What were the Language and Script used by the Harappan Civilization?

The language or languages of the Harappans is still unknown, and must remain so until the Harappan script is delipped hered. Broadly, there would appear to be two main contestants as to the nature of the language: that it belonged – however improbably – to the Indo-European or even Indo-Aryan family; or that it belonged to the Dravidian family.

In spite of the careful analysis of the corpus of Harappan inscriptions, now in the region of 3000, the task of decipherment remains problematic and shortness of the inscriptions, nearly all on seals or amulet tablets, renders it difficult to interpret. Perhaps because of this challenge the associated problems have attracted a whole series of scholars to attempt their solution.

Since no two attempts have so far been in agreement and as their number increases, only one thing becomes more certain: the probability of any one being correct is correspondingly reduced. Several arduous attempts to read the inscriptions have been made by groups of scholars, using a variety of techniques, including computers.

Parpola and his Scandinavian colleague Koskeniemi have produced an impressive concordance of the known inscriptions, and proceeded with a hypothesis that the language was an ancestral language of the Dravidian family and that the script relied upon homophones. This has been the most frequently and strongly supported hypothesis since its adoption by Marshall (1931) and Hunter (1934).

A group of Soviet scholars have also concluded that the language is closer to Dravidian than to any other known languages, and an Indian scholar, Mahadevan, has also published an impressive computer concordance. There appear some areas of agreement between all these attempts, both in accepting the Dravidian hypothesis and in reconstructing from the inscriptions elements of an astronomical system.

The arguments for it are several; first, a careful analysis has shown ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’ that Eli mite and the Dravidian language family are ‘truly’ cognate. This would suggest that at some time in the past they were in closer geographical proximity than the modern distribution of Dravidian indicates. Next, in spite of doubts regarding its significance, the fact remains that a Dravidian language, Brahui, is still spoken by nomadic pastoralists in the Balluchi hills.

A rather different approach is to be found in a recent attempt to read the contents of the inscriptions in terms of analogies between Harappan and Sumerian signs or groups of signs. This does not lead us to the language of the inscriptions, but it may lead us to the meaning of some of them. S. R. Rao has also produced quite a different attempt to read the script as containing a pre Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-European family, and as clearly ancestral not only to the later Indian Brahmi script, but also to the early Semitic alphabet. This attempt has so far not been supported by other scholors.

Amongst the greatest of the unresolved mysteries that face humankind in the next millennium is one from the past – why can’t we read what the people of the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization wrote? Along with the Etruscan, a pre-Roman language, it is one of the last undeciphered scripts in the world. The solver of this puzzle, say historians, is not only assured of world fame, but will open the key to a whole range of information on the subject. Not that there have been no efforts to crack the script.

At least 100 experts have tried their hands but not a single interpretation of this predominantly pictographic script has found universal acceptance. Most archeologists agree that our knowledge of the first of the Indie civilizations is extremely limited, mainly because we cannot read its script. Yet this remarkable civilization has given us many indications of a complex system of governance and town-planning. The emergence of this complex network seems impossible without a writing system, and that too a well developed one.

The number of signs estimated by various archaeologists in the Indus script varies too. While G. R. Hunter (1932) estimated 149 signs, A. H. Dani (1963) put the number at 537. Asko Parpola and his Finnish team said there were 396 (1973), Mahadevan 417(1977) and Fairservis 419(1992). This is a problem that has exercised the minds of the experts ever since John Marshall first discovered the remains of this 5000-year-old culture at Mohenjodaro in 1922.

The script was written from right to left like modern Urdu. The numbers of signs indicate that script is not related to any of the contemporary Egyptian, Sumerian or Babylonaian scripts. Some scholars call it the parent of the Brahmi script, but this has not been conclusively proved. This mystery can only be solved when a bilingual inscription including a known language or a long inscription with significant recurrent features is found. All the inscriptions discovered till now are short, with an average of half a dozen letters, the longest has seventeen. It will prove a turning point in the history of India the day this Indus script is deciphered.