3 days ago
ASI to host three-day international conclave in August on decoding Indus Valley script
The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) will host a three-day international brainstorming conference in August on ways to decipher the Indus Valley script.
Invitations to the international conclave on 'Decipherment of the Indus Script: Current Status and the Way Forward', to be held from August 20 to 22 at the Pt. Deendayal Upadhyay Institute of Archaeology, Greater Noida, have been sent out to experts working on the Harappan civilisation and culture both in India and abroad.
EDITORIAL | Script reading: On deciphering the script of the Indus Valley Civilisation
Tamil Nadu CM's offer
The ASI move comes months after Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin announced a $1 million prize for experts or organisations that succeed in deciphering the scripts of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Sources in the ASI told The Hindu said there are also plans to announce a fellowship for research scholars who are interested in working dedicatedly towards deciphering the Indus script.
The sources said the seminar will take place mainly through presentations, both offline and online. Thematic sessions shall be designed based on the current stage of research in this field. Discussions shall follow presentations at the end of each session.
It is expected that the papers will be submitted prior to the date of the seminar. Anticipated results will include, but not be restricted to, a better understanding and documentation of the current state of research in this field, and the potential for further research.
'The proceedings of the seminar is anticipated to highlight the scope and quantum of current and future research in the field,' a senior ASI functionary said.
The Indus Valley Civilisation was discovered more than a 100 years ago in 1921 at Harappa, and was formally announced to the world in 1924 by John Marshall, the then Director-General of the ASI.
According to ASI records, the first official report on excavations at Mohenjo-daro, in 1931 had a section on the 'Indus Script'. It also listed different symbols and their variants.
Also Read | Tamil Nadu CM Stalin announces $1 million prize for deciphering Indus Valley script
A riddle since
This script has attracted and fascinated a number of archaeologists, epigraphists, scientists, and many others who have made sincere attempts to solve its riddles, if not read it. Scholars have propounded several hypotheses about the nature and contents of this script.
Most examples of this script have been found on Harappan seals and their impressions. Other objects that preserved this script are metal and terracotta tablets, copper objects, pottery, etc.
The corpus of documented characters of the script suggests that they are predominantly pictorial. A rough estimation of the principal characters puts them at over 400. This has led some researchers to hypothesise that the Indus script is primarily 'logo-syllabic', the ASI official said.
Also Read | When John Marshall revealed the Indus Valley civilisation to the world
Major challenges
The major limitations in deciphering the script are the absence of bilingual texts and the relatively short nature of recorded specimens.
Computational linguistic analysis has added a new dimension to the study and decipherment of the Indus script.
According to Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, who has been working on the Harappan script for more than a decade now and is one of the invitees to the conference, most of the Indus script signs were language-agnostic – meaning symbols that could be understood by people from different parts of the Indus civilisation. The script was largely used to record commercial administration such as taxation and licensing-related information, on seals and tablets.
Ms. Mukhopadhyay says that her research indicates that though ancestral Dravidian languages were spoken by a significant population of the Indus civilisation, the one million square km area of the ancient civilisation must have had other groups of languages. In some of the Indus script signs, ancient Dravidian symbolism is found.
She maintains that 'Sanskrit was most likely not the language that influenced the Indus script. However, the symbolism of Indus civilisation has certainly influenced Vedic texts and culture, and has remained alive in various forms across multiple languages and cultures across the Indian subcontinent.'
However, according to archaeologist Ravi Korisettar, all claims till now are hypothetical as the symbols are not complete. 'So far, in the Indus Valley site, we haven't been able to find any bilingual records running into at least a couple of sentences. Hence, serious archaeologists refrain from making any claims on deciphering the script,' he said.
