The Indus Valley Civilisation: script
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Deciphering the script
No success till 2020
Manimugdha Sharma, February 9, 2020: The Times of India
From: Manimugdha Sharma, February 9, 2020: The Times of India
This enigmatic 4,000-year-old script that has foxed scientists, linguists, archaeologists and others. The task is so daunting that a $10,000 award for deciphering it announced in 2004 remains unclaimed.
Harappa, the first city of the Indus Valley Civilisation that was discovered, was excavated in 1920-21. But a century later, why has no serious researcher deciphered the script? There have been multiple claims but none of them have held up. In fact, there is strong disagreement among linguists and Indologists about the very nature of the script. Indologist Prof Michael Witzel of Harvard University and others had claimed in 2004 that the Indus script may not have been linguistic at all, while Prof Asko Parpola, professor emeritus, University of Helsinki, Finland, who has been trying to decipher the script since 1968, and others say it was pretty much linguistic and may have belonged to the Dravidian family of languages.
Nevertheless, the problems with the deciphering of the script are manifold. Witzel lists two main reasons: “We do not know which language(s) was spoken in the Indus civilisation. Also, we do not know the value (linguistically or not) of the Indus signs. Some of them seem obvious, such as: a certain seed, a plough, etc. But what about the squirrel on a tree, or the duck in a pond? All attempts so far do not lead anywhere.”
Dr Nisha Yadav of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, adds to the list of problems. “Extreme brevity of the Indus texts (average text length is about five signs), absence of bilingual or multilingual texts, and apparent discontinuity in traditions at the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation are the other problems.” Bilingual and multilingual texts are those where a text is placed alongside one or more translations. Yadav co-authored a paper in 2009 which had, using a computer programme, provided evidence in favour of the linguistic hypothesis of the Indus script. “Our studies suggest that the Indus script had a rich syntax with an underlying logic in its structure. Linearity, directionality, use of certain modifying elements in its sign designs, diverse usage of the script, and its use in foreign lands (at West Asian sites with some rare combinations of signs), are some of the other characteristics of the Indus script that tilt the evidence in favour of the linguistic hypothesis,” Yadav says.
Parpola still stands by his hypothesis. “In my opinion, the Harappan language belonged to the Dravidian family (which is today represented by Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu and some 20 tribal languages), and the Indus script can be deciphered without bilinguals to a limited extent.”
In the absence of a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone which helped in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, Indus script researchers say the going ahead is difficult. But Yadav still has hope. “Ancient scripts such as Linear B (earliest Greek script) have been deciphered earlier without bilingual texts as well.”
As in 2022
Arshad Awan, April 24, 2022: The Tribune
The Indus Valley riddle
Despite hundreds of artefacts discovered, a comprehensive view of this ancient civilisation continues to elude us
PUBLISHED April 24, 2022
LAHORE:
Indus Valley script is the most daunting and intriguing deciphering assignment for archaeologists and codebreakers worldwide. The lost language of the Indus Civilization, which goes back 4000 years, may remain incomprehensible forever, simply because there’s not enough material for deciphers to work on or because the languages they record aren’t related to any known now.
Excavators discovered the first signs of a script in the 1870s. It turned up on small seal stones, amulets and fragments of pottery. The seal stones are believed to have been used for stamping the clay tokens that sealed bales of goods. Above a short script, they generally have a realistic carving of an animal, for example, a bull, a rhinoceros, or an elephant. It consists of signs depicting human beings, animals, plants, and other natural phenomena like mountains and manufactured tools. Unfortunately, these about 400 different signs are not drawn as carefully and in great detail as other Egyptian hieroglyphs. This means that the exact pictorial meaning of many signs is not yet clear to archaeologists and other codebreakers.
It’s believed that such an advanced civilisation must have used writing extensively, but the usual writing material would probably have been perishable, and no remains have ever been found. The average script stone inscription is five signs long. There are no clues about where one-word ends and another begins, and the script’s language is unknown. The only source of Indus Valley Civilisation’s past is through these Indus seals text, though it doesn’t reveal much but it is an obvious historic indicator to prove the rise of the most extensive civilisation of its time, considerably larger than Egypt or Mesopotamia.
