The Indus script (also known as the Harappan script) is a corpus of symbols produced by the

Indus Valley Civilisation during the Kot Diji and Mature Harappan periods between 3500 and
1900 BCE. Most inscriptions containing these symbols are extremely short, making it difficult to
judge whether or not these symbols constituted a script used to record a language, or even
symbolise a writing system.[4] In spite of many attempts,[5] ‘the script’ has not yet been
deciphered, but efforts are ongoing. There is no known bilingual inscription to help decipher the
script, and the script shows no significant changes over time. However, some of the syntax (if
that is what it may be termed) varies depending upon location.[4]

The first publication of a seal with Harappan symbols dates to 1875, in a drawing by Alexander
Cunningham.[6] Since then, over 4,000 inscribed objects have been discovered, some as far afield
as Mesopotamia. In the early 1970s, Iravatham Mahadevan published a corpus and concordance
of Indus inscriptions listing 3,700 seals and 417 distinct signs in specific patterns. He also found
that the average inscription contained five symbols and that the longest inscription contained
only 14 symbols in a single line.[7] He also established the direction of writing as from right to
left.[8]

Some scholars, such as G.R. Hunter,[9] S. R. Rao, John Newberry,[10] Krishna Rao,[11] and
Subhash Kak[12] have argued that the Brāhmī script has some connection with the Indus system,
but others, such as Iravatham Mahadevan, Kamil Zvelebil and Asko Parpola, have argued that
the script had a relation to a Dravidian language.[13][14] F. Raymond Allchin has somewhat
cautiously supported the possibility,[15][16] that even many supporters of the theory that Brāhmī
probably derives from Aramaic influence consider: that the Brahmi language can have some
Indus script influence.[17] Another possibility for continuity of the Indus tradition is in the
megalithic culture graffiti symbols of southern and central India (and Sri Lanka), which probably
do not constitute a linguistic script but may have some overlap with the Indus symbol inventory.

Corpus
Early examples of the symbol system are found in an Early Harappan and Indus civilisation
context, dated to possibly as early as the 35th century BCE.[20][21] In the Mature Harappan period,
from about 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE, strings of Indus signs are commonly found on flat,
rectangular stamp seals as well as many other objects including tools, tablets, ornaments and
pottery. The signs were written in many ways, including carving, chiseling, painting and
embossing, on objects made of many different materials, such as soapstone, bone, shell,
terracotta, sandstone, copper, silver and gold.[22] Often, animals such as bulls, elephants,
rhinoceros, water buffaloes and the mythical unicorn accompanied the text on seals to help the
illiterate identify the origin of a particular seal.[23]

Late Harappan

After 1900 BCE, the systematic use of the symbols ended, after the final stage of the Mature
Harappan civilization. A few Harappan signs have been claimed to appear until as late as around
1100 BCE, the beginning of the Iron Age in India. Onshore explorations near Bet Dwarka in
Gujarat revealed the presence of late Indus seals depicting a three-headed animal, an earthen
vessel inscribed in what is claimed to be a late Harappan script and a large quantity of pottery.
The thermoluminescence date for the pottery is 1528 BCE. That evidence has been used to claim
that a late Harappan script was used until around 1500 BCE.[24]

Characteristics

Inscription of ten characters from Dholavira.

The characters are largely pictorial but include many abstract signs. The inscriptions are thought
to have been written mostly from right-to-left (because there are several instances of the symbols
being compressed on the left side, as if the writer is running out of space at the end of the row
there), but they sometimes follow a boustrophedonic style. The number of principal signs is
about 400. Since that is considered too large a number for each character to be a phonogram, the
script is generally believed to instead be logo-syllabic.

Decipherability question
An opposing hypothesis that has been offered by Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, is that these
symbols are nonlinguistic signs, which symbolise families, clans, gods, and religious concepts
and are similar to components of coats of arms or totem poles.[25] In a 2004 article, Farmer,
Sproat, and Witzel presented a number of arguments stating that the Indus script is nonlinguistic.
The main ones are the extreme brevity of the inscriptions, the existence of too many rare signs
(which increase over the 700-year period of the Mature Harappan civilization) and the lack of the
random-looking sign repetition that is typical of language.[26]

Asko Parpola, reviewing the Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel thesis in 2005, stated that their
arguments "can be easily controverted".[27] He cited the presence of a large number of rare signs
in Chinese and emphasised that there was "little reason for sign repetition in short seal texts
written in an early logo-syllabic script". Revisiting the question in a 2007 lecture,[28] Parpola took
on each of the 10 main arguments of Farmer et al., presenting counterarguments for each.

A 2009 paper[29] published by Rajesh P N Rao, Iravatham Mahadevan and others in the journal
Science also challenged the argument that the Indus script might have been a nonlinguistic
symbol system. The paper concluded that the conditional entropy of Indus inscriptions closely
matched those of linguistic systems like the Sumerian logo-syllabic system, Rig Vedic Sanskrit
etc., but they are careful to stress that by itself does not imply that the script is linguistic. A
follow-up study presented further evidence in terms of entropies of longer sequences of symbols
beyond pairs.[30] However, Sproat claimed that there existed a number of misunderstandings in
Rao et al., including a lack of discriminative power in their model, and argued that applying their
model to known non-linguistic systems such as Mesopotamian deity symbols produced similar
results to the Indus script. Rao et al.'s argument against Sproat's claims and Sproat's reply were
published in Computational Linguistics in December 2010.[31] The June 2014 issue of Language
carries a paper by Sproat that provides further evidence that the methodology of Rao et al. is
flawed.[32] Rao et al.'s rebuttal of Sproat's 2014 article and Sproat's response are published in the
December 2015 issue of Language.[33][34]

