Context: Recently, the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin announced a $1-million prize to anyone who deciphers the scripts of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
- First discovered in the 1920s by Sir John Marshall’s team, the script is found on seals, terracotta tablets, and metal, showcasing pictograms as well as animal and human motifs.
- Over 100 documented attempts by archaeologists, epigraphists, linguists, historians, and scientists to decipher the Harappan writing system have been unsuccessful.
About the Script
- Date: The Indus civilization (Matured), dated around 2600-1800 B.C., declined approximately 500 years before the composition of most hymns in the Rgveda-Samhita, the oldest historical document of India.
- Area covered: The IVC, covered 2,000 sites across 1.5 million sq. km. in present-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan during the Bronze Age (3000-1500 BCE)
- Information: No clear information remains about the names of Indus kings, their subjects, their gods, or the language they spoke.
- Found on: The Indus people used a pictographic script, with around 3500 surviving specimens on seals, amulets, pottery, and other inscribed objects.
- Writing system: The Indus script is an unknown writing system, and the inscriptions discovered are very short,
- However, some scholars interpreted that, the writing system features a boustrophedon style, referring to texts read alternately from right to left and then left to right.
- Script Style: The Indus script is logo-syllabic, meaning it doesn’t function as a closed system like syllabic or alphabetic scripts. Its signs must be interpreted individually, and many graphemes may remain mysteries.
- Purpose: The purpose of the Indus script remains debated, with some viewing it as for trade and administration, while others see it as ritualistic or symbolic.
Significance of Deciphering the Indus Script
- Determining the language family (Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, or others) could provide valuable insights into the linguistic origins of ancient India.
- Understanding of ancient cultures and their societal complexity.
- Connecting the Harappans to later civilizations could provide insights into India’s social, cultural, religious and linguistic evolution.
- Understanding the script would provide a deeper understanding of trade, governance, and daily life in the ancient world.
Challenges in Deciphering the Indus Script
- Lack of multilingual inscriptions: The lack of a bilingual inscription, like the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian hieroglyphs, has slowed its decipherment.
- Unknown Language: The script probably represents an unidentified language, making phonetic assignments challenging.
- Ambiguity of Signs: The presence of multiple interpretations for many symbols makes it difficult to establish a consistent reading system.
- No definite writing style: Unlike other ancient scripts, there are no clear links to known languages or writing systems, which hampers progress.
Connection between IVC and Tamil Nadu
- Scholars such as Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Father Heras, Walter Fairservis and Asko Parpola argue that the Indus script has proto-Dravidian references, as highlighted in recent studies of Indus signs and graffiti in Tamil Nadu.
- The study compared marks on 15,000 pot shards from 140 Tamil Nadu sites with 4,000 Indus Valley artefacts, identifying 42 base signs, 544 variants, and 1,521 composite forms.
- Parpola’s research, starting in 1964, concluded that the Indus script, a logosyllabic script used by major cultures around 2500 BCE, has Dravidian roots.
- Parpola suggested that the fish sign on Indus seals likely represented a “star,” not an actual fish, linking it to the Dravidian word for fish (min or meen), a homophone for “star.”
- Starting with this hypothesis, Parpola claimed to have found the Old Tamil names of all planets in the Indus script.
- The presence of Brahui, a living Dravidian language spoken by a small ethnic group in Balochistan, Pakistan, further supports the Dravidian hypothesis.
- Recent chronometric dates suggest that while the Indus Valley was in the Copper Age, South India was in the Iron Age, making them contemporary. This implies potential cultural exchanges, either directly or through intermediate zones.
