Can We Crack Their [Indus] Code?

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Can We Crack Their [indus] Code?

from "The Indus Riddle from India Today"

 

A Nobel prize possibly awaits the person who can decipher what the

Indus people wrote. Along with the Etruscan of Italy, it is the last

script of the Bronze Age that is yet to be deciphered. The Egyptian

hieroglyphics were cracked by the chance discovery of a rosetta stone

found by Napoleon's men who invaded Egypt in 1798. It had on it an

inscription in three languages -- hieroglyphic, demotic (another script

popular in ancient Egypt) and Greek, which helped decipher it. Sumer's

cuneiform script was deciphered by Henry Rawlinson, a British officer in

Iran, after he found the Behistun inscription on a high rock that

provided clues to it. So far no such bilingual artefact has been found

that could help break the Indus writing code.

 

Yet, there is no dearth of claimants: since the sites were discovered,

over a 100 theories have been put forward and even high speed computers

employed. But in the absence of an independent test, none of them could

be corroborated. What they did throw up were some patterns that hold a

clue to what the Indus people wanted to communicate. The inscriptions

are usually short, made up of 26 characters written usually in one line.

The script, largely glyptic in content, has around 419 signs, which is

far short of the 50,000 the Chinese script has.

 

The writing system is believed to be based on syllables. The Indus

people also wrote from right to left as is manifest by the strokes, but

it does follow at times a rebus style similar to that of a farmer

ploughing a field. The dominant animal to be featured is the unicorn,

the mythical beast, followed by the short-horned bull. Among lettering,

a jar-shaped alphabet is the most common. I. Mahadevan, an Indian

archaeologist, has a fetching theory about the conical standard that

appears on most seals. He believes it is the legendary soma urn used to

make alcohol. Apparently there was no ban on advertising it.

 

Asko Parpola, a Finnish scholar who has spent several decades banging

his head against the script, homes in on the Dravidian script and points

to the fact that one of its languages, Brahui, has been spoken in

Baluchistan for at least a thousand years. He rejects an Indo-Aryan

genesis to the script. Parpola's thesis has been contradicted by

Shikarpur Ranganath Rao, a distinguished archaeologist responsible for

the excavation of Lothal. Rao claims to know what exactly the seals mean

and says the script has a close link to Vedic Sanskrit and Semitic

symbols. But many archaeologists disagree with his approach, and remain

despondent about ever cracking the code.

 

The bottomline: While some progress has been made, the Indus seals are

still a lot of gibberish to us.