Mystery of the Indus script
• The Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology (TNSDA) released a book titled 'Indus Signs and Graffiti
Marks of Tamil Nadu: A Morphological Study'. The study revealed that nearly 90% of the graffiti marks
and 60% of the signs unearthed from excavation sites across Tamil Nadu resemble those found in the
Indus Valley Civilisation.
• Following this, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin has announced a $1 million prize for deciphering the
script of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
An enigmatic script
• The Harappans invented the art of writing like the people of ancient Mesopotamia.
• The Harappan script has not yet been deciphered. It is not alphabetical (where each sign stands for a
vowel or a consonant) but mainly pictographic. It has many signs (pictographs), somewhere between
375 and 400, and each stands for a word (idea, object or sound).
• The script was written from right to left, as some seals show wider spacing on the right and cramping
on the left as if the engraver began working from the right and then ran out of space. In a few long seals,
the boustrophedon method was adopted.
ð Boustrophedon: Writing in the reverse direction in alternative lines.
• Writing has been found on various objects, such as seals, copper tools, rims of jars, copper and terracotta
tablets, jewellery, bone rods, and even an ancient signboard.
• Most inscriptions are short, the longest containing about 26 signs.
• The Harappan script is not related to the contemporary scripts of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Disagreements on the Nature of the Indus script
Number of symbols
• Scholars have no agreement on the number of symbols in the Indus script.
Scholar Number of Signs
S R Rao (Archaeologist who pioneered the deciphering effort) 62
Asko Parpola (Finnish Indologist) 425
Bryan K Wells (Archaeologist and epigrapher) 676
Language
• Some scholars, such as S R Rao, suggested that the Indus language was the ancestor of Sanskrit.
However, others, such as Asko Parpola, refuted this claim.
• Some scholars, such as Asko Parpola, Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Father Heras, Iravatham Mahadevan, and
Krishnamurti, have also suggested that the Indus language has Dravidian roots.
PMF IAS Ancient and Medieval India
Not a Script
• Some scholars argue that the Indus script is not a language-based writing system. They point out that
the inscriptions are very short, averaging five characters, with the longest being 26. Researcher Bahata
Ansumali Mukhopadhyay proposed that the symbols of the Indus script were used for practical purposes,
like tax stamps and trade permits, not for religious or linguistic functions.
Major Challenges in Deciphering the Indus Script
• The following are significant challenges in deciphering the Indus script:
1. Absence of multilingual inscriptions
2. Unknown Language
3. Limited Knowledge of the Indus Valley Civilisation
Absence of multilingual inscriptions
• Multilingual inscriptions having the same content in two or more scripts are most helpful in deciphering
unknown scripts. Scholars who can read the inscriptions in one script can compare the letters and
decipher the other script.
• Harappans had trade relations with the contemporaneous Mesopotamian Civilisation, whose cuneiform
script was deciphered in the early 19th century — but no multilingual inscriptions have been discovered
so far.
Rosetta Stone Inscription
• It is a multilingual inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic, and ancient Greek. It contains a decree
passed during the reign of Ptolemy V in 196 BCE. This inscription was instrumental in deciphering Ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 1820s by French philologist Jean-François Champollion.
Unknown Language
• Undeciphered scripts/languages fall into three categories:
1. An unknown script writing a known language
2. A known script writing an unknown language
3. An unknown script writing an unknown language
• The Indus script belongs to the third category, which is the hardest to decipher due to the lack of
reference points.
Limited Knowledge of the Indus Valley Civilisation
• Deciphering the script requires more material evidence in the form of inscribed artefacts, as each artefact
and its context offer clues. However, only about 3,500 seals have been found, with an average of just five
characters each.
PMF IAS Ancient and Medieval India
• Deciphering the script is difficult because not much is known about the Indus Valley Civilisation
compared to contemporaneous ancient civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Many Harappan sites
remain undiscovered or underexplored.
Importance of Deciphering the Script
• Archaeological evidence, such as houses, pots, ornaments, tools, and seals, tells us much about the
Harappan people. However, understanding some aspects of the civilisation, such as beliefs, religion,
governance, etc., is challenging without deciphering its script. Hence, some aspects of the civilisation are
unknown, and deciphering the Harappan script will shed much light on this culture.
Possible Dravidian Link to the Indus Valley Civilisation
• Iravatham Mahadevan, in 2009, in one of his articles in The Hindu, highlighted certain linguistic evidence
favouring the Dravidian theory. These are:
v The survival of Brahui, a Dravidian language in the Indus region
v The presence of Dravidian loanwords in the Rigveda
v The substratum influence of Dravidian on the Prakrit dialects
v Computer analysis of the Indus texts revealed that the language had only suffixes (like Dravidian) and
no prefixes (as in Indo-Aryan) or infixes (as in Munda)
• However, Mahadevan suggested that these points did not automatically make Indus scrip Dravidian,
and much more work remains to be done.
PMF IAS Ancient and Medieval India
