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The term Indus script (Harappan script) refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Harappan civilization (Indus Valley Civilization) of ancient India (most of the Indus sites are distributed in present day Pakistan and North West India) used between 2600–1900 BC. Inspite of many attempts at decipherments and claims, it is as yet undeciphered. That the underlying language is unknown and there is no "Rosetta stone" makes the decipherments extremely difficult.

The script generally refers to that used in the mature Harappan phase, which evolved from an early Harappan script attested from around 3500 BC, and was followed by a late Harappan script used until around 1500 BC. They are most commonly associated with flat, rectangular stone tablets called seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials. The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1875, in the form of a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, well over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. After 1900 BC, use of the symbols ends, together with the final stage of Harappan civilization. Some early scholars, starting with Cunningham in 1877, thought that the script was the archetype of the Brahmi script used by Ashoka. Cunningham's ideas were supported by G.R. Hunter, and many Indian scholars continue to argue for the Indus script as the predecessor of the Brahmic family.

Script characteristics

The script is written from right to left (Lal 1966), and sometimes follow a boustrophedonic style. Since the number of principal signs is about 400, midway between typical logographic and syllabic scripts, many scholars accept the script to be logo-syllabic (Bryant 2000) (typically syllabic scripts have about 50-100 signs whereas logographic scripts have a very large number of principal signs). Structural analysis indicates an agglutinative language underneath the script.

Attempts at decipherment

Over the years, numerous decipherments have been proposed, but none has been accepted by the scientific community at large. The following factors are usually regarded as the biggest obstacles for a successful decipherment:
  • The substrate language has not been identified, nor the language family to which it belongs.
  • The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being one of only 26 signs.
  • No bilingual texts have been found.

The Russian scholar Yury V. Knorozov, who has edited a multivolumed corpus of the inscriptions, surmises that the symbols represent a logo-syllabic script, with an underlying Dravidian language as the most likely linguistic substrate.(Knorozov 1965) Yury V. Knorozov is the author of the well known decipherment of the Maya script, too. The Finnish scholar Asko Parpola repeated several of the readings. The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a neolithic stone celt, a hand-held axe, with Indus script has been considered to be significant for this identification.(Subramanium 2006)

If the signs are purely ideographical, they may contain no information about the language spoken by their creators, and cannot be called a script in the true sense of the word. Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel(Farmer 2004) make the case that the symbols were not coupled to oral language, which in part explains the extreme brevity of the inscriptions. This view has been challenged by Parpola (2005).

The last serious research of the script was conducted by the Russian scholar Sergei V. Rjabchikov. His method is based on the structural linguistics. Sergei V. Rjabchikov has reconstructed the Proto-Indo-Aryan (Proto-Indo-European) language, and as a result he has decoded the Proto-Indian Writing System.(Rjabchikov 2006) Sergei V. Rjabchikov is the author of the well known decipherment of the rongorongo script, too.

Amateur research

The topic is popular among amateur researchers, and there are various decipherment claims. Several authors, such as S. R. Rao (19xx) and R. Hasenpflug (2006 *), have attempted to prove that the script encodes Vedic Sanskrit. These theories are not accepted by most scholars.

Kak (200x) focusses on the morphological connection between Indus and Brahmi without stressing the question of the decipherment, alleging to have found evidence that the Brahmi script derives from the Indus script. This view was first put forward by Cunningham in the 1870s, but is not accepted by mainstream scholars now.

Late Indus script

Onshore explorations near Bet Dwarka in Gujarat revealed the presence of late Indus seals depicting a 3-headed animal, earthen vessel inscribed in 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 thermo-lumenescence date for the pottery in Bet Dwaraka is 1528 BC. This evidence suggests that a late Harappan script was used until around 1500 BC. *

Notes

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, EVJS, vol. 11 (2004), issue 2 (Dec) * (PDF).
  • Knorozov, Yuri V. (ed.) (1965) Predvaritel’noe soobshchenie ob issledovanii protoindiyskikh textov. Moscow.
  • Parpola, Asko (2005) Study of the Indus Script. 50th ICES Tokyo Session.
  • Rjabchikov, Sergei V. (2006). A New Key to the Proto-Indian Writing System. AnthroGlobe Journal, 2006.
  • Subramanian, T. S. (2006) "Significance of Mayiladuthurai find" in The Hindu, May 01, 2006.

External links

Undeciphered writing systems | Indus Valley Civilization

Indus-Schrift | Escritura del Indo | Écriture de l'Indus | インダス文字 | Письменность долины Инда

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Indus script".

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