Attempts at decipherment
Further information: Harappan language

Over the years, numerous decipherments have been proposed, but there is no established
scholarly consensus.[35] The following factors are usually regarded as the biggest obstacles for a
successful decipherment:

 The underlying language has not been identified though some 300 loanwords in the
Rigveda are a good starting point for comparison.[36][37]
 The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being only 26
signs long[38], although recent findings have revealed copper plates belonging to the
mature Harappan period, one of them having 34 characters inscribed onto it.[39]
 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.[40]

Dravidian hypothesis

The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov suggested, based on computer analysis, the Dravidian
language as the most likely candidate for the underlying language of the script.[41] Knorozov's
suggestion was preceded by the work of Henry Heras, who also suggested several readings of
signs based on a proto-Dravidian assumption.[42]

The Finnish scholar Asko Parpola wrote that the Indus script and Harappan language "most
likely belonged to the Dravidian family".[43] Parpola led a Finnish team in the 1960s-80s that, like
Knorozov's Soviet team worked towards investigating the inscriptions using computer analysis.
Based on a proto-Dravidian assumption, the teams proposed readings of many signs. A lot of
people agreed with the suggested readings of Heras and Knorozov, one such reading was
legitimised when the Dravidian word for both 'fish' and 'star', "min" was hinted at through
drawings of both the things together on Harappan seals.[44] A comprehensive description of
Parpola's work until 1994 is given in his book Deciphering the Indus Script.[45]

Iravatham Mahadevan, another historian 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".[46] According to Mahadevan, a stone celt
discovered in Mayiladuthurai (Tamil Nadu) has the same markings as that of the symbols of the
Indus script. The celt dates to early 2nd millennium BCE, post-dating Harappan decline.
Mahadevan considers this as evidence of the same language being used by the neolithic people
of south India and the late Harappans.[47][48]
In May 2007, the Tamil Nadu Archaeology 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 Mohenjo-daro in present-day Pakistan in the 1920s.
[49]

"Sanskritic" hypothesis

Indus people endless knot symbol/Rangoli and Inscription possibly proto Dravidian or proto
Sanskrit

Indian archaeologist Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao claimed to have deciphered the Indus script.
He compared it to the Phoenician alphabet, and assigned sound values based on this comparison.
His decipherment results in a "Sanskritic" reading, including the numerals aeka, tra, chatus,
panta, happta/sapta, dasa, dvadasa, sata (1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, 100).[50] He also noted a number of
striking similarities in shape and form between the late Harappan characters and the Phoenician
letters, arguing that the Phoenician script evolved from the Harappan script, and not, as the
classical theory suggests from the Proto-Sinaitic script.[51]

John E. Mitchiner dismissed some of these attempts at decipherment. Mitchiner mentioned that
"a more soundly-based but still greatly subjective and unconvincing attempt to discern an Indo-
European basis in the script has been that of Rao".[52]

Miscellaneous hypotheses

There have been several hypotheses regarding the language pertaining to the Indus Script. One of
the most common ones has been that the script belongs to the Indo-Aryan language. However,
there are many problems with this hypothesis. A major one includes: Since the people belonging
to the Indo-European cultures were always on the move, horses played a very important role in
their lives or as Parpola put it, "There is no escape from the fact that the horse played a central
role in the Vedic and Iranian cultures..." (Parpola, 1986). However, no depiction of horses on
seals nor any remains of horses have been found in the subcontinent before 2000 BCE. Thus, it is
very likely there were no Aryan speakers present before 2000 BCE in the Indus Valley.

A second, though not as popular hypothesis is that the Indus script belongs to the Munda family
of languages. The Munda family of languages is spoken largely in Eastern India, and is related to
some Southeast Asian languages. However, much like the Indo-Aryan language, the
reconstructed vocabulary of early Munda does not reflect the Harappan culture. Therefore, its
candidacy for being the language of the Indus Civilization is dim.[53]
Scholars also compare the Indus valley script with a writing system from ancient Persia, known
as Linear Elamite. The two languages were contemporary to each other. Scholars gained
knowledge of the Elamite language from a bilingual monument called the Table of the Lion in
the Louvre museum. The monument contained the same text in Akkadian, a known writing
system, and in Linear Elamite. On comparing this ancient language to the Indus script, a number
of similar symbols have been found.[54]

The Dholavira signboard is one of the longest in the Indus script, with one symbol appearing
four times, and this and its large size and public nature make it a key piece of evidence cited by
scholars arguing that the Indus script represents full literacy.

Other languages connected to the script include Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan. Further
possibilities include nearby language isolates such as Burushaski, Kusunda and Nihali as well as
the extinct Sumerian civilization with which there was trade contact.

Encoding
The Indus symbols have been assigned the ISO 15924 code "Inds". The script was proposed for
encoding in Unicode's Supplementary Multilingual Plane in 1999; however, the Unicode
Consortium still lists the proposal in pending status.[55] At the International Conference on
Mohenjodaro and Indus Valley Civilisation 2017 it was noted that two language engineers, Amar
Fayaz Buriro and Shabir Kumbhar have engineered all 1839 signs of Indus script and presented a
developed font.