Indus script


Indus script
Type Undeciphered Bronze Age writing
Spoken languages Unknown (see Harappan language)
Time period 2600–1900 BC
Parent systems
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  • Indus script
ISO 15924 Inds
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
Seal impression showing a typical "inscription" of five "characters".
Collection of seals

The term Indus script (also Harappan script) refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Indus Valley Civilization, in use during the Mature Harappan period, between the 26th and 20th centuries BC. In spite of many attempts at decipherments and claims, it is as yet undeciphered. The underlying language is unknown, and the lack of a bilingual makes the decipherment unlikely pending significant new finds.

The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1873, in the form of a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, well over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. In early seventies Iravatham Mahadevan published a corpus and concordance of Harrapan writing listing about 3700 seals and about 417 distinct sign in specific patterns. The average size of writing is five signs and largest text in a single line is 14 signs. He also established the direction of writing as right to left.[1]

Some early scholars, starting with Cunningham in 1877, thought that the script was the archetype of the Brahmi script used by Ashoka. Cunningham's ideas were supported by G.R. Hunter, Iravatham Mahadevan and a minority of scholars continue to argue for the Indus script as the predecessor of the Brahmic family. However most scholars disagree, claiming instead that the Brahmi script derived from the Aramaic script.

Contents

Inscription corpus

Early Harappan

The script generally refers to that used in the mature Harappan phase, which perhaps evolved from a few signs found in early Harappa after 3500 BC.[2] However, the early date and the interpretation given in the BBC report have been challenged by the long-term excavator of Harappa, Richard Meadow.[3] The use of early pottery marks and incipient Indus signs was followed by the mature Harappan script.

Mature Harappan

The Harappan signs are most commonly associated with flat, rectangular stone tablets called seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials.

Late Harappan

After 1900 BC, the systematic use of the symbols ended, after the final stage of the Mature Harappan civilization.

Late Indus script found on pottery at Bet Dwarka dated to 1528 BC based on thermoluminescence dating.

A few Harappan signs have been claimed to appear until as late as around 1100 BC (the beginning of the Indian Iron Age). Onshore explorations near Bet Dwarka in Gujarat revealed the presence of late Indus seals depicting a 3-headed animal, earthen vessel inscribed in what is claimed to be a late Harappan script, and a large quantity of pottery similar to Lustrous Red Ware bowl and Red Ware dishes, dish-on-stand, perforated jar and incurved bowls which are datable to the 16th century BC in Dwarka, Rangpur and Prabhas. The thermoluminescence date for the pottery in Bet Dwaraka is 1528 BC. This evidence has been used to claim that a late Harappan script was used until around 1500 BC. [4] Other excavations in India at Vaisali, Bihar [5] and Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu [6] have been claimed to contain Indus symbols being used as late as 1100 BC.

In May 2007, the Tamil Nadu Archaeological Department found pots with arrow-head symbols during an excavation in Melaperumpallam near Poompuhar. These symbols are claimed to have a striking resemblance to seals unearthed in Mohenjodaro in the 1920s.[4]

In 1960, B.B. Lal of the Archaeological Survey of India wrote a paper in the journal Ancient India. It carried a photograhic catalog of megalithic and chalcolithic pottery which Lal compares with the Ancient Indus script.[4] Ancient inscriptions that are claimed to bear a striking resemblance to those found in Indus Valley sites have been found in Sanur near Tindivanam in Tamil Nadu, Musiri in Kerala and Sulur near Coimbatore.[4]

Script characteristics

The writing system is intensely pictorial. The script is written from right to left,[5] and sometimes follows a boustrophedonic style. Since the number of principal signs is about 400-600,[6] midway between typical logographic and syllabic scripts, many scholars accept the script to be logo-syllabic[7] (typically syllabic scripts have about 50-100 signs whereas logographic scripts have a very large number of principal signs). Several scholars maintain that structural analysis indicates an agglutinative language underneath the script. However, this is contradicted by the occurrence of signs supposedly representing prefixes and infixes.

Attempts at decipherment

Further information: Harappan language

Over the years, numerous decipherments have been proposed, but none has been accepted by the scientific community at large. The following factors are usually regarded as the biggest obstacles for a successful decipherment:

  • The underlying language, if any, has not been identified.
  • The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being one of only 17 signs (and a sealing of combined inscriptions of just 27 signs).
  • No bilingual texts (like a Rosetta Stone) have been found.

The topic is popular among amateur researchers, and there have been various (mutually exclusive) decipherment claims. None of these suggestions has found academic recognition.[8]

Dravidian hypothesis

The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov, who has edited a multi-volumed corpus of the inscriptions, surmises that the symbols represent a logosyllabic script, with an underlying Dravidian language as the most likely linguistic substrate.[9] Knorozov is perhaps best known for his decisive contributions towards the decipherment of the Maya script, a pre-Columbian writing system of the Mesoamerican Maya civilization. Knorozov's investigations were the first to conclusively demonstrate that the Maya script was logosyllabic in character, an interpretation now confirmed in the subsequent decades of Mayanist epigraphic research.

