01/02/2021
1. SOME STARTING POINTS:
Ever since the discovery of the highly advanced Indus Valley civilization in British India in 1872, there have been efforts spanning over a century to crack this enigmatic script, but nothing till now has been proved. The primary difficulty comes from the absence of any underlying language, and also the fact that most of the inscriptions are too short. Flourishing over 4,500 years ago, the script most probably disappeared after the civilization itself came to decay, around 500 years before the Aryans came to India. Recent climate models suggest that the civilization declined around 2,000 BCE due to a 900 year old drought due to El Nino activities that forced these people to move to more greener pastures, around the Gangetic plain and even Deep South of the subcontinent. This may also have led to the decline of the script as well.
The most accepted hypothesis that is given by many Sindologists and Indus script pundits is that the same represents a form of proto-Dravidian and this has led many Tamil nationalists to cheer for the same. Unlike the Rosetta stone that contained a bilingual language that led to the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, no bilingual language has been yet found to have existed during this time.The Indus script contains some 400 known symbols and pictograms and most probably was a logographic system of writing that stood for ideas that could be communicated by a single sign. Iravathan Mahadevan identifies over 400 signs in the Indus inscription corpus, while Paropla over 350. The abundance of the fish symbols on the tablets have led linguists like Asko Parpola to interpret the same as "meen" in Dravidian that also denotes a starry object and is a likely correspondence between the script and Proto-Dravidian. Yet nothing has been conclusively proved. While there are many interesting hypotheses put forward to link the dancing girl of Mohenjodaro with “Parvati” and the famous Pashupati seal with an early form of Shiva. The search goes on.
2. The Possible Disappearance of the Script: Reasons
The Indus Valley Civilization may have started as early as 6000 BCE when the early Harappan sites began to flourish along the Indus river and its tributaries and distributaries. Yet, the most widespread civilization of its time, harboring over five million people during its peak, it comes to an end around 2000 BCE, before the Aryans are thought to have invaded the IVC, a fact that is however losing credence now. As a script flourishes under its users, it came to an end around 4000 years ago. No underlying language has been found, though there are similarities with the graffiti signs used in South Asia and even with the Brahmi script, though the latter comes during the Iron Age era and the Indus Valley script flourished during the Bronze Age. As the civilization flourished in an arid area, water conservation may have been crucial. The most accepted hypothesis put forward is invasion and flood or even the change of course of the Indus river. Yet none of the studies are conclusive. Recently, a team of Indian scientists at IIT Kharagpur (2018) led by Professor Anil K. Gupta have come to a conclusion that a 900-1000 year old drought that steadily decreased rainfall patterns reduced the area around the major settlements into an arid one, and around 4,200 years ago, major settlements had been already abandoned. The report states:
Professor Gupta along with his team members from Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun, and Institute of Estuarine and Coastal Research, Shanghai, China studied Tso Moriri Lake situated in Ladakh. It showed that around 4,350 years ago, monsoon weakened under the influence of strong El Niño and southward migration of the inter-tropical convergence zone. This decreased moisture transport and snow deposition in northwest Himalaya, which was a major source of water of the Indus and its tributaries. They might have tried to adapt to the situation but this arid phase continued for more than 900 years. Therefore, in search of better water availability for their agriculture and animal husbandry, which were major occupations for the people of the civilisation, they had to migrate to south and eastward regions in India, which were under more influence of the Indian summer monsoon. (http://indianexpress.com/article/india/iit-kharagpur-study-900-years-of-little-rain-ended-indus-civilisation-5140052/)
Yet, the ‘continuance’ of the script in the later sign patterns like Brahmi may be seen by a similarity in orthography, though it is a matter of controversy:
A. The Indus Script: A Sample
http://www.crystalinks.com/indus.html
B. Sample Brahmi Script:
