Indus script

The corpus

Some four to five thousand inscribed objects are known, chiefly seals and sealings, together with pottery graffiti, copper tablets and a small number of larger inscriptions. The signs number in the hundreds — estimates vary with how variants are counted, most falling between four and six hundred.

The inscriptions are extremely short. The average is around five signs; the longest on a single surface is seventeen, and the largest known inscription, the Dholavira signboard, is ten. There is no bilingual text, no long document, and nothing that can be identified as literature, law or accounts at length.

Why it resists

Three obstacles compound each other. There is no bilingual inscription of the kind that unlocked Egyptian and cuneiform. The texts are too short to permit statistical attack of the usual kind. And the underlying language is unknown — if it is not related to any surviving family, even a correct phonetic reading would produce sounds no one could interpret.

The sign count itself is ambiguous evidence: too many for an alphabet, too few for a purely logographic system, which suggests a logo-syllabic script, but the inference is not secure.

Proposals

Attempts fall into families. Asko Parpola and others have argued for a Dravidian language, using the placement of signs and later Dravidian evidence. Others have proposed Indo-Aryan, which would have consequences for the chronology of Indo-European in the subcontinent. Iravatham Mahadevan produced the standard concordance of the corpus and worked towards a Dravidian reading. Some, notably Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat and Michael Witzel, have argued that the system is not writing at all but a non-linguistic sign system.

None of these is accepted. Claims of decipherment appear regularly and are not sustained.

Consequences

The failure is why the Indus civilization is known through its objects rather than its words. No ruler's name, no deity's name, no self-designation of the people or their cities can be read. Whether they called themselves anything at all that has survived is unknown, and disputes about Indus religion, government and language turn on material evidence precisely because the texts are silent.