Indus script

01Signs on seals and pots

Most of what survives is short. A square steatite seal carries a bull, an elephant or a seated figure, and above it a line of five or six signs. Scholars count roughly four hundred distinct signs, far too many for an alphabet and too few for a script of whole-word pictures. The lines usually run from right to left; you can tell because signs crowd together at the left edge where the carver ran out of room. Thousands of inscribed objects have been found, from the Makran coast to Haryana and Gujarat.

02The Dholavira signboard

At Dholavira in Kachchh, the ASI team under R. S. Bisht found ten large signs that had once been set in a wooden board near the city’s northern gate. Each sign is cut from white gypsum and is close to forty centimetres tall. It is the largest Indus inscription known, and it was meant to be read from a distance by anyone entering the city. What it announced, the name of the city, a ruler or a deity, nobody can say.

03A script still unread

Iravatham Mahadevan published a concordance of the texts for the ASI in 1977, and Asko Parpola and others built the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions. Many decipherments have been announced, reading the signs as early Sanskrit, as early Dravidian or as something else. None has won general acceptance, because the texts are short and there is no bilingual inscription, the kind of key that opened Brahmi and Egyptian. Some scholars ask whether Brahmi itself owes anything to these signs; the question is open.

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