We’ve discussed the Indus/Harappan script before (2009, 2017); I’m happy to report that it can now provide you with big bucks. Soutik Biswas for BBC News:
Every week, Rajesh PN Rao, a computer scientist, gets emails from people claiming they’ve cracked an ancient script that has stumped scholars for generations. These self-proclaimed codebreakers – ranging from engineers and IT workers to retirees and tax officers – are mostly from India or of Indian origin living abroad. All of them are convinced they’ve deciphered the script of the Indus Valley Civilisation, a blend of signs and symbols. “They claim they’ve solved it and that the ‘case is closed’,” says Mr Rao, Hwang Endowed Professor at the University of Washington and author of peer-reviewed studies on the Indus script.
Adding fuel to the race, MK Stalin, the chief minister of southern India’s Tamil Nadu state, recently upped the stakes, announcing a $1m prize for anyone who can crack the code.
[There follows a long account of the script and attempts at decipherment.]
Back in India, it is not entirely clear why Mr Stalin of Tamil Nadu announced a reward for deciphering the script. His announcement followed a new study linking Indus Valley signs to graffiti found in his state. K Rajan and R Sivananthan analysed over 14,000 graffiti-bearing pottery fragments from 140 excavated sites in Tamil Nadu, which included more than 2,000 signs. Many of these signs closely resemble those in the Indus script, with 60% of the signs matching, and over 90% of south Indian graffiti marks having “parallels” with those from the Indus civilisation, the researchers claim. This “suggests a kind of cultural contact” between the Indus Valley and south India, Mr Rajan and Mr Sivananthan say.
Many believe Mr Stalin’s move to announce an award positions him as a staunch champion of Tamil heritage and culture, countering Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules in Delhi. But researchers are confident that there will be no claimants for Mr Stalin’s prize soon. Scholars have compiled complete, updated databases of all known inscribed artefacts – crucial for decipherment. “But what did the Indus people write? I wish we knew,” says Ms Yadav.
We all wish we knew… (Thanks, Bathrobe!)
I for one appreciate the BBC’s fussy old stylebook resulting in the honorific “Mr Stalin.”
Me too!
Stalin’s “return to power” happened just over 3 years ago, and, as a researcher with a genealogy background, I couldn’t resist investigating the origins of his name. His politician dad named him so in the days following the death of the Greatest Linguist of All Times. But his DMK party isn’t particularly red; more like regular regional-nationalistic…
Of course the news that the latest Stalin ALSO makes forays into linguistics is uncanny…
An interesting question is what threshold must be crossed to consider the code “cracked”. Sometimes a scholar advances a tentative interpretation that not all peers agree with. In other cases, the relationships of a few characters are considered convincing, while the majority of a script remains unsolved.
Harappan may be different since my understanding is these situations arise in settings where there are a limited number of examples, but either some obvious script relationships (Linear A) or candidate language groups (scripts in Iberia). I believe Harappan has a large corpus, but no clear links to other scripts, and a millennia-long separation from the first documentation of languages considered potential descendants. (Unless a link to a Mesopotamian language were advanced, something that the Tamil authorities are unlikely to appreciate.)
There may be political incentives here for using a low threshold, so Stalin can claim victory.
Does anybody have a photo of any of those? There aren’t any in the article.
Some photos are in the galleries of the archaeological site pages on the website of Tamil Nadu Archaeology Dept.
Like this one:
https://www.tnarch.gov.in/keeladi
Harappan has a large corpus, but there are no long inscriptions. The longest inscription is only thirty-four characters, and I think the vast majority—mostly found on seals—are less than ten. This suggests that, if the script does encode a language, the cultural role of written texts was different from in any other known literate culture. The overwhelming preponderance of short character sequences on seals suggests that much of the corpus may consist of proper names; so even if the script does represent a language, there may be very little semantic content in the extant corpus. It could be challenging to identify a four-thousand-year-old language with an extant modern family using using little more than phonotactic data, meaning that even if we knew the sound correspondences of the various symbols, characterizing the underlying language as, say, Dravidian might still be impossible. And of course there is the added challenge that the script may not encode a language from a known family at all. With Linear A, we think we know approximately how to pronounce many of the signs, thanks to our knowledge of how Linear B encodes Mycenean Greek; however, whatever language or languages the existing Linear A inscriptions represent seem completely foreign to our experience.
