Decipherment of the Indus script: new angles and approaches

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Want a Million Dollars? Get Busy Deciphering This Ancient Script.  A prize offered by an Indian state leader is intended to shed light on a Bronze Age civilization — and settle a cultural battle.
By Pragati K.B., NYT (2/1/25)

The Indus Valley civilization, also called the Harappan civilization, is seen by experts as on a par with the better-known ones of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China.

One of the earliest, it flourished on the banks of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers during the Bronze Age. It had planned townships, water management and drainage systems, huge fortified walls and exquisite pottery and terra cotta artistry.

Since the Archaeological Survey of India announced the first findings on the civilization in 1924, around 5,000 inscriptions have been excavated.

They are engraved in stone or metal, or stamped onto fired clay. The brevity of the inscriptions, along with the absence of a Rosetta Stone-like text showing its symbols in translation, are among the reasons the script has not been deciphered, scholars say.

Asko Parpola, a Finnish Indologist who has studied the Indus script since 1964, said that deciphering it could put the Indus Valley civilization in the realm of history rather than prehistory, giving new perspective to India’s cultural evolution.

Asko (b. 1941), an old friend of mine and the brother of Akkadian language epigrapher, Simo Parpola (b. 1943), and nephew of the distinguished Assyriologist, Armas Salonen (1915-1981) — decipherment runs in the family — in my estimation has come as close as anyone to cracking the code of the Indus Valley script.

Mr. Parpola, who is working on the sixth volume of “Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions,” a database of all available material culture on the Indus civilization, said he had received a lot of mail over the years from enthusiasts and researchers claiming to have cracked the script or found new inscriptions.

I've been following the Indus script decipherment debates for more than half a century, but up to this point, I've never taken a firm position on what it might be:

a. phonetic or logographic / morphographic, etc.

b. Indo-European or Dravidian, etc.

Impressed by the power of AI to solve challenging problems involving massive amounts of data (e.g., inspired by the whirling-twirling "thought" processes of AIO), I've decided to take a radically different approach to solving the problem.

My humble contribution to the quest will be based on theoretical premises and empirical evidence gathered from archeological exploration that point to migration patterns they attest to.  I will not begin with a hypothesis that the undeciphered IV script most likely reflects a Dravidian language or an Indo-European language, but that is what I hope to end with.  In other words, I will start with masses of data as compiled and analyzed in the 6-vol. corpora of Asko Parpola, but filter it through archeological and cultural filters.

Methodologically, in the history of script decipherment, I want to emphasize the techniques of the Russian scholar, Yuri Knorozov (1922-99) a graduate of Moscow State University, who played a decisive role in the decipherment of the Mayan script.  Here is a conceptual description of his key contribution:

In 1952, the then 30-year-old Knorozov published a paper which was later to prove to be a seminal work in the field (Drevnyaya pis’mennost’ Tsentral’noy Ameriki, or "Ancient Writing of Central America".) The general thesis of this paper put forward the observation that early scripts such as ancient Egyptian and Cuneiform which were generally or formerly thought to be predominantly logographic or even purely ideographic in nature, in fact contained a significant phonetic component. That is to say, rather than the symbols representing only or mainly whole words or concepts, many symbols in fact represented the sound elements of the language in which they were written, and had alphabetic or syllabic elements as well, which if understood could further their decipherment.
(source)

Knorozov also applied these insights to the investigation of the Indus Valley script, simultaneously extensively employing computers in his research already before the mid-sixties.

Regular readers of Language Log will understand why I have such enthusiastic regard for Knorozov.  Like Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (1760-1844), he downplayed the pictographic, ideographic, and logographic aspects of written symbols in writing systems and emphasized their phonetic properties in the formation of words.  This is why Knorozov and Du Ponceau operate at a higher level of analysis and insight than middling scholars who overemphasize the visual / pictorial aspects of early scripts and are able to make major breakthroughs instead of simply repeating what has been taken for granted for centuries, when it is often quite wrong.  Another scholar who strongly emphasized sound over shape in full-fledged writing is John DeFrancis, as in his magnum opus, Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989), which we recently visited in "A brief literary linguistic analysis of the Gettysburg Address" (1/19/25).  See also John's The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1984).

