In ancient times, migration routes from Central and Western Asia to India passed through the Indus Valley. Here in this valley, man has created one of the greatest civilizations. All the same Indus flows through the territory of present-day Pakistan, and this leaves an imprint of ancient times on the young state. The first urban settlements in the Indus Valley emerged in the same era when similar civilizations were developing on the banks of the Nile and in the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates. The development of cities became possible thanks to the achievements of material culture in the Bronze Age - they made it possible to grow crops in river valleys sufficient to feed an entire growing population. This contributed to the development of trade with overseas countries and the establishment of contacts with distant lands. As a result, each of the three districts has its own special writing system,but in their earliest forms there was a lot in common - they were images of objects common to three civilizations.
Such a drawing letter (pictography) is read differently than our lettering. To understand it, it is necessary that one specific meaning is associated with each picture (pictograph). In the process of simplification, the drawing was reduced to an outline; concepts began to be conveyed in simplified symbols. This is how, in an effort to make symbols understandable to other people, man came to ideographic writing. This process of simplifying writing has gone differently in each of the three civilizations.
Each of them had its own language, and therefore their ideograms were the designation of the words of the corresponding language. This is how simplified drawings began to correlate with the sounds of speech. The next step in the development of writing - a person began to express not only visible objects, but also sounds with signs of writing. Over time, the drawings, in fact, have lost their real visual image and meaning. They were reduced to symbols and became associated with sounds.
Each of the three great civilizations followed its own path in this respect. In Egypt, a hieroglyphic writing system was developed, in Mesopotamia - cuneiform, but the writing of the Indus Valley is still a mystery, which scientists are struggling to solve.
The writing of forgotten civilizations needs to be deciphered. It can be carried out either by establishing the meaning of the symbols (and then we will recognize the words corresponding to them), or by recognizing the sounds of some known language in writing and, finally, by establishing a correspondence between words and sounds.
This method turned out to be possible for deciphering hieroglyphs and cuneiform writing due to the fact that inscriptions were found in two or three writing systems or in two or three languages (bilingual or trilingual); as a result, scientists were able to correlate signs with sounds, and then decipher these ancient writing systems.
The Rosetta Stone, with an inscription in Greek and in Ancient Egyptian (with demotic and hieroglyphic characters), helped uncover the mystery of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. But for the writing of the Indus Valley such a "Rosetta Stone" has not yet been found. However, scientists continue to research in this area. There must be some other method that will make it possible to decipher unknown writing systems. After all, after all, symbols are a product of the human mind, and they are created in a specific context. Therefore, if we thoroughly study the "cultural context", if we are able to recognize the symbols in it and establish their meaning, then we will find ourselves on a path that can lead to deciphering the forgotten writing system.
You can tackle the problem in a different way. Among the many modern languages of the world, there are languages interconnected with each other, forming a linguistic group, which in turn is part of a particular language family. The languages of one family are distinguished by the originality of the linguistic characteristics of words.
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If the writing of the Indus Valley was used by one of the languages belonging to any of the surviving language groups, then, having studied the features of their sound structure, having caught the nature of the models by which they change, one can then "superimpose" these sound models on the system of ancient writing and try to determine, consistent
whether she is with a particular language family.
This is undoubtedly a difficult method, but it is hoped that computers will help find a solution to the problem. However, the machine works only on tasks that a person develops for it, so we first of all need to thoroughly study the problem.
So far it has not been possible to find a single long inscription relating to the Indus Valley civilization, only short ones have been found. Mostly they are engraved on seals, but sometimes they are inscriptions on stamps, bronze tablets, and ceramics. The seal is like a "negative" of the inscription, and therefore its imprint should be read.
Usually, the seal contains an image of an animal (bull, elephant, tiger, unicorn, etc.) and a short (one to three lines) inscription, usually located at the top of it.
The head of the animal is always facing to the right; from this it was concluded that the inscriptions are read from right to left.
Some signs of the Indus Valley letter are easily deciphered. They are short or long, with 1 to 12 vertical bars. They are supposed to represent numbers. But are they just numbers? The dashes appear in various combinations before and after other symbols, suggesting that they represent syllables.
