Component-I (A) – Personal details:

Prof. P. Bhaskar Reddy Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati.

Prof. P. Bhaskar Reddy Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati. & Dr. K. Muniratnam Director i/c, Epigraphy, ASI, Mysore

Prof. P. Bhaskar Reddy Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati.

Prof. V. Sakunthalamma Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati.

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Component-I (B) – Description of module:

Subject Name Indian Culture

Paper Name Indian Epigraphy

Module Name/Title Indus Script

Module Id IC / IEP / 08

Origin and evolution of writing system in ancient Pre requisites civilizations To know Indus valley civilization and significance, Knowledge of writing, Discovery of seals with script, Objectives Attempts of Decipherment, Character features of Indus script and Theories of origin Indus script / Harappan script / pictographic / Keywords decipherement

E-text (Quadrant-I) :

1. Introduction :

The Indus Valley Civilization also called the Harappan civilization was the first major urban culture of South Asia. It reached its peak from 2600 BC to 1900 BC roughly; a period called by some archaeologists "Mature Harappan" as distinguished from the earlier Neolithic "Early Harappan" regional cultures. Spatially, it is huge, comprising of about 1000 settlements of varying sizes, and geographically extended from the Afghan border in the West to Uttar Pradesh in the east and from Manda (Jammu) in the north to Bhagatrav (Gujarat) in the south.

The civilization is known for its clean and well-planned cities such as Harappa and Mohenjodaro (Pakistan), and Lothal and Kalibangam (India). The Harappans administered their cities and provinces efficiently and provided all the civic amenities known to the age. Houses were built on terraced platforms to save them from recurring floods in the Indus, Sabarmati and Saraswati rivers. The Harappas standardized goods and services throughout the empire. They introduced the decimal system for linear measurement. Their overseas trade passed through Lothal, a port-city situated at the head of the Gulf of Cambay where berthing facilities for ships were provided in a scientifically designed dock. The Lothal dock is the earliest of its kind in the world. A miniature model of a ship found here .The exports consisted of cotton goods, stone beads, ivory, etc., and the imports included wool. The material progress of the Harappans was well matched by their spiritual progress.

Such a highly advanced civilization as the Harappan was gradually eclipsed owing natural calamities. The generally held theory that the invading Aryan tribes destroyed the Indus cities is now discarded in favour of the more concrete evidence of flood at Indus cities. In Circa 1900 B.C., the Harappans left the flood-ravaged towns and moved into the Indo- Gangatic divide and Gujarat.

2. Indus Script:.

As a highly literate people the Harappans have left for posterity around 4,000 seals bearing symbols popularly called Indus script. Square stamp seals are the dominant form of Indus

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writing media; they are normally an inch square (2.54 c m) displaying the pictographic script on the top. The seals were pressed on a pliable surface (e.g. clay) in order to replicate its image. The recent evidence from the excavation at Lothal shows that the seals were used for sealing cargo and not used as amulets.

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 (soapstone) 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”

The script is the writing system developed by the Indus Valley Civilization and it is the earliest form of writing known in the Indian subcontinent. During the early Harappan phase (c. 3500-2700 BCE), we find the earliest known examples of the Indus Script signs, attested on Ravi and Kot Diji pottery excavated at Harappa. Its full development was reached during the Urban period (c. 2600-1900 BCE), when longer inscriptions are recorded. The inscriptions are known from some 60 excavation sites: most of them are short, the average length is five signs and none of them is longer than 26 signs.

It is needless to say that the decoding of the writing on these seals is most essential for understanding the Harappan culture to a greater extent. Several attempts have been made to decipher the Indus script. However, the script still remains to be deciphered to the satisfaction of all the scholars but efforts are ongoing. In this lesson let us try to learn about the attempts so far made to decipher the Indus script by different scholars both foreign and Indian.

3. Attempts of decipherment

The Indus script has long challenged epigraphists because of the difficulty in reading and classifying text and symbols on the artefacts.

