Indus script

Indus script
Type	Undeciphered Bronze Age writing
Languages	Unknown (see Harappan language)
Time period	3500–1900 BC
ISO 15924	Inds, 610
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols.

Seal impression showing a typical "inscription" of five "characters".

Collection of seals

The term Indus script (also Harappan script) refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Indus Valley Civilization, in use during the Early Harappan and Mature Harappan period, between the 35th and 20th centuries BC. In spite of many attempts at decipherments and claims,^[1] it is as yet undeciphered. The underlying language has not been identified, primarily due to the lack of a bilingual inscription.

The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1873, in a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. In the early 1970s, Iravatham Mahadevan published a corpus and concordance of Indus writing listing about 3700 seals and about 417 distinct signs in specific patterns. The average inscription contains five signs, and the longest inscription is only 17 signs long. He also established the direction of writing as right to left.^[2]

Some early scholars, starting with Cunningham in 1877, thought that the script was the archetype of the Brāhmī script. Cunningham's ideas were supported by G.R. Hunter, Mahadevan and a minority of scholars, who 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.^[3] However, the early date and the interpretation given in the BBC report have been challenged by the long-term excavator of Harappa, Richard Meadow.^[4] The use of early pottery marks and incipient Indus signs was followed by the mature Harappan script.

Mature Harappan

Strings of Indus signs are most commonly found on flat, rectangular stamp seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials including tools, miniature tablets, copper plates, and pottery.

Late Harappan

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

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.^[5] Other excavations in India at Vaisali, Bihar^[6] and Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu^[7] 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 Mohenjo-daro in the 1920s.^[8]

In 1960, B.B. Lal of the Archaeological Survey of India wrote a paper in the journal Ancient India. It carried a photographic catalog of megalithic and chalcolithic pottery which Lal compares with the Ancient Indus script.^[8] 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.^[8]

In one alleged "decipherment" of the script, the Indian archeologist S. R. Rao argued that the late phase of the script represented the beginning of the alphabet. He notes a number of striking similarities in shape and form between the late Harappan characters and the Phoenician letters, arguing than the Phoenician script evolved from the Harappan script, challenging the classical theory that the first alphabet was Proto-Sinaitic.^[9]

Script characteristics

Inscription of ten characters from Dholavira

The writing system is largely pictorial but includes many abstract signs as well. The script is written from right to left,^[10] and sometimes follows a boustrophedonic style. Since the number of principal signs is about 400-600,^[11] midway between typical logographic and syllabic scripts, many scholars accept the script to be logo-syllabic^[12] (typically syllabic scripts have about 50-100 signs whereas logographic scripts have a very large number of principal signs). The prevailing scholarly view maintains that structural analysis indicates that the language is agglutinative, like the Dravidian languages.^[13] However, this is contradicted by the occurrence of signs supposedly representing prefixes and infixes, features more typical of a fusional language like the Indo-European languages.

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 has not been identified though some 300 loanwords in the Rigveda are a good starting point for comparison.^[14][15]
• The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being only 17 signs (and a sealing of combined inscriptions of just 27 signs).^[16]
• 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.^[17]

Indo-European hypothesis

Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao (Kannada: ಶಿಕಾರಿಪುರ ರಂಗನಾಥ ರಾವ್) (born 1922) is an Indian archeologist who led teams credited with the discovery of a number of Harappan sites including the port city of Lothal in Gujarat. He also discovered the ancient city of Dwarka. Rao (1992)^[18] claimed to have deciphered the Indus script. Postulating uniformity of the script over the full extent of Indus-era civilization, he compared it to the Phoenician Alphabet, and assigned sound values based on this comparison. His decipherment results in an "Sanskritic" reading, including the numerals aeka, tra, chatus, panta, happta/sapta, dasa, dvadasa, sata (1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, 100).