I’m trying to understand the timeline. The Keeladi page Dmitry linked says that recent findings there have pushed the dates of the Tamil-Brahmi script back to 600 bce. Relevant only if the script was used for a Dravidian language.
The Harappan/Indus script wiki says that use peaked in the Middle Harappan, through about 1900 bce. And going back to the Keeladi site, the new Harappan-related graffiti is from “the Iron Age”. If Dravidian is relevant, the prospect of new findings to fill gaps seems reasonably good.
Anyone in on a Language Hat compact to share the $1 million when we crack the code right here in this thread? Though I’m worried that Dmitry, Trond and David M. will form a smaller, more lucrative alliance.
From the wiki on “lipi” or early scripts in South Asia:
> “Support for this idea of pre-Ashoka development [of writing scripts] has been given very recently by the discovery of sherds at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, inscribed with small numbers of characters which seem to be Brahmi. These sherds have been dated, by both carbon 14 and thermo-luminescence dating, to pre-Ashokan times, perhaps as much as two centuries before Ashoka”.[37]
The “very recent findings” seem to be those mentioned in Solomon, Indian Epigraphy, from 1998. The introduction of Solomon’s book is available at that link, an offers a decent survey of what was known or believed 25 years ago.
* – the Semitic origin is also disputed, with “some scholars favoring the idea of an indigenous origin”.
The TNarch site was painfully slow for me and I only went there after finding no publications, not even preprints, on the supposed graffiti. It has multiple pages listing graffiti on potsherds, one can use the site search. The first couple of pages I opened were even more recent, so I kind of felt satisfied with 2.5K years old ones and didn’t search any further. Perhaps there are some older ones on the same site… although in India, speculative and unrealistically ancient dates are too popular, arrgh.
I’d be more satisfied with a publication!
My working hypothesis on reading this was that a. the supposed similarities are imaginary, and b. Harappan = Dravidian = Tamil = the ancientestestest mother of all languages and civilizations, QED. On further investigation, I have no reason to believe otherwise.
The Keeladi/Keezhadi site is amazing. I am assuming that the great majority of archaeologists working there are good and sensible, and should not be tainted by the fantasies of a few or by the pressures of the nationalists (whether Tamil or Hindutva; see WP link above.) That said:
A photo on Reddit, from the local museum perhaps? That in itself is unconvincing, even though the pottery marks are presumably cherry-picked to illustrate these supposed similarities. Indeed, “Speaking to TNM, T Udhayachandran, Commissioner of TN Archeological Department, says, ‘It’s an initial finding. Researchers note there is a gap between the Indus script and Tamil Brahmi script and this graffiti could fill that gap. We have to position this graffiti marks in that gap. We found 1000 different marks. We have chosen a few that distinctly relate to the Indus. Research is going on.’”
I have not seen anywhere a mention or an image of anything but isolated signs on the pots. The Harappan signs have been suspected to be a script because they show repeating sequences of symbols. Until I see same on the pots, I assume that there are none, and no computer or award is going to extract a writing system out of them.
This is a survey (pre-Keeladi) of pot markings from elewhere in South India. For example, The markings in fig. 10 (from the Deccan) suggest to my eye the Keeladi marks more than than the Harappan ones do.
@Y: Actually, there seems to be a lot of disagreement about whether the Harappan symbols show enough repeats for it to encode speech. I’ve seen plausible analyses both ways.
Right, but there are at least enough to make it open to argument.
Thanks; a direct link to the picture with the inscribed shards is here. The glyphs are few and simple; they could be anything, I’m afraid.
Some of those sherds do show sequences of signs. Still, nothing suggests Harappan to me.
The article Y linked to notes that the marks on a pot often were made by different hands and that the pots were rotated between marks, suggesting that the pots were put down and picked up by a different person, each incising a mark. This suggests that it was an essential part of the funeral ritual. There’s some indication of correlation between type of mark and type of burial, so perhaps symbols for certain gods or cults, but the contextual information for many finds is too sparse to say anything certain.