Why scholars have struggled to decipher Harappan script

Historians close to the Sangh have long claimed that the underlying language represented by the Harappan script is Sanskrit. Others say that it is a form of proto-Dravidian, while still others link it to Ho and Santali. Driving such claims, often made with scant evidence, is a bid to establish the antiquity of one’s people and culture, and the political capital that such antiquity provides.

But to date, a definitive breakthrough has been elusive. Now, some scholars argue that it might not be a script at all.

The challenge

To decipher a script, the following subproblems have to be solved in order. (Fabio Tamburini, ‘Decipherment of Lost Ancient Scripts as Combinatorial Optimisation using Coupled Simulated Annealing’, 2023).

– Deciding if a set of symbols actually represent a writing system;

– Devising appropriate procedures to isolate or segment the stream of symbols into a sequence of single signs;

– Reducing the set of signs to the minimal set for the writing system forming (its alphabet, syllabery, or inventory of signs) by identifying all allographs (the same sign written in a variant form, for example a printed ‘a’ and a cursive ‘a’);

– Assigning to each symbol their specified value, whether phonetic or otherwise;

-Trying to match these values to a specific language.

In the case of the Indus script, many of these problems remain unsolved due to three main reasons.

No multilingual inscriptions: What is perhaps most helpful to decipher unknown scripts is direct comparison with known ones, made possible by multilingual inscriptions with the same content in two or more scripts. There is evidence that the Indus Valley Civilisation had robust trade links with the contemporaneous Mesopotamian Civilisation whose cuneiform script was deciphered in the early 19th century — but no multilingual inscriptions have been discovered so far.

Language not known: Undeciphered scripts/languages fall in three basic categories, according to Andrew Robinson, the author of the influential Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts (2008). These are: “an unknown script writing a known language; a known script writing an unknown language; and an unknown script writing an unknown language.” Of these, the third category, in which the Indus script falls, is the most challenging to decipher as they provide scholars with the least number of points of reference to go by.

Not much is known about civilisation: The greater the availability of material evidence — in the form of inscribed artefacts — the higher the likelihood of a script being deciphered. This is because each different artefact, and the context in which it was found, can provide some insight into the script it is inscribed with. Although some 3,500 seals have been identified till date, given that each seal has on average only five characters inscribed, scholars simply do not have enough material to analyse. In fact, compared to contemporaneous ancient civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt, much less is known in general about the Harappan civilisation.

Progress so far

One of the key early figures trying to decipher the Indus script was archaeologist S R Rao who postulated in 1982 that the script contained 62 signs. Although he was not the first to make the claim, Rao was one of the foremost authoritative voices to link the Indus script to Sanskrit and the Vedic civilisation.

In Lost Languages, 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”.

The most notable opponent of this hypothesis is Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola, who in 1994 identified 425 distinct signs in the script which he had for decades linked to old Tamil.

“Basically the signs were pictures which stood for complete words by themselves,” he told The Indian Express in an interview last year. 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.

But more recent scholarship has questioned whether the 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. This claim was made in a 2004 paper by historian Steve Farmer, computer linguist Richard Sproat, and Indologist Michael Witzel who said that the “script” constituted non-linguistic symbols of political and religious significance.

While this paper was heavily criticised at the time, including by Parpola, its conclusions have since received support from other scholars. Linguist Peggy Mohan, author of Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages (2021), told The Indian Express last year that the signs were a part of 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”.