The narrative of the discovery of this fascinating Indus Valley vanished civilisation begins with a little carved stone used as a seal to stamp wet clay. Its rediscovery in Pakistan was one of the great archaeological stories of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, archaeologists and anthropologists worldwide are still piecing the evidence together.
The first seal was discovered in the 1850s, approximately 245 kilometres south of Lahore, near the town of Harappa. Three similar seals arrived in the British Museum during the next fifty years, but no one knew what they were or when or where they were made and the meaning of the text upon these seals. However, in 1906, they attracted the notice of John Marshall, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India. He directed the excavation of the remains at Harappa, the discovery site of the first seal. The findings made there resulted in a rewrite of world history. Marshall’s crew discovered the ruins of a massive city at Harappa and found numerous others nearby, dating between 3000 and 2000 BC. This pushed the boundaries of Indian civilisation much further back in time than previously believed. It became apparent that this was a land of advanced urban centres, commerce and manufacturing, and even writing. It must have been contemporary with and comparable to ancient civilisations such as Egypt or Mesopotamia - and yet Indus civilisation had utterly forgotten it.
Indus seals are designed to be pressed into wax or clay to establish ownership, sign a document, or identify a cargo. Between 2500 and 2000 BC, they were created. They are all roughly square, around the size of a current postage stamp, and are made of soapstone, which made carving them simple. And they have been exquisitely carved, with exquisitely engraved animal images. There’s an elephant, an ox, a creature that looks like a hybrid between a cow and a unicorn, and a rhinoceros. In historical terms, without a doubt, the most significant of them is the seal depicting a cow that resembles a unicorn; it was this stamp that sparked the discovery of the entire Indus civilisation. We could learn more about the Indus civilisation if we could decipher the writing on Indus seals. The animal pictures on the seals are composed of a series of symbols: one resembles an oval shield, others resemble matchstick human figures, some are composed of single lines, and one is written of an upright spear shape. However, we don’t know if they are numbers, logos, symbols, or even a language. Since its discovery, there have been hundreds of attempts to translate them even with computers, but due to a lack of the necessary reference material - no longer inscriptions, no bilingual texts - to make confident progress.
While most scholars believe these inscriptions demonstrate the Indus Valley residents’ literacy but assert that the Indus Valley symbols do not represent a language. Rather than that, this school of thought believes the characters resemble the non-linguistic systems used by various cultures to express their deities, sects, clans, religious codes, and family names. Additionally, there is a belief that the Indus Valley symbols were possibly used exclusively for economic transactions. The seals and tablets with the signs discovered at various sites are comparable to the structured messages found on tokens, currencies, and stamps; and were used to regulate commercial transactions with other contemporary civilisations throughout the world.
Today, a team of Indian and American researchers attempts to piece together information about the still-unknown script by utilising mathematics and computer science. Computers were used by a team led by a University of Washington researcher to extract patterns from ancient Indus symbols. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates distinct patterns in the placement of symbols in sequences and develops a statistical model for the unknown language. The new study examines the sequence of symbols for mathematical patterns. Calculations demonstrate that the order of symbols is significant; changing the position of one symbol in a sequence discovered on an artefact results in a new sequence with a much lower probability of belonging to the hypothetical language. The authors stated that such distinct rules for symbol sequencing add weight to the group’s previous findings, published earlier this year in Science, that the unknown script could represent a language.
With the Indus civilisation station obliterated nearly 4000 years ago, it was a matter of searching all the ancient languages and scripts of South Asia for a likely candidate. One of the so-called existing Dravidian languages spoken in South India. Related languages used to be widely spoken across the subcontinent before being displaced by the classical language of India, Sanskrit. Experts worldwide on the regions, religions, and myths now believe that the Indus Valley people spoke similar sort of the Dravidian language and worshipped gods associated with stars and planets. Collectively these experts believed that a typical seal stone spells out its owners’ name, but this is expressed as the star under which he was born. That is why the fish symbol crops up so often. The most common word for fish in the current Dravidian languages is ‘meen’, which has precisely the same sound as the word for a star. So, a seal stone text might have a fish sign combined with seven vertical strokes. Seven fish translates as ‘Illumeen’, Dravidian, and this is the old Tamil language name for one of the most familiar constellations in the night sky are the bear and the flowers. Working on a script like Indus Valley is like filling in a crossword puzzle. One has to be prepared to scrap many wrong guesses. For archaeologists and codebreakers, of course, deciphering experience is severe frustration, but this is also a pure joy of discovering to them.
