Mystery of the Indus script, and the over 100 failed deciphering attempts

The announcement by Stalin followed the publication of a study of ‘Indus Signs And Graffiti Marks of Tamil Nadu’ by the state’s Department of Archaeology, which identified “parallels” between “more than 90% of the graffiti marks of South India and the graffiti marks of the Indus Valley Civilisation”.

The study compared marks on 15,000 pot shards found in 140 archaeological sites in Tamil Nadu with 4,000 artefacts, including seals, discovered at Indus Valley sites, and identified 42 “base signs”, 544 “variants” and 1,521 “composite forms”.

The signs in the Indus script

The Indus Civilisation, which reached its zenith between 2600 and 1900 BCE, sprawled over more than 800,000 sq km in what is today Pakistan and parts of northwestern India. It was the world’s most sophisticated urban culture at the time, with an elaborate system of trade, taxation, and drainage.

The plethora of inscriptions on seals and terracotta tablets found at Indus sites contain a variety of symbols – human and animal motifs, and what scholars have identified as parts of a forgotten script. However, there is no agreement on the number of symbols in the supposed script.

Archaeologist S R Rao, who pioneered the deciphering effort, postulated in 1982 that the script contained 62 signs. This was refuted by the Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola, one of the most authoritative voices on the subject – he said there were 425 signs (Deciphering the Indus Script (1994)). Then, in 2016, archaeologist and epigrapher Bryan K Wells suggested the presence of 676 signs.

This is only the first of many scholarly disagreements on the nature of the Indus script.

Debate over language

Scholars have long attempted to find linkages between the Indus script (and language) and Sanskrit. Some experts say that this is a part of the larger nationalist project to link the civilisation of the Indus Valley to that of the Vedic period, emphasising the indigeneity of India’s people and culture. Rao was the most notable of these voices – but other specialists disagreed.

Andrew Robinson wrote that Rao seemed “determined to prove that the Indus language was the ancestor of Sanskrit, the root language of most of the modern languages of North India, and that Sanskrit was therefore not the product of the so-called Indo-Aryan (Indo-European) ‘invasions’ of India from the West via Central Asia but was instead the expression of indigenous Indian (Indus) genius” (Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts (2008)).

In an interview to The Indian Express last year, Parpola explained why Sanskrit, the language of the Vedic Aryans, could not be connected to the Indus script. “There is archaeological evidence to suggest that the Aryans came to the Indus Valley only in the second millennium BCE which is after the Indus Valley Civilisation,” he said.

Parpola’s investigations, which began in 1964, concluded that the Indus script – a logosyllabic script of the kind used by all major cultures around 2500 BCE – has Dravidian roots. “Basically the signs were pictures which stood for complete words by themselves,” he said.

The script used a concept called ‘rebus’, in which pictograms represented the word for the object or action depicted, or any other word with a similar sound, irrespective of meaning.

So, the fish sign, found in abundance on Indus seals, is unlikely to have meant actual fish, Parpola said. Rather, he connected it to ‘star’ — a homophone (words with the same pronunciation but different meaning) of the Dravidian word for fish (min or meen).

Starting with this hypothesis, Parpola claimed to have found the Old Tamil names of all planets in the Indus script. His theory has found support from both Western and Indian scholars, including Iravatham Mahadevan, the leading researcher on the Indus script in the country.

The existence of Brahui, an extant Dravidian language spoken by a small ethnic group in Balochistan in present-day Pakistan, appears to lend further weight to the Dravidian hypothesis.

‘Not a script at all’

From the early 2000s onward, questions have been raised on whether the so-called Indus “script” represented any language at all. This hypothesis was based mainly on the fact that all the Indus inscriptions are very short – with only about five characters on average – with the longest having only 26 characters.

In a paper published in 2004, historian Steve Farmer, computer linguist Richard Sproat, and Indologist Michael Witzel claimed that the Indus “script” did not constitute a language-based writing system, but mainly comprised nonlinguistic symbols of political and religious significance.

The paper (The collapse of Indus Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilisation) was severely criticised. Parpola rejected the principal claim that writing systems necessarily produce longer texts than the ones found on Indus inscriptions – pointing out that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was of a similar nature.

Some recent scholarship has, however, supported some of the conclusions of Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel. Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, a software engineer who has researched the script, has said that while the Harappans may not have been “illiterate”, the symbols “do not phonologically spell words of any language”.

In a paper published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications in 2023, she argued that the inscribed Indus seals were mainly used as tax stamps, while the tablets were used as permits for tax collection, craft making or trading. The script was not used for religious purposes, nor did it phonetically spell out words to encode names of ancient Vedic or Tamil deities, she wrote.

Linguist Peggy Mohan, author of Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages (2021), told The Indian Express last year that one must stop referring to the signs on Indus seals as being part of a script, and rather consider them to be a hallmarking system. “Even today dhobis in India have their own signs which are useful for them but they are not what you would call language,” she said. “Most prehistoric societies did not write the kind of things we write today. Commercial information was perhaps the first thing that any society would record in writing”.

That said, it remains important to decipher the meaning of the symbols. Ansumali Mukhopadhyay noted that “When Linear B (among the earliest Greek scripts) was being deciphered, some scholars hoped to find snippets of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey”, but found a palace book-keeping record instead. Nonetheless, it provided significant information about the palace economy.

“Similarly, in the case of the Indus script, even though it is just giving us commercial information, it can tell us a lot about how the economy functioned at that time,” she said.