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Indus script

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The term Indus script (also Harappan script) refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Indus Valley Civilization, in use during the Mature Harappan period, between the 26th and 20th centuries BC. In spite of many attempts at decipherments and claims, it is as yet undeciphered. The underlying language is unknown, and the lack of a bilingual makes the decipherment unlikely pending significant new finds.

Indus script
Script type
Undeciphered
Bronze Age writing
Time period
2600–1900 BC
DirectionRight-to-left script, boustrophedon Edit this on Wikidata
LanguagesUnknown (see Harappan language)
ISO 15924
ISO 15924Inds (610), ​Indus (Harappan)
 This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
Seal impression showing a typical "inscription" of five "characters".
Collection of seals

The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1873, in the form of a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, well over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia.

Some early scholars, starting with Cunningham in 1877, thought that the script was the archetype of the Brahmi script used by Ashoka. Cunningham's ideas were supported by G.R. Hunter, Iravatham Mahadevan and a minority of scholars continue to argue for the Indus script as the predecessor of the Brahmic family. However most scholars disagree, claiming instead that the Brahmi script derived from the Aramaic script.

Inscription corpus

Early Harappan

The script generally refers to that used in the mature Harappan phase, which perhaps evolved from a few signs found in early Harappa after 3500 BC.[1]. However, the early date and the interpretation given in the BBC report have been challenged by the long-term excavator of Harappa, Richard Meadow. [2] The use of early pottery marks and incipient Indus signs was followed by the mature Harappan script.

Mature Harappan

The Harappan signs are most commonly associated with flat, rectangular stone tablets called seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials.

Late Harappan

After 1900 BC, the systematic use of the symbols ended, after the final stage of the Mature Harappan civilization.

File:Late Harappan script.jpg
Late Indus script found on pottery at Bet Dwarka dated to 1528 BC based on thermoluminescence dating.

A few Harappan signs have been claimed to appear until as late as around 1100 BC (the beginning of the Indian Iron Age). Onshore explorations near Bet Dwarka in Gujarat revealed the presence of late Indus seals depicting a 3-headed animal, earthen vessel inscribed in what is claimed to be a late Harappan script, and a large quantity of pottery similar to Lustrous Red Ware bowl and Red Ware dishes, dish-on-stand, perforated jar and incurved bowls which are datable to the 16th century BC in Dwarka, Rangpur and Prabhas. The thermoluminescence date for the pottery in Bet Dwaraka is 1528 BC. This evidence has been used to claim that a late Harappan script was used until around 1500 BC. [1] Other excavations in India at Vaisali, Bihar [2] and Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu [3] have been claimed to contain Indus symbols being used as late as 1100 BC.

In May 2007, the Tamil Nadu Archaeological Department found pots with arrow-head symbols during an excavation in Melaperumpallam near Poompuhar. These symbols are claimed to have a striking resemblance to seals unearthed in Mohenjodaro in the 1920s.[3]

In 1960, B.B. Lal of the Archaeological Survey of India wrote a paper in the journal Ancient India. It carried a photograhic catalog of megalithic and chalcolithic pottery which Lal compares with the Ancient Indus script.[3] Ancient inscriptions that are claimed to bear a striking resemblance to those found in Indus Valley sites have been found in Sanur near Tindivanam in Tamil Nadu, Musiri in Kerala and Sulur near Coimbatore.[3]

Script characteristics

The script is written from right to left,[4]and sometimes follows a boustrophedonic style. Since the number of principal signs is about 400-600,[5] midway between typical logographic and syllabic scripts, many scholars accept the script to be logo-syllabic[6] (typically syllabic scripts have about 50-100 signs whereas logographic scripts have a very large number of principal signs). Several scholars maintain that structural analysis indicates an agglutinative language underneath the script. However, this is contradicted by the occurrence of signs supposedly representing prefixes and infixes.

Attempts at decipherment

Further information: Harappan language

Over the years, numerous decipherments have been proposed, but none has been accepted by the scientific community at large. The following factors are usually regarded as the biggest obstacles for a successful decipherment:

  • The underlying language, if any, has not been identified.
  • The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being one of only 17 signs (and a sealing of combined inscriptions of just 27 signs).
  • No bilingual texts (like a Rosetta Stone) have been found.