David W. McAlpin (1945-2023), who was an assistant professor of South Asian linguistics when I came to Penn in 1979, is another key figure in my inquiry into the origins and affinities of the IV script.  McAlpin was denied tenure, but I think he was investigating something of enormous potential, namely that Elamite (in what is now Iran before the Iranians / Aryans impinged from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe) and Dravidian were cognate languages, and he was working toward the description of Proto-Elamo-Dravidian.  Since Harappan was sandwiched between Dravidian and Elamite, I believe that his hypothesis pointed toward a tremendous breakthrough in South Asian linguistics, enabling us to conceptualize Elamo-Dravidian as a substrate language family for Indo-Iranian / Aryan which came to South Asia and the Iranian Plateau around 3,500-4,000 years ago.  Even though he was not able to lead a professional academic career, McAlpin continued to write high-level papers that kept alive and advanced his Elamo-Dravidian (Zagrosian) hypothesis till near the time of his passing in 2023.

Even though my friends and colleagues are on both sides (Dravidian and Indic) of the IV script decipherability debate, I have remained agnostic.  After the recent work described in this probing Rest of World article (for details see "Selected readings" below) and being a believer in the awesome power of AI, I'm now tilting toward the possibility that we will one day understand those short IV texts.

Since the Indo-Aryans / Iranians dispersed from the Pontic-Caspian homeland around five thousand years ago, they moved south to overlay and displace the Elamo-Dravidians.  In my estimation. we should be able to detect cultural traces of these migrations and their interactions with the local people in the archeological record.

Seals are an important attribute of IV civilization, as they are of the Elamites and thence very much so to Mesopotamia.  This Indicates a foundational linkage to the Middle East.

This small steatite statue depicts an Indus Valley priest-king.

 
Smarthistory – The Priest-King sculpture from the Indus Valley Civilization
 
Indus Priest/King Statue. The statue is 17.5 cm high and carved from steatite a.k.a. soapstone. It was found in Mohenjo-daro in 1927. It is on display in the National Museum, Karachi, Pakistan.

He dates to around 3,000 years ago.  From the moment I first saw him, I was struck by the objects on his forehead and upper right arm held in place by straps.  They strike me as being a type of phylactery / tefillin ("phylactery" is the Greek equivalent of Semitic "tefillin").  Since these appurtenances are also present in Jewish ritual and were common as ornamental bands encircling the head among Levantine populations in the biblical period, they would seem to constitute another fundamental connection to the Middle East, not to the Pontic-Caspian.

Articles on Jewish phylacteries by Jeffrey Tigay:

1979   "On the Term Phylacteries (Matt 23:5)." Harvard Theological Review 72:45-52. Reprinted in Bible and Spade 10/3-4 (Summer-Autumn, 1981):86-94.

1982   "On the Meaning of T(W)TPT (totafot)." Journal of Biblical Literature 101:321-31.

1982   Article in Entsiqlopedia Miqra'it (Encyclopaedia Biblica), Volume 8 (in Hebrew; Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik):Tefillin (Phylacteries"), cols. 883-95.

There is also a book by Yehuda Cohn, Tangled Up in Text: Tefillin and the Ancient World (https://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Up-Text-Tefillin-Ancient/dp/1930675798).

From Michael Carasik:

…we have physical examples from the last centuries BCE (see here [on the Dead Sea Scrolls]).  It's also not clear to me that any of the actual biblical texts must be interpreted literally rather than metaphorically (as the Karaites and some of our own Rabbanite medieval commentators do), so I don't know how early the actual objects are in Jewish practice.

Of course, the Indus priest-king amulets do not have texts inside the rings on his right upper arm and middle of the forehead, but these may be an archaic form of what later became the little black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah.  The latter may well be later Jewish ceremonial elaborations, inasmuch as they are not prescribed in the earliest textual references to tefillin.  The numerous wrappings around the non-dominant arm are also likely to be subsequent augmentations of the simple straps and rings of the Indus priest-king.  

