“In 1872 a British general named Alexander Cunningham, excavating an area in what was then British-controlled northern India, came across something peculiar. Buried in some ruins, he uncovered a small, one inch by one inch square piece of what he described as smooth, black, unpolished stone engraved with strange symbols — lines, interlocking ovals, something resembling a fish — and what looked like a bull etched underneath. The general, not recognizing the symbols and finding the bull to be unlike other Indian animals, assumed the artifact wasn’t Indian at all but some misplaced foreign token. The stone, along with similar ones found over the next few years, ended up in the British Museum. In the 1920s many more of these artifacts, by then known as seals, were found and identified as evidence of a 4,000-year-old culture now known as the Indus Valley Civilization, the oldest known Indian civilization to date.”
“Though we now have thousands of examples of these symbols, we have very little idea what they mean. Over a century after Cunningham’s discovery, the seals remain undeciphered, their messages lost to us.”
“Are they the letters of an ancient language? Or are they just religious, familial, or political symbols?”
“Those hotly contested questions have sparked infighting among scholars and exacerbated cultural rivalries over who can claim the script as their heritage. But new work from researchers using sophisticated algorithms, machine learning, and even cognitive science are finally helping push us to the edge of cracking the Indus script.”
“Spanning from 2600 to 1900 BC, the Indus Valley Civilization was larger than the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, encompassing over 1 million square kilometers that stretched over present-day India and Pakistan.”
“It featured sophisticated infrastructure including advanced water management and drainage systems, well-organized cities with street planning, and some of the first known toilets. The Indus people also hosted a massive trade network, traveling as far as the Persian Gulf.”
“Archeological digs revealed precious little: oddly and rather inconsistently with other Bronze Age civilizations, there is no evidence of powerful rulers or religious icons. We haven’t found any palaces or large statues, nothing like the ziggurats of Mesopotamia or the pyramids in Egypt. And we have very little indication of warfare, save for some excavated spearheads and arrowheads.”
“In fact, we know almost nothing. “If you were to ask an archaeologist, they would not be able to tell you where the Indus Civilization came from with certainty, or how it ended, or what they were doing when they were around,” says epigrapher Bryan Wells. To us, the Indus Civilization is as mysterious as its symbols.”
“The Indus symbols are part of a slowly shrinking list of undeciphered ancient scripts. Scholars are still working on a number of writing systems found all over the world including Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphs (two scripts from ancient Greece), Proto-Elamite (writing from the oldest known Iranian civilization), a handful of Mesoamerican scripts, and the Rongorongo script of Easter Island. Some Neolithic symbols, with no known linguistic descendents, may never be deciphered. Other ancient scripts, such as Linear B, an early precursor to Greek, were eventually deciphered by charting out the signs, figuring out which marked the start of a phrase and which marked the end, how different syllables changed the meaning of a word, and how consonants and vowels were structured within a sentence.”
““Complicating the problem is the fact that we don’t know the underlying language,” says Rajesh Rao, director of the National Science Foundation’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. “We don’t even know the language family that was spoken by people in that region at that time.” And once the civilization ended, it appears that its culture and writing system did, too. “We do not have any continuing cultural tradition,” says Yadav. Archaeologists have yet to find a multilingual text like the Rosetta Stone, which was key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.”
“In order to decipher the Indus script, it’s important to ascertain what we’re looking at — whether the symbols stand for a language, or, like totem poles or coats of arms, just representations of things like family names or gods. “Given the amount of data we have, we cannot make any firm statement regarding the content of the script,” says Yadav.”
“artifacts found in different regions depicted distinctly different symbol sequences. So seals found in what is now Iraq have symbol sequences that tend to be different from others found in India and Pakistan. “This suggests that maybe the same symbols were being used to encode the local language there,” says Rao. “It’s like they were experimenting with the script,” says Yadav. “They were using the same script to write some other language or some other content maybe.””
“But not everyone agrees that the script is a language. In 2004, a paper written by cultural neurobiologist and comparative historian Steve Farmer, computational theorist Richard Sproat, and philologist Michael Witzel claimed that the Indus script was not a language. The authors even went so far as to offer a $10,000 reward to anyone who finds a lengthy Indus inscription. “To view the Indus symbols as part of an ‘undeciphered script’ isn’t a view anyone outside the highly politicized world of India believes,” Farmer said in an email.”
“One thing Rao and Sproat do agree on is that if the Indus script turns out not to encode a language, that might end up being even more interesting. “We know a lot about ancient civilizations that had writing but we know a lot less about civilizations that lacked writing,” says Sproat. “And if this was some kind of general nonlinguistic system, in a sense, that would be much more interesting than if it was just some kind of script.””
“Outside of this debate, decipherment progress is also threatened by modern-day politics. Within India, different factions are fighting over whose language and culture descended from the Indus Valley Civilization. There’s the Sanskrit region in the north, the Dravidian region in the south, and those speaking tribal languages in the middle. “They’re arguing that whoever is descended from the people who wrote the Indus script are the true inheritors of India,” says Wells. “So, they’re arguing about this from a modern political point of view. I know people who have received death threats for saying it’s not Sanskrit or saying it’s not Dravidian.””
“And because the Indus Valley Civilization spanned across present-day India and Pakistan, modern tensions between the two countries bleed into the Indus studies. The photographic collections of the Indus artifacts are published in two separate volumes — one for the artifacts found in India and another for those found in Pakistan.”
“Another challenge to the script’s decipherment is a classic one: money. Wells believes that until universities and funding agencies make a concerted effort to foster the study of the Indus script, little headway will be made. “It has to be a cooperative effort, it has to be funded, and it has to have a home,” says Wells. For his part in fostering a collaborative effort, Wells is hosting a second annual meeting on the Indus script to take place this March in British Columbia. And if nothing else, that $10,000 reward is on the table for as long as Farmer is alive.”