As the characteristics of the Indus seals, they are frequently pierced, implying that their owners wore them. People of the time undoubtedly used them to stamp products for trade — they have been discovered throughout Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and central Asia. Between 2000 BC and 1500 BC, the Indus civilisation was a massive network of intricate, structured cities with strong trading connections to the rest of the world, all of which appeared to be thriving. And then it came to an end in 1900 BC. The cities deteriorated into earthen mounds, and even the memory of this, one of the world’s great early urban cultures, vanished. Nobody knows why.
As in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the transition from village to city typically necessitated the presence of a dominating king capable of coercion and resource deployment. However, who ruled these highly organised Indus Valley cities remains a mystery. There is no proof of kings or pharaohs - or even of authority. This is primarily because we do not know where the bodies are buried, both literally and metaphorically. There are none of the opulent tombs that tell us so much about the powerful and the society they ruled in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Experts believed that the Indus Valley inhabitants cremated their dead, and while cremation has some benefits, it is a slow loss for archaeologists. What remains of these vast Indus cities provide little evidence of a culture at war or threatened by war. Few weapons have been discovered, and the cities do not appear to have been fortified. There are some magnificent communal structures, but nothing resembles a royal palace, and there appears to be little distinction between the wealthy and the impoverished. It appears to be a very different model for urban civilisation development that does not celebrate violence or high concentrations of individual authority. Is it possible that these societies were founded on consensus rather than coercion?
Around 4,500 years ago, the Indus River flowed down from the Tibetan Plateau into the Arabian Sea, just as it does now. The Indus civilisation, which spanned approximately 200,000 square miles at its peak, developed in the fertile floodplains. So far, excavations have uncovered blueprints for entire towns and vibrant patterns of broad international trade. The Indus Valley’s stone seals with similar text patterns have been discovered far from the Middle East and Central Asia.
Please del last 2 paras; please use photo collage
2024: ‘The script was written with signs that could convey meanings in different languages”
Adrija Roychowdhury, January 8, 2024: The Indian Express
For more than a century now, over one hundred attempts have been made by scholars from different fields to decode the Indus script, without much success. The many theories include those that link the language to Sanskrit, Dravidian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian among others. There are also those that are skeptical about whether the Indus script is in any one language at all.
Ever since the remains of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) was first discovered in the 1920s by a team of British archaeologists led by Sir John Marshall, its script has remained a puzzle. For about a century now, more than 100 attempts have been made by archaeologists, epigraphists, linguists, historians, scientists and others to decipher the script without much success. A recent research paper published by a Bangalore-based software engineer contends that the Indus script was mainly written with signs that could symbolically convey meanings to people of different dialects, and languages, across Indus settlements.
Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, who has been researching the Indus script since 2014, contends that each Indus sign represented a specific meaning, and the script was used mainly for commercial purposes. In a paper published in the Nature Group of journal – Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, volume 10, Article number: 972 (2023), Mukhopadhyay explains that the inscribed Indus seals were mainly used as tax stamps, while the tablets were used as permits for tax collection, craft making or trading. She argues that contrary to popular beliefs, the script was not used for religious purposes, nor did it phonetically spell out words to encode names of ancient Vedic or Tamil deities. “Any such attempt of reading the Indus script is inherently flawed,” she suggests.
While Mukhopadhyay’s arguments are far from being accepted universally, it has definitely caused a stir among the small but diverse group of scholars who have been studying and attempting to decode the Indus script and language for years.
Debating the Indus script
The Indus Civilisation reached its peak between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE, spread out over an expansive area of about 800,000 square kilometres in large parts of modern-day Pakistan and north-western India. Scholars agree that at its time it was the most extensive urban culture in the world with an elaborate trade, taxation and drainage system.