The Finnish scholar Asko Parpola repeated several of these suggested Indus script readings. The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a late Neolithic (early 2nd millennium BC, i.e. post-dating Harappan decline) stone celt adorned with Indus script markings has been considered to be significant for this identification.[10][11] However, their identification as Indus signs has been disputed.

Iravatham Mahadevan, who supports the Dravidian hypothesis, says, "we may hopefully find that the proto-Dravidian roots of the Harappan language and South Indian Dravidian languages are similar. This is a hypothesis [...] But I have no illusions that I will decipher the Indus script, nor do I have any regret."[12]

Script vs. Ideographical Symbols

If the Indus signs are purely ideographical, they may contain no information about the underlying language spoken by their creators, i.e., they would be just logographic script, or pictograms.

In 2004, Steve Farmer, an independent scholar, computational linguist Richard Sproat and Indologist Michael Witzel[13] published an article asserting that the Indus Script symbols were not coupled to oral language, which they say explains the extreme brevity of the inscriptions. Witzel had earlier presented his "Para-Munda" Hypothesis, that the spoken language of the Indus civilization was distantly related to Munda. (Witzel 1999)[14].

Asko Parpola reviewing the thesis in 2005 argued that Sproat, "the computer linguist of the Farmer team" underlines that by statistical means it is not possible to distinguish a logo-syllabic script of the Mesopotamian type from a non-linguistic symbol system, so that Farmer et al. strictly leave open the possibility that the Indus texts may be utilizing a "language-based rebus principle".[15]

A computational linguistics study conducted by a joint Indo-US team led by Rajesh P N Rao of University of Washington, consisting of Iravatham Mahadevan and others from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, was published in April 2009 in Science.[16] They conclude that "given the prior evidence for syntactic structure in the Indus script, (their) results increase the probability that the script represents language".[17] Farmer, Sproat and Witzel published a quick two-page in reaction to the study, [18] and announced a more detailed criticism would follow.[19] Two specialists in computational linguistics, Mark Liberman [20] and Fernando Pereira [21] have criticized the paper. Rao et al. have responded to this critique.[22]

Revisiting the question in a 2007 lecture,[23] Parpola concludes that the arguments adduced by Farmer and his colleagues may be sufficient to establish that the Indus script had not yet reached the stage of a fully developed writing system, but cannot be used to rule out that it had reached the "rebus-punning" phase corresponding to the protoliterate phase of Egyptian and Sumerian writing in in the 32nd to 31st centuries BC.[24]

Notes

  1. ^ "Write signs for Indus script?" (in en). Nature India. 2009-05-31. http://www.nature.com/nindia/2009/090531/full/nindia.2009.147.html. Retrieved on 2009-06-01. 
  2. ^ Whitehouse, David (1999) 'Earliest writing' found BBC
  3. ^ http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1721/17211220.htm
  4. ^ a b c Subramaniam, T. S. (May 1, 2006). "From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu". The Hindu. http://www.hindu.com/2008/05/03/stories/2008050353942200.htm. Retrieved on 2008-05-23. 
  5. ^ (Lal 1966)
  6. ^ (Wells 1999)
  7. ^ (Bryant 2000)
  8. ^ see e.g. Egbert Richter, N. S. Rajaram and Srinivasan Kalyanaraman for examples.
  9. ^ (Knorozov 1965)
  10. ^ (Subramanium 2006; see also A Note on the Muruku Sign of the Indus Script in light of the Mayiladuthurai Stone Axe Discovery by I. Mahadevan (2006)
  11. ^ Significance of Mayiladuthurai find
  12. ^ Interview at Harrappa.com
  13. ^ (Farmer 2004)
  14. ^ [1]
  15. ^ Parpola 2005, p. 42f.
  16. ^ Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari, and Iravatham Mahadevan, Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script published online 23 April 2009 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1170391] (in Science Express Brevia)
  17. ^ http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/ScienceIndus.pdf
  18. ^ A Refutation of the Claimed Refutation of the Nonlinguistic Nature of Indus Symbols: Invented Data Sets in the Statistical Paper of Rao et al. (Science, 2009)
  19. ^ Steve Farmer's website. 24 April 2009.
  20. ^ http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1374
  21. ^ http://earningmyturns.blogspot.com/2009/04/falling-for-magic-formula.htm
  22. ^ http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/IndusResponse.pdf (see also [2])
  23. ^ published in Airāvati, Felicitation volume in honour of Iravatham Mahadevan, Chennai, 2008 [3]
  24. ^ comparing the Narmer Palette as a good example of what is "already a writing system even if the texts are on average shorter than the Indus texts!" (p. 127)

References

See also

External links







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