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.
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,
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.
[Thanks to Miriam Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble]