Writings on the wall

While the ‘grammar’ of the script broadly seems to be uniform across all the sites of the Bronze Age civilisation, including Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Lothal, Kalibangan, Chanhudaro, each has a special affinity to certain signs and a distinct writing style. The latest finding — published in Korean journal Scripta — may take archaeologists and historians a step closer to understanding the Indus script.

Spread across a million square kilometres, the Indus script is found on various types of inscribed objects. Around 3,700 such objects have been unearthed from several Indus sites situated across India, Pakistan and some West Asian areas.

Eighty-five per cent of these objects have been excavated from Mohenjodaro and Harappa, the two major sites. While 80 per cent of these objects are in the form of seals, the remaining 20 per cent include miniature tablets, copper tablets, pottery graffiti, ivory or bone rods and bronze implements.

“In the present study, we have analysed data based on sign usage and text length distribution. We have focused on 67 most frequently occurring signs that account for 80 per cent of the data unearthed and the fluctuations in each. While there is a common thread of rules and grammatical structures that are fairly well obeyed in Indus writing, our study suggests that writings on different types of objects and at different sites do have individualistic clues to their content,” says TIFR’s Nisha Yadav, the principal author of the study.

While there are small and subtle variations across sites and types of objects, there are no large and dramatic variations, indicating that the level of planning and standardisation was large.

“The small variations suggest that even within this framework, some local freedom was permitted. This shows that the Indus Valley civilisation, though highly uniform in several aspects, was not fully homogenised,” she adds.

The findings also reveal that Mohenjodaro, in Pakistan, and Lothal, near Ahmedabad in Gujarat, share high level of similarity in their pattern of text length distributions and usage of signs, which is quite distinct from other sites. While Harappa is closest to Kalibangan with respect to its text length distribution, this similarity does not hold in their pattern of sign usage, says the study. In terms of sign usage, Harappa stands apart from all other major sites. West Asian sites share least similarity with these clusters and appear as a distinct entity.

“This suggests that Harappa had a distinct style of writing. But we would like to emphasise that this does not in itself suggest that the content of writing in Harappa and Mohenjodaro was different, as the same information can be expressed in different manner,” adds the paper.