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Cracking the Indus Script’ (A COMMENT from atmospheric chemists from around the world. First, establish and fund a network of ‘flagship’ stations9 to monitor: concentra- tions, fluxes, interactions and feedbacks as well as more general air quality and ROBERT HARDING/CORBIS meteorology data. Around 5–8 such stations (costing between US$7 million and $11 million each) would suffice for a major city. These should be com- plemented by mobile measurement platforms on cars and aeroplanes, remote sensing of air columns from the ground, satellite observations and smog cham- bers. Major sources of pollutants can be identified using historic data. Second, indoor air-quality meas- urements and monitoring must be conducted concurrently in a represent- ative selection of residential and office buildings. Third, atmospheric chemists must model secondary-pollutant production pathways and feedback mechanisms under high concentrations of various pollutants. These models must then be compared with observations. Fourth, the links between air pollutants and mortality and other health effects need to be established. That way the most health-relevant pollutants and their sources can be identified and mitigated first. A database should be developed to The mysterious Indus unicorn on a roughly 4,000-year-old sealstone, found at the Mohenjo-daro site. track health impacts. Fifth, long-term sustainable engineer- ing solutions such as improving processes and material flows in industry must be implemented to maintain low levels of Cracking the air pollution. This will require capacity building across the Chinese authori- ties and institutes on using air-quality assessment data in decision-making, in Indus script developing legislative tools and in clean- air action plans. Andrew Robinson reflects on the most tantalizing of all Only by understanding atmospheric the undeciphered scripts — that used in the civilization chemistry will China clean its air. ■ of the Indus valley in the third millennium bc. Markku Kulmala is professor of aerosol physics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. he Indus civilization flourished culture of its period, with a population of e-mail: [email protected] for half a millennium from about perhaps 1 million and a vigorous maritime 1. Lelieveld, J., Evans, J. S., Fnais, M., 2600 bc to 1900 bc. Then it myste- export trade to the Gulf and cities such as Giannadaki, D. & Pozzer, A. Nature 525, Triously declined and vanished from view. Ur in Mesopotamia, where objects inscribed 367–371 (2015). It remained invisible for almost 4,000 years with Indus signs have been discovered. 2. Lim, S. S. et al. Lancet 380, 2224–2260 (2012). until its ruins were discovered by accident Astonishingly, the culture has left no archae- 3. Zhang, J. et al. Lancet 375, 1110–1019 in the 1920s by British and Indian archae- ological evidence of armies or warfare. (2010). ologists. Following almost a century of exca- Most Indus settlements were villages; 4. Guo, S. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 17373–17378 (2014). vation, it is today regarded as a civilization some were towns, and at least five were 5. Ding, A. J. et al. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 13, worthy of comparison with those of ancient substantial cities (see ‘Where unicorns 5813–5830 (2013). Egypt and Mesopotamia, as the beginning of roamed’). The two largest, Mohenjo-daro 6. Ding, A. J. et al. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 13, 10545–10554 (2013). Indian civilization and possibly as the origin — a World Heritage Site listed by the United 7. Xiao, S. et al. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 15, of Hinduism. Nations — located near the Indus river, and 1769–1781 (2015). More than a thousand Indus settlements Harappa, by one of the tributaries, boasted 8. Kulmala, M. et al. Annu. Rev. Phys. Chem. 65, 21–37 (2014). covered at least 800,000 square kilometres street planning and house drainage worthy 9. Hari, P. et al. Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss. 15, of what is now Pakistan and northwest- of the twentieth century ad. They hosted 21063–21093 (2015). ern India. It was the most extensive urban the world’s first known toilets, along with 22 OCTOBER 2015 | VOL 526 | NATURE | 499 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved COMMENT complex stone weights, elaborately drilled gemstone necklaces and exquisitely carved seal stones featuring one of the world’s stubbornly undeciphered scripts. FOLLOW THE SCRIPT The Indus script is made up of partially pictographic signs and human and animal motifs including a puzzling ‘unicorn’. These are inscribed on miniature steatite (soap- stone) seal stones, terracotta tablets and occasionally on metal. The designs are “little masterpieces of controlled realism, with a monumental strength in one sense out of all proportion to their size and in another entirely related to it”, wrote the best-known excavator of the Indus civilization, Mortimer Wheeler, in 19681. Once seen, the seal stones are never forgot- ten. I became smitten in the late 1980s when tasked to research the