These are just two of the cultural traits linking the Indus Valley civilization with that of the Middle East.  If researchers carefully comb through the archeological, art historical, religious, and other types of evidence of these two centers of early civilization, I'm confident that they will find many more telling parallels, more than those for the Indus Valley and Pontic-Caspian civilization.  In contrast, the linkages between Indo-Aryan/Iranian and Vedic-Avestan culture are far more prominent than those they share with Indus Valley civilization.

To summarize what is at stake:

"Tamil Nadu CM Stalin* Offers '1 MILLION DOLLAR' To Change History? Big Twist In Tamil VS Sanskrit?", Times Now (1/12/25), 8 minute video. 

*Chief Minister M.K. Stalin of the southern state of Tamil Nadu

A million dollars for a translation job. Sounds crazy right? Then again, the job requires the translation of a riddle that has remained unsolved for over a century now. Tamil Nadu is all set to once again become the epicentre of a politico-cultural battle. The Tamil vs Sanskrit debate rages on for Indian politicians, and an archaeological site in Keeladi and the Indus Valley Civilisation are at the centre of the drama. Confused? Watch the video to find out more.

If Asko or other Dravidian proponent for the Indus Valley script wins the million dollar Stalin prize in part because of what I have proposed in this Language Log post, I do not expect to receive one thin rupee.  I've thrown my hat into the ring only because I want to help solve a quintessential intellectual puzzle.  For me, this contest has absolutely nothing to do with nationalism or politics.  It's purely a matter of science.

 

Selected readings

  • "Toward the decipherment of Harappan" (2/14/22) — describes the application of advanced machine learning and AI, which were not available to early decipherers of the IV script, although some of them did make use of computers in various ways
  • "Conditional entropy and the Indus Script" (4/26/08) — consideration of arguments / papers for and against the proposition that the Indus Script is a writing system
  • "From the American Association for the Advancement (?) of Science (?)" (5/25/13) — following up on the previous post; there are at least two other Language Log posts in this series
  • "A million-dollar challenge to crack the script of early Indians", Soutik Biswas, BBC (16 January 2025) — featuring the scholarship of Rajesh PN Rao, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, and Nisha Yadav, a researcher at the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and other investigators who emphasize the challenges in the decipherment of the script and the patterns of occurrences of a certain limited number of the signs in the script, plus their resemblance to south Indian graffiti marks.

[h.t. rit malors; thanks to Miriam Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble]



14 Comments »

  1. Yves Rehbein said,

    March 7, 2025 @ 7:56 am

    Suffice to say I doubt that a neural network is able to carry out detailed graphemic analysis, but least it would be neutral.

    I have watched Steve Bonta's three hour presentation on Rajesh Rao's Youtube (Yajna Devam), and looked at the unfinished book. One skeptic comment under the video points out:

    "It seems to me that if we are comparing what we presume to be names which are composed of a few short sounds with names and name-endings that we find in a large body of literature, then we would expect to get a certain number of hits by chance alone." (@extremaz9908)

    Although this rings true and this is probably the reason why most scholars consider it an exercise in futility, that is not all Bonta contributes to the field. He looks at patterned inscriptions to deduce a rough syntax with an eye on repeated sequences, following simple semiological analysis of logographs to apply the rhebus principle, to show that these signs can be read in different contexts as names we know from the Vedas. https://www.youtube.com/live/rOZ21f3DKs4?si=PNwYD04MIPIJWnnD

    It is remarkable that some of his readings resemble the near eastern tradition. Most remarkable for some LLOG readers who already are familiar with Sumerian DINGIR https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=41538#comment-1559615 might be the "wheel" which he reads logographically DEVA, but he does unfortunately not explain in detail how he arrived at this.