More than 100 attempts of decipherment have been published by professional scholars and others since the 1920s. The first publication of the seal with Harappan symbols dates to 1875, in a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since nearly 4,000 inscribed objects have been discovered.

In 1932, Flinders Petrie — the most celebrated Egyptologist of his day — proposed an Indus decipherment on the basis of the supposed similarity of its pictographic principles to those of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In early 1970 Iravatham Mahadevan published a Corpus and concordance of 3,700 seals and 417 different signs in specific pattern. He also found that an average inscription contained five symbols and longest inscription contained only 14 symbols in single line. He also established the direction of writing was right to left.

In 1982, archaeologist Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao (S R Rao)published a Sanskrit-based decipherment. According to him, the Indus writing underwent gradual changes from a picture-cum-linear scripts to a purely linear one dropping in the process pictures of birds, insects, plants and the non-living beings like hills, fields etc.,

After making, thorough analysis of the Indus script Rao arrived at the conclusion that there were only 22 basic signs in the Late Harappan script and 40 linear and 22 pictorial basic signs in the Harappan script. So, he affirms that with a few as 62 basic signs the Indus script cannot be pictographic or ideographic and it could only be phonetic, that is, syllabic or alphabetic with occasional rebus use of pictures and numerals.

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The renowned epigraphist Dr. K. V. Ramesh correlates the Indus script with Vedic literature. He suggests that most of the independent as well as conjunct symbols can be convincingly related to Vedic words and in some cases even to Vedic phrases. But he admits that it has not been possible to give all the symbols of any given Indus seal or sealing an interpretation which will exactly correspond to any of the available Vedic passages. However, the important point he suggests is that “some of the seals and sealing appear to say what men and materials were required for what rites and rituals”. He further hazards a conjecture that the Indus writings belonged to a period much before that Vedic hymns were codified and compiled, but to a time when the ritualistic patterns were still in their developmental stages, all their various details not easy to remember.

In 1983, Indus excavator Walter Fairservis at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, claimed in Scientific American that he could read the signs in a form of ancient Dravidian: the language family from southern India that includes Tamil.

In 1987, Assyriologist James Kinnier Wilson at the University of Cambridge, UK, published an 'Indo-Sumerian' decipherment, based on a comparison of the Indus signs with similar- looking ones in cuneiform accounting tablets from Mesopotamia

Indus scholars have achieved much in recent decades. A superb three-volume photographic corpus of Indus inscriptions, edited by the indefatigable Asko Parpola, an Indologist at the University of Helsinki, was published between 1987 and 2010 with the support of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; a fourth and final volume is still to come. The direction of writing — chiefly right to left — has been established by analysis of the positioning of groups of characters in many differing inscriptions. The segmentation of texts containing repeated sequences of characters, syntactic structures, the numeral system and the measuring system are partly understood.

Digital approach

The dissident paper has stimulated some fresh approaches. Wells — a vehement believer that the Indus script is a full writing system — working with the geoinformation scientist Andreas Fuls at the Technical University of Berlin, has created the first, publicly available, electronic corpus of Indus texts (see www.archaeoastronomie.de). Although not complete, it includes all the texts from the US-led Harappa Archaeological Research Project.

A group led by computer scientist Rajesh Rao at the University of Washington in Seattle has demonstrated the potential of a digital approach

However, it must be noted that in spite of the serious attempts by various scholars the Indus script still remains to be a problem to be solved. Now — as a result of increased collaboration between archaeologists, linguists and experts in the digital humanities — it looks possible that the Indus script may yield some of its secrets.

4. The Characteristic Features of the Indus Script :

The main corpus of writing dated from the Indus Civilization is in the form of inscribed seals in good, legible conditions. Since 1875 more than 4,000 objects inscribed with this script have been found. The script consists of about 400 signs which can be divided into basic signs, approximately 250, and various additional auxiliary marks which do not stand alone but which are used in combinations with the basic signs. These combinatory marks are variously interpreted as determinatives, vowel marks, punctuation or other indications of gradation. In addition to these signs, there occur many compound signs which are made up of the basic signs combined with each other, or basic and auxiliary signs combined.

