The Script of the Indus Valley
A writing system is an important component of our modern conception of civilization, because written communication is necessary to preserve information. Ancient Egypt had hieroglyphics while Mesopotamia had cuneiform, both of which have been deciphered. Their contemporary, the Indus Valley Civilization, is also thought to have had a writing system, but it has proven notoriously hard to decode. Scholars have a number of theories regarding the nature and use of the IVC script but have yet to reach any sort of satisfactory conclusion.
Old theories posited that the IVC was somehow related to the Aryan peoples who came from the steppe, and that their script could thus be related to later Indo-Aryan scripts and languages. However, there are numerous problems with this theory. Firstly, the Rigveda cannot be dated earlier than the 15th Century BCE due to similarities with the Avesta, placing it at the earliest in the Late Harappan phase (Sharma 38). Additionally, there is little evidence within the Rigveda of the sort of large-scale settlements and technology that characterized the IVC. If the IVC was related to the Rigveda, it is likely that such important parts of their society would have been mentioned in their religious texts. The Rigveda also makes no mention of the sorts of economic interactions that would have been prominent in an advanced and settled society, such as hiring or borrowing (Sharma 39). . Because of this, the IVC cannot be identified with the Indo-Aryan peoples who created the Rigveda.
If the IVC was in no way connected to the Indo-Aryan peoples, how can its script be deciphered? How do we know it even encodes language? The IVC script is notoriously difficult to make sense of, as nearly the entire discovered body of script comes in the form of short inscriptions on tablets which appear to be, which are often rendered difficult to read by damage (Fairservis 59). This characteristic is largely unique among ancient civilizations while making the script extremely difficult to decipher, and has thus been used to argue against the IVC inscriptions as constituting a language-encoding script (Farmer et al. 22). Asko Parpola notes, however, that Egyptian hieroglyphics have not been found in long inscriptions for the first 600 years of their existence and that small bodies of textual evidence do not disprove the interpretation of the IVC symbols as constituting a true script (6).
The IVC script has yet to be deciphered, but progress has been made in understanding some of its more common symbols, as well as the patterns in which they appear. Rao et al. analyzed the entropy value, or “orderliness” of the script and determined that it did encode language and was not a set of nonlinguistic symbols, contrary to the not uncommon belief that the lack of long inscriptions means that the script encodes non-linguistic symbols (1165). Another study using convolutional neural networks backs this conclusion up and identifies sounds with some IVC script symbols (Daggumati and Revesz 5). Computational analyses have been conducted on symbolic sequences to determine the relationship between the IVC script and modern languages. The conclusions drawn from such data, however, are still far from certain.
Conflicting views exist as to the interpretation of this evidence. A paper by Srinivasan et al. finds similarities between the Indus script and Kannada, Kharosthi, Telugu, and Brahmi scripts. They conclude that considering the geographic and temporal extent of the civilization, their evidence points towards the Indus script being used for multiple languages, and that the IVC was a multilingual civilization. They further back this assertion by noting that in the modern subcontinent, the languages and scripts used change within the span of 1000 km, so it is not far-fetched to conclude the same for the IVC (156).
Another view suggests that the Indus script was purely Dravidian in origin. Circumstantial evidence comes from the existence of the Brahui language, a Dravidian language spoken in the Balochistan region of Pakistan. Speakers of Brahui are genetically largely indistinguishable from the surrounding Indo-European populations, but this could be explained by the assimilation of a previous Dravidian-speaking group into the surrounding population, which assumed their language (Pagani et al.)
More evidence, though still far from conclusive, comes from computational analyses of the evidence found on seals. Entropy analysis, while an imprecise method of determining the origin of a language, does seem to place the Indus script as similar to old Tamil (Rao et al. 1165). Furthermore, scholars have noted that homophones (different meaning words that sound similar, like slay and sleigh) in the IVC script and Dravidian languages seem to correspond (Fairservis 63).
Early evidence of Dravidian influence on Indo-Aryan provides yet more circumstantial evidence of the IVC script being Dravidian in origin. As early as the Rigveda, Dravidian loanwords have been found in Indo-Aryan texts (Parpola 12). Asko Parpola further notes that of the extant language groups of the subcontinent, Dravidian is the only one that could have any plausible relation to the IVC language, and that while multiple languages could have been spoken in the IVC, it is likely that only one had a written form (Parpola 10).
The jury is still out regarding the origins of the IVC script and the nature of the language (or languages) it encodes. The debate on these characteristics of the Indus Valley Civilization takes on a larger-than-life role in the context of efforts by both Dravidian nationalists (Farmer et al. 22) and Hindutva followers (Hume 188) to push their respective theories and ascribe meaning to them. In modern times, it is important to look past the veneer of politics and look at the underlying facts in order to find truth in history.
Citations:
Daggumati, Shruti, and Peter Z. Revesz. “Data Mining Ancient Script Image Data Using Convolutional Neural Networks.” Proceedings of the 22nd International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium on — IDEAS 2018, June 2018, https://doi.org/10.1145/3216122.3216163.
Fairservis, Walter A. “The Script of the Indus Valley Civilization.” Scientific American, vol. 248, no. 3, 1983, pp. 58–67. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24968852. Accessed 28 July 2022.
Farmer, Steven, et al. “The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization.” Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2004, pp. 19–57.
Humes, Cynthia Ann. “Hindutva, Mythistory, and Pseudoarchaeology.” Numen, vol. 59, no. 2/3, 2012, pp. 178–201. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23244958. Accessed 28 July 2022.
Parpola, A. 2010. A Dravidian solution to the Indus script problem. (Paper read at World Classical Tamil Conference, at Coimbatore).
Sharma, Ram Sharan. “Identity of the Indus Culture.” East and West, vol. 49, no. 1/4, 1999, pp. 35–45. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29757421. Accessed 28 July 2022.
Srinivasan, S., et al. “Indus Writing Is Multilingual: a Part-Syllabic System at Work.” Current Science, vol. 103, no. 2, 2012, pp. 147–157. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24084993. Accessed 28 July 2022.