The inscriptions left behind by the Indus culture occur on seal stones, terracotta tablets and occasionally on metal. They are written in pictograms often in conjunction with animal or human motifs. To begin with, scholars have for long disagreed and debated over the number of symbols that the Indus script contained. Archaeologist S R Rao had in 1982 postulated that the script contains just 62 signs. This was refuted by the Finnish Indologost Asko Parpola, one of the most formidable names associated with the decipherment of the Indus script. He put the number at 425 in 1994. As recently as 2016, archaeologist and epigrapher Bryan K Wells suggested a much higher estimate of 676 signs.
The issue of the language on which the Indus script is based is yet again something that scholars cannot agree upon. Long before the ruins at Harappa and Mohenjodaro were even recognised as part of the Indus Valley Civilisation, Sir Alexander Cunningham had reported the first seal from Harappa. A few years later he had suggested that the inscriptions on the seal bear signs of the Brahmi script which is the ancestor of more than 200 scripts in South and Southeast Asia. After Cunningham, several other scholars too made the argument in favour of connecting the Indus script with Brahmi.
Parpola, who is Professor Emeritus at University of Helsinki, disagrees with this hypothesis. “The Brahmi script emerged on the basis of the Aramaic script used in the Persian Empire,” he says.
He explains that it is an alphabetic script that was brought to the Indus Valley by the bureaucrats of the Persian Empire in 500 BCE and that the Brahmi script was further influenced by the Greek script which came to India with Alexander the Great in 326 BCE. Consequently, it could not have had anything to do with the Indus script given that the civilisation had died down much before.
There was also the attempt made by a few scholars to connect the Indus script with Sanskrit. The most notable voice in this regard was that of archaeologist SR Rao who is credited with having discovered some very important Harappan sites such as Lothal. Rao’s argument was seen as a product of ideological bias by several scholars. Journalist and author Andrew Robinson, in his book Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts (2008), writes “it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Rao, for nationalistic reasons, was 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.”
“There is archaeological evidence to suggest that the Aryans came to Indus Valley only in the second millennium BCE which is after the Indus Valley Civilisation,” explains Parpola with regard to why Sanskrit could not have been connected with the Indus script.
Parpola’s own investigation into the Indus script began in 1964 while he was working on his doctoral thesis on Vedic texts. It started out more as a hobby, as he was inspired by the deciphering of the Greek Linear B script that had taken place just a decade back. One major innovation he brought to the field of the Indus script was the use of computers which was a new technology back then. Along with his childhood friend Seppo Koskenniemi who was a computing expert and his brother Simo Parpola who was then working on the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, the trio began studying the Indus script. The team’s analysis reached the conclusion that the script had Dravidian roots.
In a zoom interview with indianexpress.com, Parpola explains that this is a logosyllabic script of the kind used by all major cultures around 2500 BCE. “Basically the signs were pictures which stood for complete words by themselves,” he says. He argues that the script used the concept that we now know as ‘rebus’, that is either the pictogram meant the word for the object or action depicted, or any word that sounded similar to that word, irrespective of meaning. “So if we know the language on which the script is based then we have the possibility of deciphering some signs of the script,” Parpola says.
An example he cites of his decipherment is that of the fish sign that is found in abundance in the Indus seals. “It is unlikely that they are speaking about actual fish in seal texts,” he says. He then connects it with the Dravidian word for fish, ‘min’. This word ‘min’ has a homophone ‘min’ meaning ‘star’ which he believes is what the Indus sign is denoting in seals, given that in pre-Vedic times it was common practice for people to have astral names. Starting from this basis, Parpola claims to have found the Old Tamil names of all the planets in the Indus script.
Parpola’s hypothesis has found support among several scholars, both in the West and in India including that of Iravatham Mahadevan, the leading Indus script researcher in India.
Even those like Mukhopadhyay who are doubtful about whether the Indus script was based on any one language at all, say that linguistic evidence indicates that the Indus people most likely spoke a Dravidian language. Linguist Peggy Mohan, who has been working on the language of the Indus Valley, says that “this was most probably a Dravidian society, but with a language family a bit different in some of its details from the Dravidian we now know in the South.”
