It’s a riddle that has confounded students for over a century. And now it carries a good-looking money prize: $1 million for anybody who can decipher the script of the traditional Indus Valley civilization.
Comparatively little is thought in regards to the creators of the script, who constructed a sprawling city system about 5,000 years in the past throughout what’s modern-day India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Excavations at greater than 2,000 websites have unearthed a wealth of artifacts. However till the civilization’s script might be learn, its language, tradition and faith, in addition to the historical past of its rise and fall, will stay shrouded in thriller.
The prize, introduced by M.Ok. Stalin, the chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, is meant to resume efforts to decipher the script. The push, nevertheless, is just not merely about historic scholarship. It’s the newest entrance in a cultural battle over India’s historical previous.
The nation’s ascendant Hindu nationalists argue that the Aryan race, which introduced the Vedic faith of Hinduism to India, represents the unique Indian individuals. The declare is central to the idea of Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu supremacy promoted by the get together of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Mr. Stalin’s get together, and lots of others, maintain a distinct view. They are saying that the Dravidians of southern India are the nation’s indigenous individuals, and that the Aryans of northern India have been invaders from Europe. (In actuality, the excellence between Aryans and Dravidians is itself not clear-cut.)
Deciphering the script, the talk’s partisans consider, may assist settle the query.
In Hindu nationalists’ conception of the previous, the Indus script almost certainly has hyperlinks to Sanskrit, a classical language of India and the one through which the Hindu scriptures have been written.
Within the minds of Mr. Stalin and others, the script almost certainly has Tamil roots. (Tamil, a Dravidian language, is one other classical language of India.) That, in flip, would cement the Dravidian declare to being the unique inhabitants of India.
It’s not for a scarcity of making an attempt that the script has remained undeciphered. Archaeologists, expertise specialists and linguists the world over have been endeavoring to unlock the script for years, Mr. Stalin stated whereas announcing the $1 million prize.
Asko Parpola, a Finnish Indologist who has studied the Indus script since 1964, stated that deciphering it may put the Indus Valley civilization within the realm of historical past slightly than prehistory, giving new perspective to India’s cultural evolution.
However a politically motivated effort, he warned, may resolve the outcomes prematurely and attempt to discover proof to justify them.
The Indus Valley civilization, additionally referred to as the Harappan civilization, is seen by specialists as on a par with the better-known ones of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China.
One of many earliest, it flourished on the banks of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers in the course of the Bronze Age. It had deliberate townships, water administration and drainage methods, enormous fortified partitions and beautiful pottery and terra cotta artistry.
For the reason that Archaeological Survey of India introduced the primary findings on the civilization in 1924, round 5,000 inscriptions have been excavated.
They’re engraved in stone or steel, or stamped onto fired clay. The brevity of the inscriptions, together with the absence of a Rosetta Stone-like textual content displaying its symbols in translation, are among the many causes the script has not been deciphered, students say.
Mr. Parpola postulates that the indicators discovered on the clay tablets have been footage that must be learn as full phrases. They may be learn phonetically, for homophones, he argues.
He believes that his analysis gives proof of the script’s Dravidian roots. The fish indicators discovered in lots of inscriptions, he theorizes, have been pictograms that would additionally imply “star” — the Dravidian phrase for fish, “meen,” was a homophone for star.
Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, a researcher who has tried to decipher the script for 10 years, differs with Mr. Parpola on the fish speculation.
She argues that the fish indicators have been used to suggest classes of shiny commodities like gems and polished copper and bronze objects. Calling the Indus script a “mercantile script,” Ms. Mukhopadhyay stated that examples through which fish indicators have been used consecutively represented the names of associated commodities, and that the excavated clay tablets have been tax stamps.
The script is supposed to be learn as symbols, not phonetically, Ms. Mukhopadhyay stated. “To point out ivory, for instance, they merely used a tusk-like signal,” she stated.
Mr. Parpola, who’s engaged on the sixth quantity of “Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions,” a database of all obtainable materials tradition on the Indus civilization, stated he had acquired loads of mail through the years from fans and researchers claiming to have cracked the script or discovered new inscriptions.
Aziz Kingrani, an instructional in Pakistan, shared on social media one such little bit of correspondence. Mr. Parpola congratulated Mr. Kingrani on a e-book he had written, however expressed remorse that his findings had not considerably superior the deciphering of the script.
“Please do carry on looking out,” Mr. Parpola wrote.