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However, it may be noted that scholars are of different views even with regard to the number of these signs due to different manners one regards the auxiliary and compound signs.

Although these seals and samples of Indus writing have been floating around the scholastic world for close to 100 years, little progress has been made on deciphering this elegant script. However, the majority of the scholars who have studied it agree on a number of points:

∙ The Indus script was generally written from right to left.

∙ The representation of certain numerical values has been identified.

∙ The Indus script combined both word signs and symbols with phonetic value.

However, there are number of factors preventing scholars from unlocking the mystery of the Indus script.

∙ Very short and brief texts.

∙ The average number of symbols on the seals is 5, and the longest is only 26.

∙ The language underneath is unknown.

∙ Lack of bilingual texts.

5. Different Theories about the Origin of the Indus Script :

Some scholars opined that the script was of a foreign origin while another set of scholars considered it as indigenous. Their opinions are as follows :

A) Different scholars who advocated foreign origin suggested the following as probable sources of the Indus Script :

∙ Sumerian

∙ Egyptian Hieroglyphs

∙ Script of Eastern Islands

∙ Partly from Egypt and partly from Mesopotamia

B) Those who advocated Indigenous origin suggested the relation of the Indus script with the following :

∙ Proto-Vedic

∙ Brahmi

∙ Prakrit and Sanskrit

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∙ Dravidian

∙ Tantrik

5. 1.Theories of Foreign Origin of the Indus Script :

L. A. Waddell, one of the earliest scholars, who attempted to decipher the Indus script thought that it had links with the Sumerian script. He, accordingly, read all the inscriptions as Sumerian and therefore concluded that the inhabitants of Mohenjodaro were Aryans.

W. M. Flinders Petri, the well known Egyptologist, thought that the Indus script had something in common with the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were ideographic. According to him the Indus seals contain not the names of the officials but only their titles. His views, however, did not receive any acceptance among scholars; particularly on the ground that, “if all the seals had belonged to officials, then almost every inhabitant of Mohenjodaro must have been an official personage and member of the court”.

M. G. de Hevesy opined that there was close similarity between the Indus script and the recent script of the Eastern Islands, a quiet remote Islet in the Pacific ocean, about 2500 miles to the west coast of Chile. He has compared about 130 signs of both the scripts. But in spite of the external linkages between the two scripts, points like the distance of time between the period of one script and the other, of space extending over thousands of miles, “the lack of any evidence proving the existence of intermediate script in the remote age of the Indus valley script” have to be taken into account before postulating any connection between the two.

G. R. Hunter has made a detailed study of the script in its varied aspects. After tabulating all the signs “he believes that he has thereby obtained the interpretation of certain symbols, such as the ordinal suffix, the ablative and dative terminations, the numeral signs etc “. On the basis of the resemblance between the Indus script on the one hand and the Sumerian and Elamite on the other he, like some other scholars, is inclined to suggest that the Indus script came from Western Asia.

He says, many of the signs bear a remarkable resemblance to the monumental script of Ancient Egypt. The entire body of anthropomorphous signs has Egyptian equivalents which are virtually exact. And it is interesting to note that not one of these anthropomorphous signs have the remotest parallel in Sumerian and proto-elamite. One is bound to conclude that the presumption is strong that our (i.e. Indus) script has been borrowed in part from Egypt, and in part from Mesopotamia.

Of course there are a considerable proportion of signs that are common to all three scripts, such as the signs for tree, fish, bird, etc., but this is coincidentally and indeed inevitable in the very nature of pictography. It is only safe to draw inferences of casual connection were the less obvious and more conventionalized that their pictographic origin is hardly determinable, show a marked correspondence; and in a lesser degree, where easily recognizable pictographs show the same variations.

It is even possible that all four scripts may have had a common origin. But this is an enquiry that does not concern us here, and which in the nature of pictography would be very hard to solve without the aid of anthropological evidence as to whether or not there was in pre- historic times racial affinity between the inhabitants of the Nile, Euphrates and Indus valleys.