    I got interested in this topic recently when I researched (your mileage may vary) eye-beads and checked out Mark Kenoyer who worked extensively on beads in the IVC showing trade connections to Mesopotamia, though no eye-beads as far as I can tell. His Felicitation volume includes articles about the IVS by Rao and Mahadevan & Bhaskar, and one about the pervasive unicorn by Asko Parpola, much recommended: Walking with the Unicorn : Social Organization and Material Culture in Ancient South Asia : Jonathha Mark Kenoyer Felicitation Volume. 2018.

  2. Victor Mair said,

    March 7, 2025 @ 8:43 am

    Fantastic points, Yves! The information you provide supports the southern connection to / from the Middle East that I adumbrated in the o.p. and will be augmenting strongly this weekend if I find the time.

    For the moment, let me just note that there's a southern unicorn, which is a real unicorn and is intimately associated with the Indus Valley civilization (see here — relatively long inscription [8 symbols] at the top of this seal), and a northern Eurasiatic "unicorn" (not really, that's a widespread misnomer), for which see my hint in the explication of the name "Kirinputra" in the second paragraph of this comment.

    P.S.: eye-beads (and other types of beads) will play a huge role in our forthcoming investigations of pre-Christian Afro-Eurasian interactions.

  3. Martin Schwartz said,

    March 7, 2025 @ 4:55 pm

    As to Victor Mair's preface, , I was a bit puzzled by "linkages between Indo-Aryan/Iranian and Vedic/Avestan culture".
    Specialists in Indo-Iranian (in which I here include Nuristani
    languages) use "indo-Aryan" for the Indo-European languages/cultures of India-Pakistan-Bangla Desh whose oldest textual representative is Vedic, and "Iranian" for the languages/cultures of greater Iran (beginning in Central Asia
    and cotinuing into the Iranian Plateau) whose oldest textual representative is the (earlier portion) of the Avesta.The late-attested
    Nuristani languages form a third group related to the foregoing;
    one coud call all three "Aryan" were that not a confusing and racially-tinged term in popular usage. I avoid mention of
    St. Zoller's controversial claim of traces of a centum language
    in the oral epic liturature of an area in Bihar. OK, to the matter at hand. Suffice it to say that, having slogged thru the video presentations of .Yajnadevanam and Bonta, I'm unconvinced
    by both. Were I a Stalin, my money would be more on Parpola's
    view, by comparison. Now, I would name (humorously) the (quasi)-))phylacteried figure King Dravid; he is (following Victor Mair) associated with tephillin (I use ph for the spirnatic allophone of p),as conventionally King David is with the Tehillim. i.e. thePsalms. Note that -in is the Aramaic equivalent of Heb. -im.
    In "fact" there are Psalms which may be read (not by me) to
    allude to the land of Dravid: 'Give thanks (hodū) to the Lord'
    taken with hoddū (Heb. 'India') as 'India is the Lord's'.
    Martin Schwartz

  4. Victor Mair said,

    March 7, 2025 @ 8:04 pm

    "The Nūristāni languages belong to the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family."

    –Britannica

    https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nuristani

  5. Martin Schwartz said,

    March 8, 2025 @ 1:46 am

    @ Victor Mair: ?????*^&!%??? NO, Victor, whatever the Britannica article you believe is authoritative says (I did read it),
    one should NOT say that Nuristani is Indo-Aryan. I donr know if
    the Britannica article you linked is revised by an ignorant bozo
    or by an AI Chatbot (which is there touted), but the Britannica article I read online s.v Nuristani (Languages) says rightly that
    Morgenstierne proved that Nuristani is a separate group from both
    Indo-Aryan and Iranian. Have a look at Wikipedia, which for a change has it right; Nuristani is a third group. Better yet,read the excellent detailed article on Nuristaniin Encyclopaedia Iranica.
    Also see at least Almut Degener's abstract for her article on topic
    in Sims-Williams (ed.), Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples.
    In the interest of full disclosure, I confess to having independently done research on the topic myself ; see e.g. my "Viiamburas and Kafirs" in BAI.
    Martin (Schwartz)

  6. Philip Taylor said,

    March 8, 2025 @ 4:44 am

    The Micropædia of the 15th "real" (physical) edition of Enc. Brit. (1987) says much the same, Martin, so I don't think that either "an ignorant bozo" or "an AI chatbot" can be blamed — perhaps nothing more (!) than an error of scholarship. See https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/fep1qdpsk5ozlbtir1xx7/Nuristani.pdf?rlkey=8q7ac19xfoks6wwlkg92sif5d&dl=0 for scanned image.