Some scholars believe that the short inscriptions on the seals are only the names and titles of their owners, who used the seals in order to certify the authenticity of the document or as a trade mark on cotton bales and on bales of other goods that were exchanged for goods from far and near lands.
This interpretation is based on the similarity of these inscriptions with the writing of titles and titles of the ancient Egyptians. It was also possible to establish a similarity between the signs in these inscriptions and in the inscriptions on tablets found in areas as remote from the Indus Valley as Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean, as well as on tablets with Hittite hieroglyphic writing.
However, there is no evidence that similar signs in the writing systems of different civilizations correspond to the same sounds. Therefore, it is important to first investigate the writing system of the Indus Valley, and only then find out whether it can be attributed to one or another language group.
Another method is also possible: to determine to which linguistic group the language of the people who inhabited the Indus Valley at that time can be attributed. It was from this point of view that three language groups were carefully analyzed: Indo-Aryan, Munda (Proto-Austro-Asiatic) and Dravidian.
The Indo-Aryan group disappears for historical reasons: the Aryans appeared in this area after the death of this civilization. Some scientists still tried to link them together. Others have tried to establish a connection between the Indus Valley script and the much later Indian Brahmi script. However, these studies have yielded no results, as have attempts to link the Indus Valley script to the Munda language group, which have proved untenable for cultural and linguistic reasons.
As for the Dravidian languages (Bragui, which is still spoken in central Baluchistan, is a branch of them), as you know, they were common in this area before the arrival of the Aryans, and then an opportunity for search opens up. However, there is no evidence of the spread of the Indus Valley civilization to the main part of South India, where the Dravidian languages are now spoken.
But the most difficult thing is to determine the specific form of the Dravidian language, which could be spoken by the people of the Indus Valley at that time. All efforts are now focused on reconstructing this language and, with its help, deciphering the Indus Valley letter.
Meanwhile, new excavations in Pakistan, southern Afghanistan and Turkmenistan show that in the Bronze Age, communication between the peoples inhabiting these areas was more intense than previously thought. A number of other circumstances also suggest that the question of what language the population of the Indus Valley spoke about 5000 years ago, perhaps, can be solved by studying the Altai linguistic group.
To understand the structure of the writing of the Indus Valley, scientists have tried several times to consider in aggregate all the available inscriptions, arrange them in a certain order, establish the exact number of known symbols, determine the initial and final signs and trace how the signs of a certain shape change.
As a result of the last such work done by Asko Parpola and his colleagues, Finnish scientists at the Scandinavian Institute for Asian Studies (Copenhagen), it was possible to concentrate all the material in one place and arrange it in the appropriate order using computers. In this form, it can be successfully used by those who undertake to decipher the Indus Valley letter. A group of Finnish scientists carefully analyzed the writing languages of the Indus Valley and tried to decipher them, taking the Dravidian languages as a basis.
The total number of signs established by Asko Parpola and his collaborators is 396. Some of them are easily recognizable, such as the sign of a person, animal, bird, fish, insect. Others are taken from the local flora - they denote the pipal leaf, the sacred tree, its flower and, perhaps, the tree itself, there is also a sign of the mushroom. Some symbols represent objects (bow and arrow, shrimp net, cart on wheels), but most are simply lines or geometric shapes.
Signs are divided into two types: modification of some is achieved by the fact that they are used in various combinations, modification of others - by adding dashes. What is the essence of these two modification methods has not yet been established. They are supposed to change the meaning of the original sign in the same way as the grammatical affixes attached to words in the languages of the Altaic and Dravidian groups.
Languages of this structure belong to the agglutinative type. If the language of the Indus Valley civilization belongs to this type, then it can be analyzed and the classification of symbols can be made, identifying the main signs and affixes. Affixes will make it possible to understand how grammatical forms and derivatives of words are formed. And once this is established, it will be possible to correlate this writing system with a specific language group. But so far this last stage of the classification of the Indus Valley writing system has not been completed.
The absence of long inscriptions dating back to this civilization should not serve as an obstacle to deciphering. Perhaps some scholar in a remote corner of South America, Africa or China will devote himself to this task and carry out analytical work that will help us discover the mystery of the Indus Valley writing.
Author: Ahmad Hasan Dani