The term Indus script refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Harappan civilization of ancient India, dating to ca. 2600–1900 BC. They are most commonly associated with flat, rectangular stone tablets called seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials. The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1875, 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. After 1900 BC, use of the symbols ends, together with the final stage of Harappan civilization. Some early scholars, starting with Cunningham in 1877, thought that the script was the archetype of the Brahmi script used by Ashoka. Today Cunningham's claims are rejected by nearly all researchers, but a minority of mostly Indian scholars continues to argue for the Indus script as the predecessor of the Brahmic family. There are over 400 different signs, but many are thought to be slight modifications or combinations of perhaps 200 'basic' signs.

Attempts at decipherment

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 substrate language has not been identified, nor the language family to which it belongs.
• The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being one of only 26 signs.
• No bilingual texts have been found.

The Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola , who has edited a multivolumed corpus of the inscriptions, surmises that the symbols represent a logo-syllabic script, with an underlying Dravidian language as the most likely linguistic substrate.

If the signs are purely ideographical, they may contain no information about the language spoken by their creators, and cannot be called a script in the true sense of the word. A recent paper by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel - a comparative historian, computational linguist, and Indologist respectively - offers evidence that the symbols were not coupled to oral language, which in part explains the extreme brevity of the inscriptions. For their paper, see the external links.

External links

• Indus Script (ancientscripts.com)
• Collection of essays about the Indus script
• The Indus Script (Asko Parpola)
• Horseplay in Harappa article by Witzel and Farmer debunking the claim of decipherment made by N.S. Rajaram and Dr. N. Jha
  • A reply to Frontline’s cover story by Michael Danino
• The collapse of the Indus-script thesis: The myth of a literate Harappan civilization (Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel PDF, 2004)
• The Vedic Harappans in writing by Dr. Koenraad Elst