While mainstream scholarship is generally in agreement with Rao's approach of comparison, the details of his decipherment have not been accepted, and the script is still generally considered undeciphered. John E. Mitchiner, after dismissing some more fanciful attempts at decipherment, mentions that "a more soundly-based but still greatly subjective and unconvincing attempt to discern an Indo-European basis in the script has been that of Rao".^[19]

In a 2002 interview with The Hindu, Rao asserted his faith in his decipherment, saying that "Recently we have confirmed that it is definitely an Indo-Aryan language and deciphered. Prof. W. W. Grummond of Florida State University has written in his article that I have already deciphered it."^[20]

Dravidian hypothesis

The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov surmised that the symbols represent a logosyllabic script and suggested, based on computer analysis, an underlying agglutinative Dravidian language as the most likely candidate for the underlying language.^[21] Knorozov's suggestion was preceded by the work of Henry Heras, who suggested several readings of signs based on a proto-Dravidian assumption.^[22]

The Finnish scholar Asko Parpola led a Finnish team in the 1960s-80s that vied with Knorozov's Soviet team in investigating the script using computer analysis. Based on a proto-Dravidian assumption, they proposed readings of many signs, some agreeing with the suggested readings of Heras and Knorozov (such as equating the "fish" sign with the Dravidian word for fish "min") but disagreeing on several other readings. A comprehensive description of Parpola's work until 1994 is given in his book Deciphering the Indus Script.^[23]

The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a late Neolithic (early 2nd millennium BC, i.e. post-dating Harappan decline) stone celt allegedly marked with Indus script signs has been considered by some to be significant for the Dravidian identification.^[24][25] 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."^[26]

Massimo Vidale^[27] says, "I actually think that the Indus script was probably a protohistoric script, somehow conveying the sounds and words of one or more still unidentified languages".

Controversy about decipherability

In a 2004 article, Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel presented a number of arguments in support of their thesis that the Indus script is nonlinguistic, principal among them being the extreme brevity of the inscriptions, the existence of too many rare signs increasing over the 700-year period of the Mature Harappan civilization, and the lack of random-looking sign repetition typical for representations of actual spoken language (whether syllabic-based or letter-based), as seen, for example, in Egyptian cartouches.

Asko Parpola, reviewing the Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel thesis in 2005, states that their arguments "can be easily controverted".^[28] He cites the presence of a large number of rare signs in Chinese, and emphasizes that there is "little reason for sign repetition in short seal texts written in an early logo-syllabic script". Revisiting the question in a 2007 lecture,^[29] Parpola takes on each of the 10 main arguments of Farmer et al., presenting counterarguments for each. He states that "even short noun phrases and incomplete sentences qualify as full writing if the script uses the rebus principle to phonetize some of its signs".

A computational study conducted by a joint Indo-US team led by Rajesh P N Rao of the University of Washington, consisting of Iravatham Mahadevan and others from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, was published in April 2009 in Science.^[30] They conclude that "given the prior evidence for syntactic structure in the Indus script, (their) results increase the probability that the script represents language".^[31] Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel have disputed this finding, pointing out that Rao et al. did not actually compare the Indus signs with "real-world non-linguistic systems" but rather with "two wholly artificial systems invented by the authors".^[32] In response, Rao et al. point out that the two artificial systems “simply represent controls, necessary in any scientific investigation, to delineate the limits of what is possible.”^[33] They state that real-world non-linguistic systems were indeed included in their analysis (“DNA and protein sequences, FORTRAN computer code”).^[34] Farmer et al. have also compared a non-linguistic system (medieval heraldic signs) with natural languages using Rao et al.'s method and conclude that the method cannot distinguish linguistic systems from non-linguistic ones.^[35] Rao et al. have clarified that their method is inductive, not deductive as presumed by Farmer et al., and their result, together with other known attributes of the script, increases the evidence that the script is linguistic, though it does not prove it.^[36]

In a follow-up study^[37] published in IEEE Computer, Rao et al. present data which strengthen their original conditional entropy result,^[38] which involved analysis of pairs of symbols. They show that the Indus script is similar to linguistic systems in terms of block entropies, involving sequences up to 6 symbols in length.^[37]

