Indus script is in news

Indus script is in news

• discovery of the Indus Civilisation in 1924 and SCRIPT

Since the announcement of the discovery of the Indus Civilisation in 1924, 

the script has 

remained one of history’s greatest 

• uncracked codes, 
• inspiring generations of linguists, 
• archaeologists, 
• computer scientists and 
• enthusiastic amateurs.

• $1 million prize for decoding the script

Then in January 2025, when Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin announced the $1 million prize for decoding the script, the interest got renewed. 

similarities between signs on Indus artefacts 

The announcement followed a study by the state’s Archaeology Department that claimed similarities between signs on Indus artefacts and graffiti marks recently unearthed at archaeological sites in Tamil Nadu, bringing the century-old puzzle back into academic and political debates.

•computational methods to understand the corpus of symbols 

 Long before AI became the loaded buzzword that it is today, Rao

had in the early 2000s turned to computational methods to understand the corpus of symbols that would throw light on “who we are as Indians, and who our ancestors were”.

• A school-time fascination / आकर्षण with the Indus Civilization stayed with him even as he pursued his undergraduate study in engineering in the US and went on to do his doctorate in computer science from the University of Rochester.

Do You Know:

• The Indus Civilisation,

 which reached its zenith between 2600 and 1900 BCE, sprawled over more than 800,000 sq km in what is today Pakistan and parts of northwestern India. 

It was the world’s most sophisticated urban culture at the time, with an elaborate system of 

• trade, 
• taxation, 
• drainage.

• The plethora of inscriptions on seals and terracotta tablets 

found at Indus sites contain a variety of symbols – human and animal motifs / PICTURE , and what scholars have identified as parts of a forgotten script. 

However, there is no agreement on the number of symbols in the supposed script.

• Archaeologist S R Rao

 who pioneered the deciphering effort, postulated in 1982 that the script contained 62 signs. 

This was refuted /  खंडन करना by the Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola,

 one of the most authoritative voices on the subject – he said there were 425 signs (Deciphering the Indus Script (1994)). 

Then, in 2016, archaeologist and epigrapher Bryan K Wells suggested the presence of 676 signs.

• Indus “script” represented any language

From the early 2000s onward, questions have been raised on whether the so-called Indus “script” represented any language at all.

 This hypothesis was based mainly on the fact that all the Indus inscriptions are very short –

•  with only about five characters on average – with the 
• 
  
• longest having only 26 characters.

• In a paper published in 2004, 

historian Steve Farmer, computer linguist Richard Sproat, and Indologist Michael Witzel claimed that the Indus “script” did not constitute a language-based writing system, but mainly comprised nonlinguistic symbols of political and religious significance.

• To decipher a script, 

the following subproblems have to be solved in order, Italian philologist Fabio Tamburini wrote in 2023 (Decipherment of Lost Ancient Scripts as Combinatorial Optimisation using Coupled Simulated Annealing).

– Deciding if a set of symbols actually represent a writing system;
– Devising appropriate procedures to isolate or segment the stream of symbols into a sequence of single signs;
–Reducing the set of signs to the minimal set for the writing system forming (its alphabet, syllabery, or inventory of signs) by identifying all allographs (the same sign written in a variant form, for example a printed ‘a’ and a cursive ‘a’);
–Assigning to each symbol their specified value, whether phonetic or otherwise;
–Trying to match these values to a specific language.

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