The topic is popular among amateur researchers, and there have been various (mutually exclusive) decipherment claims. None of these suggestions has found academic recognition.[7]The latter maintains that that the script is a set of hieroglyphs, composed of both pictorial motifs and signs and all are read rebus as metallurgical repertoire in mleccha [4]language.

Dravidian hypothesis

The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov, who has edited a multi-volumed corpus of the inscriptions, surmises that the symbols represent a logosyllabic script, with an underlying Dravidian language as the most likely linguistic substrate.[8] Knorozov is perhaps best known for his decisive contributions towards the decipherment of the Maya script, a pre-Columbian writing system of the Mesoamerican Maya civilization. Knorozov's investigations were the first to conclusively demonstrate that the Maya script was logosyllabic in character, an interpretation now confirmed in the subsequent decades of Mayanist epigraphic research.

The Finnish scholar Asko Parpola repeated several of these suggested Indus script readings. The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a late Neolithic (early 2nd millennium BC, i.e. post-dating Harappan decline) stone celt adorned with Indus script markings has been considered to be significant for this identification.[9][10] However, their identification as Indus signs has been disputed.

Iravatham Mahadevan, who supports the Dravidian hypothesis, says, "we may hopefully find that the proto-Dravidian roots of the Harappan language and South Indian Dravidian languages are similar. This is a hypothesis [...] But I have no illusions that I will decipher the Indus script, nor do I have any regret."[11]

Script vs. Ideographical Symbols

Signs which are not purely ideographical, are likely to contain information about the underlying language spoken by their creators [5], i.e., they would not be just logographic script, or pictograms.

Steve Farmer, an independent scholar, with Richard Sproat and Michael Witzel[12] claim that the Indus Script symbols were not coupled to oral language, which they say explains the extreme brevity of the inscriptions. This view has been challenged by Asko Parpola who maintains that their claims are not supported by computational linguistics experiments.[13]

A computational linguistics study conducted by a joint Indo-US team led by Rajesh P N Rao[6] of University of Washington, consisting of Iravatham Mahadevan, and others from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, was published in April 2009 in Science (Brevia section)[14] They claim that their study found "evidence for the existence of linguistic structure in the Indus script".[15]

Farmer, Sproat and Witzel published a quick two-page in reaction to the study, [16] and announced a more detailed criticism would follow.[17] Since then, two specialists in computational linguistics, Mark Liberman [18] and Fernando Pereira [19] have criticized the Rao et al. paper. An ongoing discussion by various statisticians appears at [20]

Notes

  1. ^ Whitehouse, David (1999) 'Earliest writing' found BBC
  2. ^ http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1721/17211220.htm
  3. ^ a b c Subramaniam, T. S. (May 1, 2006). "From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu". The Hindu. Retrieved 2008-05-23. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. ^ (Lal 1966)
  5. ^ (Wells 1999)
  6. ^ (Bryant 2000)
  7. ^ see e.g. Egbert Richter, N. S. Rajaram and Srinivasan Kalyanaraman for examples.
  8. ^ (Knorozov 1965)
  9. ^ (Subramanium 2006; see also A Note on the Muruku Sign of the Indus Script in light of the Mayiladuthurai Stone Axe Discovery by I. Mahadevan (2006)
  10. ^ Significance of Mayiladuthurai find
  11. ^ Interview at Harrappa.com
  12. ^ (Farmer 2004)
  13. ^ (Parpola 2005)
  14. ^ Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari, and Iravatham Mahadevan, Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script published online 23 April 2009 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1170391] (in Science Express Brevia)
  15. ^ http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/ScienceIndus.pdf
  16. ^ A Refutation of the Claimed Refutation of the Nonlinguistic Nature of Indus Symbols: Invented Data Sets in the Statistical Paper of Rao et al. (Science, 2009)
  17. ^ Farmer's website. 24 April 2009.
  18. ^ http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1374
  19. ^ http://earningmyturns.blogspot.com/2009/04/falling-for-magic-formula.htm
  20. ^ https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=3112258799568696095&postID=5532371483160231163&page=1

References

See also

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