The Enigma of the INDUS Script – still to be deciphered

The Enigma of the INDUS Script - still to be deciphered

The INDUS Script of the Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilization is one of the earliest known writing systems in the world.  But even after 100 years of discovery (1921-22) of the Indus Valley civilization by British archaeologist Sir John Marshall and myriad attempts by world famous scholars, linguists, anthropologists, philologists, epigraphers, historians and even computer scientists to decipher the written language used by people of the Indus valley, the Indus script is yet to be deciphered. Hence the Enigma of Indus Script continues.

Linguists and epigraphers across the globe have been successfully decoding several ancient scripts like the Egyptian hieroglyphics (after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt in 1799), the Brahmi script of India (in the 1830s) and the Cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia (in the latter half of the nineteenth century) just to name a few. But surprisingly not one of them could crack the meaning conveyed by the Indus script with any reliable providence.

There seems to be three major handicaps in deciphering the Indus script. First of all, there is no plausible information available about the underlying language or the language spoken in Indus valley. Besides, extreme brevity of the Indus texts - inscriptions found so far are relatively short with an average of only 5 signs and the sheer absence of any bilingual or multilingual texts (such as the Rosetta Stone) make things extremely difficult. Last but not the least, the unexplained discontinuity of the Indus Valley civilization and the lack of any connection or similarity of the Indus script with any language or writing system of the later period have made it almost impossible to decode the script.

While we still don’t know what the Indus Scripts exactly convey, many researchers agree that the Indus script is pictographic in nature and could be a form of logo-syllabic writing system consisting of word-signs, syllables and phonetic symbols. Some signs express specific words or ideas while others represent sounds. Some other points on which there exists scholarly consensus are – right to left direction of most of the inscriptions, numerical nature of certain stroke-like signs in the script and segmentation of the inscriptions initial, medial and terminal clusters.

And finally, does Indus Script belong to any of the known language families? While many argue that it doesn’t belong to any such family, there are scholars who have argued that it’s an early form of Indo-Aryan language and could be even an early form of Sanskrit. However, a considerable number of research scholars including some top Computational Linguists, Epigraphers and Anthropologists have suggested that a Dravidian language could be the most probable candidate for the underlying language of the Indus script.

In conclusion while we still don’t know anything about the stories and information hidden beneath the mysterious Indus Script, with the supersonic progress of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI – ML) and deep interest of multi-disciplinary linguistic researchers in the Indus Valley civilization, we may just hope that the Indus script will soon be deciphered thus unravelling stunning history of the Indian subcontinent 5000 years back.