There were also attempts to connect the Indus script with other cultures with whom the people of the Indus Valley were possibly in trading relations. One of the first decipherments that was published in 1932 by the Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie suggested that the Indus script be treated on the pictographic principles that were followed in Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1987, an Assyriologist J V Kinnier Wilson argued for links between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia.
Yet another attempt was made by an Hungarian engineer, Vilmos Hevesy, who in 1932 suggested a connection between the Indus inscriptions and the rongorongo tablets of Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean. Parpola, who finds Hevesy’s theory to be the ‘strangest’ of all, argues in his book, The Roots of Hinduism (2015), that “the two scripts are separated by more than 20,000 kilometres and some 3500 years.” Moreover, he writes that the speculation is useless given that the rongorongo tablets are to a large extent undeciphered.
Is the Indus script based on a language at all?
Since the early 2000s, some researchers have been questioning if the Indus script was a language at all. This hypothesis was based mainly on the fact that the Indus inscriptions found are all very short. On an average there are about five characters per text and the longest is 26.
The issue was hotly debated after a group of researchers consisting of historian Steve Farmer, computer linguist Richard Sproat, and Indologist Michael Witzel came out with a paper in 2004 titled The collapse of Indus Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilisation. In it they claimed that the Indus script did not constitute a language-based writing system and that they were mainly nonlinguistic symbols of political and religious significance. The paper refuted the universally accepted claim that the Indus Valley was a literate civilisation. It also accused those who link the script to Dravidian or Sanskritic roots of being ideologically motivated. “Political motives linked to the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan models, often obscured under a thick veneer of ‘neutral’ scientific language, have played an increasing role in the Indus script thesis in the last two decades,” they noted. However, they also pointed out that “evidence that Indus inscriptions did not encode speech increases and does not decrease the symbols’ historical value.” “We know a great deal about literate civilisations, but far less about premodern societies that rejected writing for other types of sign systems,” they wrote.
The theory devised by the team came to be severely criticised by many scholars, both for its tone and for its findings. Parpola, for instance, points out to the principle claim made by the team that all writing systems have produced longer texts than those found in the Indus script. He notes that even Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was of a similar nature.
Mukhopadhyay, whose recent findings have led to similar conclusions, says even though she partly agrees with the technical arguments being made by Farmer and his team, she does not approve of their tone and definitely does not consider the Harappans to be ‘illiterate’. “The script’s symbols are influenced by linguistic symbolism in certain cases.” she says. “But they do not phonologically spell words of any language. The script also has a language like syntax, as it uses connective signs and certain phrase orders.”
Mohan, who is in support of Mukhopadhyay’s views, says we must stop calling it the Indus ‘script’ and consider it something like 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 says. She emphasises the need to form a distinction between the script and the language. “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,” she says. As she points out, stories and mythologies would be memorised, passed down and reinvented through generations, not necessarily written.
As far as the language of the Indus people is concerned, Mohan suggests that the Indus Civilisation was spread across a vast area. It is highly unlikely that the people spoke a single, uniform language. “Linguists put too much emphasis on words to find a language. I don’t like this approach. You and I are speaking English right now, does that make us British?” she asks, adding that “words by themselves are transferable and don’t tell us everything about a society.”
Italian archaeologist Paolo Biagi too doesn’t believe that the Indus script is strictly related to any language. He recollects his experience of being a member of an archaeological mission in Oman in the 1990s, where they found an Indus inscription at one of the sites. “We started excavating further with the hope of finding something bilingual since Oman is located between the Indus Civilisation and Mesopotamia,” he says. “But we never found anything in terms of language, even though we found other traces of trade between Indus and Mesopotamia.”
Parpola, though, remains skeptical of the view that the script did not represent a language. “I believe that a script is always there to write a language,” he says. He also points out that it would be an error to assume that the script is not encoding proper names or names of deities.
