script indeed not a writing system?. Published in Airāvati, Felicitation volume in honour of Iravatham Mahadevan, Chennai.
• .
• Rao, R.P.N. et al. (2009). "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script". Science, 29 May 2009.
• Rao, R.P.N. (2010). "Probabilistic Analysis of an Ancient Undeciphered Script". IEEE Computer, vol. 43(4), 76-80, April 2010.
• Sproat, R. (2014). "A Statistical Comparison of Written Language and Nonlinguistic Symbol Systems". "Language", vol. 90(2), 457-481, June 2014.
• Subramanian, T. S. (2006) "Significance of Mayiladuthurai find" in The Hindu, May 1, 2006.
• Wells, B. "An Introduction to Indus Writing" Independence, MO: Early Sites Research Society 1999.
• Keim, Brandon (2009) "Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000 Year Old Mystery" in WIRED

External links

• Indus Script (ancientscripts.com)
• Indus Script (http://www.shangrilagifts.org/hp/indus.html - Comparison of Indus Valley Harappan 哈拉帕 and Ancient Chinese Jia-Gu-wen 甲骨文 "Bone Script")
• "Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu ("Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu )
• The Indus Script (From harappa.com)
• BBC - 'Earliest writing' found
• How come we can't decipher the Indus script? (from The Straight Dope)
• Iravatham Mahadevan, Towards a scientific study of the Indus Script
• "Studies in Indus Scripts - I" by S. Srikanta Sastri, published in Quarterly Journal of Mythic Society, Vol XXIV, No. 3
• "Studies in Indus Scripts - II" by S. Srikanta Sastri, published in Quarterly Journal of Mythic Society, Vol XXIV, No 4
• Script Image;Article
• Collection of essays about the Indus script (Steve Farmer)
• WIRED.com (WIRED.com)
• .
• Rao, Rajesh (2011) "A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language" TED Talks