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He believes that the script was mainly phonetic and not alphabetic, though he acknowledges that its origin was pictographic and ideographic. He further thinks that the Brahmi script was derived from the Indus script. However, the following are the two important objections raised against the view that Brahmi was derived from the Indus script.

1. The pictographs of the Indus valley are solitary finds and they do not occur elsewhere in India.

2. The intervening period of about 2500 years between the Indus script and the Brahmi still remains blank.

B. Hrozny, famous for his interpretation of the Hittite inscriptions thought that the Indus valley people were Indo-Europeans and even Proto-Hittites who reached India even before the Rigvedic Aryans. He connects the Indus script with the Hittite hieroglyphic writing.

According to Hrozny there were nearly 110 symbols which were important phonetic signs of which “no less than 86 are considered as the symbols for six sounds only; 45 signs for the sound si, se, sa and s”. But his interpretation has not been received well by scholars. It is remarked, for instance, that “while acknowledging Hrozny’s brilliancy as a decipherer, one cannot help feeling that he has tackled too difficult a task”.

Herr P. Merggi, who argued that the authors of the Indus script were not a Sanskrit people, thought that the script was ideographic, to which the Hittite hieroglyphic script bore some similarity. He believed that the documents were administrative seals.

Diringer writes; It seems obvious that the Indus valley script, which is rather schematic and linear on the extant inscriptions, was originally pictographic, but it is impossible to decide whether it was truly indigenous or imported. A connection between this script and the common ancestor of the cuneiform writing and of the early Elamite script is probable, but it is impossible to determine what the connection was. Some solutions – none of them can be considered certain – may be suggested, for instance :

∙ The Indus script was perhaps derived from an, at present unknown, early script, which may have been common ancestor also of the cuneiform and early Elamite writings.

∙ All three (i.e., cuneiform, Early Elamite and Indus) might have been local creations, one probably the prototype of the cuneiform or of the Early Elamite script being an original invention and the other two being creations inspired by the knowledge of the existence of writing.

But it should not be forgotten that according to ancient tradition (1) the authors of the ancient Egyptian civilization migrated to Egypt from Western Asia; (2) the Phoenicians were colonists in Turky and the Summarians themselves migrated to Sumer from outside by sea; it should also be noted that the Hittite inscriptions in similar script are written in the Indo- European languages.

5.2. Theories of Indigenous Origin :

∙ Langdon connected the Indus script with the Brahmi script of the later times.

∙ C. J. Gadd also held similar views concluded that the writing was at least in part syllabic. According to him the language of the seals is indo Aryan and the seal

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inscriptions were in general names. D.C. Sircar and S.K. Chatterjee too thought that Brahmi could be derived from the Indus script.

∙ Pran Nath gave alphabetic values to a number of signs of the Indus script. He compared them with those of the Brahmi scripts and concluded that the latter was derived from the former. According to him the language of the Indus seals is some form of Prakrit or older Pre-Vedic language.

∙ Svami Shankarananda and B. K. Barua felt that the key to the Indus script lies in the Tantric texts.

∙ Heras is of the strong view that the Indus civilization was of Dravidian and that the language of the Indus seals was Proto – Dravidian. In fact he reads often old Tamil in the Indus seals. His approach is now rejected.

∙ The Soviet scholars like Knorozor, Gurov and the Finnish scholars Asko Parpola and Penti Altov considers the Indus language as Proto – Dravidian. Among Indian scholars who subscribe to this view mention must be made or Iravatam Mahadevan. Fairservis is another foreign scholar who profound this theory.

∙ S. R. Rao and M. V. Krishnna Rao on the other hand are of the opinion that the Indus language is Proto-Vedic.

6. Summary

In spite of all that has been written on the subject the Indus script will have to remain a mystery till such time as a key of unimpeachable character or a bilingual inscription and a known language or a long inscription with significant recurrent features is found.

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