  7. Nelson Goering said,

    March 8, 2025 @ 5:11 am

    For Nuristani, which is rather famously often argued to be a third branch of Indo-Iranian, there are better sources than a Britannica article. In his recent overview of the family, for example, Martin Kümmel has a judicious evaluation:

    "The so-called Nuristani languages are spoken just between Eastern Iranian and NW Indo-Aryan in the Hindukush region. They are only attested in modern times and represent a group of transitional languages between Indo-Aryan and Iranian, rather difficult to classify due to the lack of ancient data. In some features, they agree with Iranian, in others with Indo-Aryan, but they clearly differ from both since early times…

    The most recent discussion is by Werba 2016, who argued that Nuristanic forms a subgroup with Indo-Aryan; but even if he was right to stress that similarities to Iranian do not require a common stage, the differences from Indo-Aryan are strong enough that for all practical purposes, Nuristanic has to be treated as an independent third branch (see Figure 14.1). It did not participate in most early innovations of either Iranian or Indo-Aryan."

    The full discussion gives concrete examples: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indoeuropean-language-family/indoiranian/C01D66B2DA24680E0808EFEC10E389C9

  8. Martin Schwartz said,

    March 8, 2025 @ 7:22 am

    @Nelson Goering–YES, and many thanks. I did not know
    Kümmel's excellent article.
    Martin Schwartz

  9. katarina said,

    March 8, 2025 @ 1:14 pm

    Re. Nuristani, there was no need for the learned Professor Schwartz to lose his temper and call the author of the Britannica, and by inference his colleague Professor Mair, "an ignorant bozo". An inaccuracy can be pointed out calmly and with civility.

  10. Martin Schwartz said,

    March 8, 2025 @ 7:27 pm

    @katarina: Thie INFERENCE is wholly yours; I meant NO such
    IMPLICATION. Professor Mair knows well that I can be critical about the use of sources. Is your intention "calmly and with civility" to stir up trouble between colleagues, and get patted on the head for it?
    Martin Schwartz

  11. David Marjanović said,

    March 9, 2025 @ 8:50 am

    I highly recommend this entire discussion about the Indus Script-Or-Is-It-Quite-Actually.

    McAlpin continued to write high-level papers that kept alive and advanced his Elamo-Dravidian (Zagrosian) hypothesis till near the time of his passing in 2023.

    Did he ever reply to this paper (PDF, academia.edu)? In the author's words: "I have tried to show that it is not difficult to put forward equally 'strong' competing theories that relate it to almost any other family in Eurasia. I cannot say that this demonstration invalidates McAlpin’s hypothesis, or 'disproves' it – it just shows that a close “Elamo-Dravidian” relationship isn’t the most probable reason for observed similarities between Elamite and Dravidian, not for now, at least."

  12. Victor Mair said,

    March 9, 2025 @ 9:22 am

    @David Marjanović

    "I have tried to show that it is not difficult to put forward equally 'strong' competing theories that relate it to almost any other family in Eurasia."

    That's a rather simplistic thing to say on an academic forum.

  13. David Marjanović said,

    March 9, 2025 @ 5:18 pm

    Well, that's a good summary of what his paper is about, so I can't fault George Starostin for summarizing his own paper in this way. I don't understand why you'd disagree – the paper is in open access at both links.

  14. Nelson Goering said,

    March 10, 2025 @ 2:28 am

    Methodologically, that's quite a sound point to make (though I haven't read the piece itself, so I can't judge whether it actually applies in this case). A good way to test any methodology is to see if it produces false positives. Or if you prefer your in Latin, "qui nimium probat, nihil probat", a phrase which applies quite literally to cases of linguistic affiliation.

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