Mukhopadhyay notes that whenever any ancient script is found, people feel very romantic about it. “They hope to find things like old scriptures or poetry. Even when Linear B was being deciphered, some scholars hoped to find snippets of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. But what they found was a record of palace book keeping of the things that were brought in and those that left the palace,” she says. But that does not take away from the findings that they led to the discovery of a lot of other information about the palace economy. “Similarly, in the case of the Indus script, even though it is just giving us commercial information, it can tell us a lot about how the economy functioned at that time,” Mukhopadhyay adds.
Biagi is of the opinion that the main challenge in deciphering the Indus script is the fact that we still don’t know enough about the civilisation itself. “Most of the excavations carried out, especially in Pakistan, are very old. For instance, Mohenjodaro was excavated more than (one) hundred years ago and we use far more advanced ways of examining and recording findings today,” he says. Further, a large number of Indus sites are still lying undiscovered. “We know about how civilisation disappeared, but what do we know enough about its origins?” he asks.
Yajnadevam/ Bharath Rao’s work, As of 2025
Brishti Guha, March 8, 2025: The Times of India
Work by an Indian cryptographer on the still-undeciphered Indus Valley script suggests Sanskrit may have been the root language. If true, it questions Aryan invasion theory as well as the north-south divide
Given the immense interest sparked by Nirmala Sitharaman’s post, The Times of India has made this piece free to read. Yajnadevam’s research challenges the Aryan invasion theory—was Sanskrit spoken & written in 4000 BCE? Read on to explore a potential rewriting of history.
Yajnadevam, aka Bharath Rao, is a rare cryptographer – among epigraphists, archaeologists, linguists etc – who can claim to have cracked the code to deciphering the Indus Valley script. The earliest pottery with Indus script symbols dates to 4,000 BCE. Ever since, the Indus script has resisted attempted decipherments.
Some of the most famous decipherments of other ancient scripts were made largely due to the presence of bilingual or trilingual inscriptions. For example, during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, his army found the Rosetta Stone while demolishing a fort. This had the same message written in ancient Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and another ancient Egyptian script. While England seized the Rosetta Stone after defeating France, a French scholar, Champollion, managed to decipher hieroglyphics using the fact that the same Greek names occurred both in the Greek portion and the hieroglyphic portion of the inscription.
Another famous decipherment was due to Henry Rawlinson, a young cadet with the East India Company’s army, who taught himself Persian and was posted to Persia. He travelled to the Zagros Mountains, where there was a trilingual inscription in old Persian cuneiform, Elamite, and Sumerian. Risking his life, Rawlinson managed to climb the sheer cliff and accurately copy the entire inscription. Later, he would use his knowledge of Persian to decipher the old Persian portion, which was key to also deciphering the Elamite and Sumerian scripts.
Closer home, a breakthrough in the decipherment of the Brahmi script was made using a bilingual coin minted by the Indo-Bactrian king, Agathocles. The coin had his name in Greek on one side, and in Brahmi on the other. Unlike all these cases, however, no bilingual or trilingual has been found for the Indus script. Indus inscriptions were never conveniently accompanied by another identical message in a known script!
Yajnadevam used cryptography, treating the unknown Indus script as a cipher encoding a known language (for which he had to first determine which language would be the best candidate). His work was built on information theory, specially on a famous 1945 paper written by Claude Shannon, the father of modern information theory. During World War II, Shannon was asked to determine how to make secret codes unbreakable. However, Shannon found that all codes could be broken once enough messages written in code had been read.
Moreover, reading enough text ensured that the solution found by the code-breakers was unique. Uniqueness and correctness mean that if I decipher your code as saying, “We will bomb the enemy on Tuesday,” it is not possible for the code to also mean, “We will have eggs for breakfast.” This had also been how, many centuries ago, an English code-breaker had broken the coded messages sent by Mary, Queen of Scots, to her loyalists, simply by intercepting enough of her coded letters.
Most earlier attempts at decipherment involved assigning values to very short inscriptions (one or two symbols long). However, when the same symbols occurred in longer inscriptions, the assigned values would fail to result in a meaningful phrase or a grammatically correct word – resulting in the decipherers assigning an entirely different possible meaning to the same symbols once they occurred in longer inscriptions. Thus, the number of possible solutions kept going up as more messages were read, so no one could say what the correct solution actually was.
