THE HARAPPAN SCRIPT

The Harappans, script is still a mystery, because it is still undeciphered. So far the other forgotten scripts like those of ancient Egypt could be deciphered because scholars found some inscriptions written in the forgotten script followed by some of its forms in a known script. 

We have not discovered any bilingual inscription in Harappa so far. Moreover, the inscriptions discovered so far are short, usually engraved on seals. 

But they used ideograms and wrote from right to left. However, scholars are still struggling to unveil the mystery of the script. 

The script did not change all through the life of the Harappan Civilization. All the other ancient scripts have showed distinct changes over a period of time. This indicates that the Harappan script was not in common use. 

Perhaps a very small section of privileged scribes had a monopoly over the written word. About what they learnt & how they learnt, we have no answers. Whether they had some kind of school for teaching as was the case in contemporary Mesopotamia is not known to us.

Earliest specimen of script found in 1853 & complete script discovered in 1923 . Nearly 4000 specimens- unlike Egypt & Mesopotamia did not write long inscription. Seals may have used to identify private property. Script is not alphabetical but mainly pictographic - no connection with any script of west Asia. The origins of this writing system is not clear and till date has not been deciphered due to the lack of a bilingual text and also because the inscriptions are very short, usually only of about five discrete symbols (Parpola, 1979)

Though now it is generally agreed that writing was from right to left and is most commonly found on the intaglio seals, made of carved and fired steatite, steatite, clay or faience tablets and numerous incised tools and ornaments and often on pottery before or after firing, stamped on pottery, terra-cotta cakes or terracotta cones (Joshi & Parpola, 1987).

These writings or symbols regardless of its understanding by the modern scholars do represent a shared belief and ideology that was distributed over an extremely large area which was undoubtedly a key factor in the integration of the urban and rural populations spread over varied ecological settings.

The recent study unravels the formulaic phrase-structures maintained by the majority of the inscriptions, where signs identified as phrase-final signs typically occur at the terminal positions of the semantic phrases.

The study identifies certain Indus signs as numerical and metrological signs, which frequently collocate with specific lexemes, and clearly quantifying them in certain ways.

The major factors incommoding decipherment are: absence of bilingual texts; extreme brevity of the inscriptions; ignorance about the languages) encoded by Indus script ; & poor chronological control in the existing Indus script corpora (Wells, 2011).

Absence of inscriptions, which contained the same text in different scripts and languages. Nor is there any closely similar known script of the same origin which could give clues to the sound values of the Indus signs. 

The meagre points of scholarly consensus can possibly be summarized as: right-to-left direction of the majority of the inscriptions, numerical nature of certain stroke-like signs; functional homogeneity of certain terminal signs, and some generally adopted techniques of segmenting the inscriptions into initial, medial and terminal clusters. 

Huge controversies surround almost every aspect of Indus script. For example, certain scholars consider the script as logo-syllabic (Parpola, 1994; Hunter, 1934; Wells, 2015). Some others take it as logographic (Koskenniemi & Parpola, 1982; Mahadevan,2014), whereas some even deny that it encoded “speech” at all (Farmer et al. 2004).

Phonetic & semantic interpretations of individual Indus signs also vary widely. For example, Mahadevan took most frequent sign of Indus script, as a Dravidian “pronominal masculine singular suffix”. 

According to Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, the semantic comprehension of Indus inscriptions needs to build on a thorough understanding of their internal structure & archeological contexts.

Often multiple Indus objects contain identical inscriptions .The study identifies the seals, sealings, and tablets of IVC as “formalized data-carriers” based on the following evidence:

(i) miniature size & portable nature of the seals and tablets; (ii) fixed positioning maintained between inscriptions & their iconography ; (iii) fixed & formulaic structures used in the sign-sequences of the inscriptions ; (iv) enormously expensive, regulated & painstaking processes used for manufacturing the durable and intricately made seals and tablets; & finally (v) standardized usage of identical & near-identical inscriptions across distant Indus locations.

This study further claims that, the domain of usage of these formalized data-carriers was mainly some commercial activities and related administrative activities of IVC in which metrology and standardization played crucial roles.

The archeological evidence that leads to this claim are: (i) the inscribed seals and tablets were almost always found concentrated near craft areas, such as bead and shell workshops, or near fortified city gates where traded goods were supposedly measured & taxed; (ii) the seals were quite often found along with standardized weights of IVC; (iii) seal impressions were found in clay-tags attached to packed merchandises; (iv) inscribed objects were rarely found in religious contexts such as in grave goods; & (v) they were often discarded as trash after use (Kenoyer, 2010; Parpola, 1994).

The standardized use of these painstakingly made artifacts strongly indicate that their formulaic inscriptions cannot be just random scribbles or decorative designs. They must have conveyed complete, meaningful messages of great importance to the people of IVC.

The ‘split-sequences’ (Mahadevan,1977), where possibly due to space-constraints faced by scribes, a continuous sign-sequence was sometimes split between more than one inscription-lines carved on the same sides of the artifacts. In Indus inscriptions, post-connectives must have functioned as principal clauses as they occur very frequently as independent inscription-lines. 

Often in logographic writing systems, the grapheme chosen for a logogram resembles the real world objects which symbolize the semantic concept of the logogram. Since many Indus signs are quite pictorial in nature ,it might be possible to trace some signs back to the concepts/objects they symbolized. 

Since the archeological evidence strongly suggests that Indus script was used in some highly standardized socio-economic activity of ancient Indus life, one should explore the functionality of the sign-classes & investigate whether most of the graphemes used for the logograms of a functional sign-class are related to some particular socio-economic symbolic dealing.

Analyzing the shortness of the inscriptions, the rigid positional preferences maintained by the signs & the co-occurrence of restriction patterns demonstrated by certain classes of Indus signs. Such patterns can never be phonological co-occurrence restrictions. 

Phonological co-occurrence restrictions refers to two or more sound units that cannot be pronounced together.  According to Bahata Mukhopadhyay, ‘a very compelling, nearly unassailable proof of the logographic nature of Indus inscriptions comes from the co-occurrence restriction patterns maintained within them.’

The inscribed seals & tablets were used in some administrative operation that controlled the commercial transactions prevalent in the trade-savvy settlements. These inscriptions can be compared to the messages found on stamps, coupons, tokens & currency coins of modern times, where we expect formulaic texts that encode certain type of information in some pre-defined ways, rather than freely composed narrative.

A common perception among some scholars is that the Indus script is logo-syllabic, where one symbol can be used as a word sign at one time and as a syllable-sign at another. This method, where a word-symbol also gets sometimes used only for its sound value, is called the rebus principle.

For example, you can combine the pictures of a honey bee and a leaf to signify the word “belief” (bee+leaf). According to Ms. Mukhopadhyay, though many ancient scripts use rebus methods to generate new words, the inscriptions found on the Indus seals and tablets have not used rebus as the mechanism to convey meaning.

It was presumed that the seals & tablets had short Indus texts because they were meant for trade & commerce. However, a 3-metre long inscription on wood inlaid with stone crystals was found at Dholavira in Gujarat. It was also presumed that Indus inscriptions would not be available in stone. Again, in Dholavira, a large slab with three big Indus signs was found recently.

The Archaeological Survey of India's website says the Dholavira site “enjoys the unique distinction of yielding an inscription made up of ten large-sized signs of the Indus script and, not less in importance, is the other find of a large slab engraved with three large signs. These finds show that the Indus script was used in monumental inscriptions too.