A discussion of the linguistic versus nonlinguistic question by Sproat, Rao, and others was published in the journal Computational Linguistics in December 2010.^[39]

In computing

The Indus script has been assigned the ISO 15924 code "Inds". It was proposed for encoding in Unicode's Supplementary Multilingual Plane in 1999; however, the Unicode Consortium still list the proposal in pending status.^[40]

See also

• Proto-Elamite script
• Undeciphered scripts
• Bronze Age writing
• Sanskrit

Notes

1. ^ (Possehl, 1996)
2. ^ "Write signs for Indus script?". Nature India. 2009-05-31. http://www.nature.com/nindia/2009/090531/full/nindia.2009.147.html. Retrieved 2009-06-01. 
3. ^ Whitehouse, David (1999) 'Earliest writing' found BBC
4. ^ http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1721/17211220.htm
5. ^ http://www.nio.org/past_events/archaeology/keynote_address.jsp
6. ^ http://www.varalaaru.com/Default.asp?articleid=194#f10
7. ^ http://www.harappa.com/arrow/stone_celt_indus_signs.html
8. ^ ^{a b c} Subramaniam, T. S. (May 1, 2006). "From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu". The Hindu (Chennai, India). http://www.hindu.com/2008/05/03/stories/2008050353942200.htm. Retrieved 2008-05-23. 
9. ^ Robinson, Andrew. Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts. 2002
10. ^ (Lal 1966)
11. ^ (Wells 1999)
12. ^ (Bryant 2000)
13. ^ Frank Raymond Allchin; George Erdosy (1995). The archaeology of early historic South Asia: the emergence of cities and states. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-37695-2. http://books.google.com/books?id=EfZRVIjjZHYC&pg=PA46. Retrieved 21 August 2011. "A second major consideration is that nearly all the scholarly attempts to pinpoint the language of the Indus seal inscriptions agree (with one to two exceptions) that the evidence points to its being structurally ancestral to Dravidian. While it is to be expected that the seal inscriptions, if and when their reading is achieved, may be found to include loan words from Indo-Aryan and perhaps other languages, the probability remains that the underlying language structure was Dravidian." 
14. ^ FBJ Kuiper, Aryans in the Rigveda, Amsterdam/Atlanta 1991
15. ^ M. Witzel underlines the prefixing nature of these words and calls them Para-Munda,a language related to but not belonging to Proto-Munda; see: Witzel, M. Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Ṛgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic), EJVS Vol. 5,1, 1999, 1-67
16. ^ Longest Indus inscription
17. ^ see e.g. Egbert Richter, S. R. Rao, N. S. Rajaram, and Srinivasan Kalyanaraman for examples.
18. ^ see Koenraad Elst, Remarks in expectation of a decipherment of the Indus script
19. ^ J.E. Mitchiner: Studies in the Indus Valley Inscriptions, p.5, with reference to S.R. Rao: Lothal and the Indus Civilisation (ch.10), Bombay 1973.
20. ^ Rao refers to a statement by W. W. De Grummond, of the Department of Classics, Florida State University, that "Dr. Rao's decipherment of the Indus script has met with considerable acceptance and will serve now as a basis for further and continuing study of the language of the ancient Indus Valley civilization." in "Linguistic Affinities of Old Indo-Aryan with Classical Greek and Latin", B.U. Nayak, N.C. Ghosh (eds.) New Trends in Indian Art and Archaeology: S.R. Rao's 70th birthday felicitation volume, Aditya Prakashan (1992), pp. 133-139. ISBN 8185689121
21. ^ (Knorozov 1965)
22. ^ (Heras, 1953)
23. ^ (Parpola, 1994)
24. ^ (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)
25. ^ Significance of Mayiladuthurai find
26. ^ Interview at Harrappa.com
27. ^ http://www.docstoc.com/docs/document-preview.aspx?doc_id=9163376
28. ^ (Parpola, 2005, p. 37)
29. ^ (Parpola, 2008).
30. ^ 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)
31. ^ http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/ScienceIndus.pdf A discussion of the Rao et al. paper can be found here
32. ^ A Refutation of the Claimed Refutation of the Non-linguistic Nature of Indus Symbols: Invented Data Sets in the Statistical Paper of Rao et al. (Science, 2009) Retrieved on September 19, 2009.
33. ^ Rebuttal of Sproat, Farmer, et al.’s supposed “refutation”. Retrieved on June 23, 2011.
34. ^ (Rao et al., 2009)
35. ^ 'Conditional Entropy' Cannot Distinguish Linguistic from Non-linguistic Systems Retrieved on September 19, 2009.
36. ^ Entropy, the Indus Script, and Language: A Reply to R. Sproat Retrieved on June 23, 2011.
37. ^ ^{a b} (Rao, 2010).
38. ^ (Rao et al., 2009).
39. ^ http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/coli/36/4 Computational Linguistics, Volume 36, Issue 4, December 2010.
40. ^ Everson 1999 and [1]

References

• Bryant, Edwin (2000), The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate Oxford University Press.
• Everson, Michael (1999-01-29). Proposal for encoding the Indus script in Plane 1 of the UCS. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2. http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1959.pdf. Retrieved 2010-08-31 
• Farmer, Steve et al. (2004) The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization, EJVS, vol. 11 (2004), issue 2 (Dec) [2] (PDF).
• Knorozov, Yuri V. (ed.) (1965) Predvaritel’noe soobshchenie ob issledovanii protoindiyskikh textov. Moscow.
• Kalyanaraman, S., Indus script encodes mleccha speech(5 volumes) [3](2008)
• Mahadevan, Iravatham, Murukan In the Indus Script (1999)
• Mahadevan, Iravatham, Aryan or Dravidian or Neither? A Study of Recent Attempts to Decipher the Indus Script (1995–2000) EJVS (ISSN 1084-7561) vol. 8 (2002) issue 1 (March 8).[4]
• Heras, Henry. Studies in Proto-Indo-Mediterranean Culture, Bombay: Indian Historical Research Institute, 1953.
• Parpola, Asko. Deciphering the Indus script Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Parpola, Asko (2005) Study of the Indus Script. 50th ICES Tokyo Session.
• Parpola, Asko (2008) Is the Indus script indeed not a writing system?. Published in Airāvati, Felicitation volume in honour of Iravatham Mahadevan, Chennai.
• Possehl, Gregory L. (1996). Indus Age: The Writing System. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 081223345X. .
• Rao, R.P.N. et al. (2009). Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script. Science Journal, April 2009.
• Rao, R.P.N. (2010). Probabilistic Analysis of an Ancient Undeciphered Script. IEEE Computer, vol. 43(4), 76-80, April 2010.
• Subramanian, T. S. (2006) "Significance of Mayiladuthurai find" in The Hindu, May 1, 2006.
• Wells, B. "An Introduction to Indus Writing" Independence, MO: Early Sites Research Society 1999.
• Keim, Brandon (2009) "Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000 Year Old Mystery" in WIRED
• Vidale, Massimo (2007) "The collapse melts down: a reply to Farmer, Sproat and Witzel", East and West, vol. 57, no. 1-4, pp. 333–366.

External links

• Indus Script (ancientscripts.com)
• Indus Script (http://www.shangrilagifts.org/hp/indus.html - Comparison of Indus Valley Harappan 哈拉帕 and Ancient Chinese Jia-Gu-wen 甲骨文 "Bone Script")
• "Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu ("Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu )
• The Indus Script (From harappa.com)
• BBC - 'Earliest writing' found
• How come we can't decipher the Indus script? (from The Straight Dope)
• Iravatham Mahadevan, Towards a scientific study of the Indus Script
• Script Image;Article
• Collection of essays about the Indus script (Steve Farmer)
• WIRED.com (WIRED.com)
• "Computers Unlock More Secrets Of The Mysterious Indus Valley Script". Science Daily. August 4, 2009. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090803185836.htm .