As an example, suppose a decipherer finds three one-symbol inscriptions and thinks they mean “cat”, “jar”, and “go”. But he then finds a fourth inscription with all three of these symbols. It is hard to justify “cat jar go” as a meaningful sentence, and so he must assign a completely different meaning to this combination of symbols once they occur together.
Yajnadevam’s first task was to fix on a likely candidate for the language of the Indus script. At the outset, he was able to rule out a large family of languages called “agglutinative languages”, that include all Dravidian languages, and ancient middle eastern or near eastern languages like Sumerian, Elamite, and Hittite. This was because of several mismatches between the pattern that all these languages follow, and the pattern of the Indus symbols.
First, the Indus script had cases where the same symbol was repeated three times consecutively. This never occurred in Dravidian or other agglutinative languages, but it did occur in old Vedic forms of Sanskrit (for instance, jajaja which means “I fought”).
Second, agglutinative languages never had compound words composed of more than two root words, while the Indus script had such words, as does Sanskrit. Third, agglutinative languages had prefixes or suffixes that could not exist as separate words and that were always joined to the root word in a fixed order. However, the Indus script had possible prefixes and suffixes also occur as separate words, and they occurred in different positional order in different inscriptions. This was inconsistent with agglutinative languages, but consistent with Sanskrit. Thus, Yajnadevam started his decipherment taking Sanskrit to be the language of the Indus script.
By using standard code-breaking methods (first identifying the symbol with the highest frequency, then the symbol which occurs most frequently along with it, in a sequence until all symbols are identified), he assigned values to the symbols.
He then found, to his surprise, that the assigned values resulted in meaningful words and grammatically correct Sanskrit expressions. At this point, he was able to decipher and translate messages on individual Indus inscriptions and seals, eventually reading more than enough to satisfy Shannon’s threshold for uniqueness. This showed that not only was it possible to read the inscriptions in Sanskrit, but that it would not be possible to read the entire body of Indus inscriptions using a different language. He says his work establishes Sanskrit as the language of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).
The translated inscriptions mention Vedic deities (like Shiva/Rudra, Indra, and others), yajnas or havans, horses, food, and often ask the deities for blessings or protection for a sea voyage. There are messages where the writer mentions that the ocean is his home. This bears out archaeological evidence and Sumerian accounts of extensive international trade (including ocean trade) during the IVC.
Some messages were carved onto bangles and other ornaments, showing that both the craftsman and the buyer were literate. Some Indus script inscriptions found in foreign locations, like Susa or Ur, used Indus script to write words in Akkadian for specific traded goods, like “wine” or “cumin”. This was presumably done so that it would be understandable by both parties in an international transaction.
The next interesting thing that Yajnadevam did was to compare each Indus symbol with the symbol producing the same sound in Brahmi. He found an amazing physical similarity between Indus symbols and Brahmi symbols associated with the same sound. This, coupled with the existence of mixed inscriptions containing both Indus and Brahmi script, showed that Brahmi had naturally evolved from Indus script.
Such mixed inscriptions were found all over the country, even as far south as Keezhadi in Tamil Nadu, where 600 BCE mixed inscriptions could be read as meaningful Sanskrit words (for example, “powerful” was written on an axe). In fact, some mixed inscriptions persisted even into the Gupta age, while others were found in foreign countries like Vietnam (where they could also be read as Sanskrit).
How does this decipherment change our view of our history? First, the main tenet of the Aryan invasion/migration theory is that steppe invaders/migrants brought in Sanskrit into our country sometime around 1500 BCE. They then also imposed their culture, religion, and this language (Sanskrit) on us. However, the decipherment shows that Sanskrit was not only being spoken, but even written, way back in 4000 BCE, negating this.
Second, a main source of the north-south divide is also the Aryan invasion theory, which says northerners are descended from steppe invaders who drove away the original IVC inhabitants, who became the ancestors of the southerners. The decipherment, by beautifully establishing the linguistic, cultural, and religious continuity of our civilisation, has destroyed both these theories.
The writer is associate professor, School of International Studies, JNU
See also
The Indus Valley Civilisation: script