Indus script by a leading documentary producer. He hoped to entice the world’s code-crackers with a substantial public prize. In the end, neither competition nor documentary got off the ground. But for me, important seeds were sown. More than 100 attempts at decipherment have been published by professional scholars and others since the 1920s. Now — as a result of increased collaboration between archae- ologists, linguists and experts in the digital Mohenjo-daro existed at the same time as the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Crete. humanities — it looks possible that the Indus script may yield some of its secrets. family from southern India that includes Ptolemy, who were known to hieroglyphic Since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Tamil. In 1987, Assyriologist James Kinnier decipherers from records of ancient Egypt Egypt in 1799, and the consequent decipher- Wilson at the University of Cambridge, UK, available in Greek. ment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs beginning published an ‘Indo-Sumerian’ decipher- Third, there is, as yet, no Indus bilingual in the 1820s, epigraphers have learnt how ment, based on a comparison of the Indus inscription comparable to the Rosetta Stone to read an encouraging number of once- signs with similar-looking ones in cunei- (written in Egyptian and Greek). It is con- enigmatic ancient scripts. For example, the form accounting tablets from Mesopotamia. ceivable that such a treasure may exist in ANCIENT ART AND ARCHITECTURE ANCIENT ART AND ARCHITECTURE Brahmi script from India was ‘cracked’ in Mesopotamia, given its trade links with the IMAGES COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN the 1830s; cuneiform scripts (character- THREE PROBLEMS Indus civilization. The Mayan decipherment ized by wedge-shaped impressions in clay) In the 1990s and after, many Indian authors started in 1876 using a sixteenth-century from Mesopotamia in the second half of the — including some academics — have Spanish manuscript that recorded a discus- nineteenth century; the Linear B script from claimed that the Indus script can be read in a sion in colonial Yucatan between a Spanish Greece in the 1950s; form of early Sanskrit, the ancestral language priest and a Yucatec Mayan-speaking elder and the Mayan glyphs “No firm of most north Indian languages including about ancient Mayan writing. from Central America information Hindi. In doing so, they support the con- in the late twentieth is available troversial views of India’s Hindu nationalist WHAT WE KNOW century. about its politicians that there has been a continuous, Indus scholars have achieved much in Several important underlying Sanskrit-speaking, Indian identity since the recent decades. A superb three-volume 3 scripts still have schol- language.” third millennium bc. photographic corpus of Indus inscriptions, ars scratching their Whatever their differences, all Indus edited by the indefatigable Asko Parpola, an heads: for example, Linear A, Etruscan from researchers agree that there is no consensus Indologist at the University of Helsinki, was Italy, Rongorongo from Easter Island, the on the meaning of the script. There are three published between 1987 and 2010 with the signs on the Phaistos Disc from the Greek main problems. First, no firm information support of the United Nations Educational, island of Crete and, of course, the Indus script. is available about its underlying language. Scientific and Cultural Organization; a In 1932, Flinders Petrie — the most cel- Was this an ancestor of Sanskrit or Dra- fourth and final volume is still to come. The ebrated Egyptologist of his day — proposed vidian, or of some other Indian language direction of writing — chiefly right to left an Indus decipherment on the basis of the family, such as Munda, or was it a language — has been established by analysis of the supposed similarity of its pictographic that has disappeared? Linear B was deci- positioning of groups of characters in many principles to those of Egyptian hieroglyphs. phered because the tablets turned out to be differing inscriptions. The segmentation In 1983, Indus excavator Walter Fairservis in an archaic form of Greek; Mayan glyphs of texts containing repeated sequences of at the American Museum of Natural His- because Mayan languages are still spoken. characters, syntactic structures, the numeral tory in New York City, claimed in Scientific Second, no names of Indus rulers or per- system and the measuring system are partly American2 that he could read the signs in sonages are known from myths or histori- understood. a form of ancient Dravidian: the language cal records: no equivalents of Rameses or Views vary on how many signs there are 500 | NATURE | VOL 526 | 22 OCTOBER 2015 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved COMMENT from the US-led Harappa Archaeological WHERE UNICORNS ROAMED Research Project. Between about 2600 BC and 1900 BC, more than a thousand settlements of the Indus civilization, including A group led by computer scientist Rajesh at least ve cities, covered at least 800,000 square kilometres.
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