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Mahesh

10/01/25 09:33 AM IST

Deciphering the Indus script

In News
  • Recently, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin announced a $1-million prize for experts or organisations in the event of their success in deciphering the scripts of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).
About IVC
  • The IVC, also called the Harappan Civilisation, spanned 2,000 sites across 1.5 million sq. km. in the territories of modern-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan during the Bronze Age (3000-1500 BCE).
  • It had a wider geographical area than the combined areas of its contemporary civilisations — Egyptian and Mesopotamian
  • The Valley lies across “ancient migration routes from central and western Asia to India.”
  • The IVC introduced urban life for the first time in the valley when similar civilisations had developed on the banks of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates valleys.
Mystery script
  • Other scripts encountered in the contemporary Mesapotomian and Egyptian civilisations had been deciphered in a more satisfying manner, But, the non-decipherment of the Indus script prevents scholars from providing a complete picture of Harappan culture, which is why scholars tend to call it a “mystery script.” 
Documentation and Digitisation of Graffiti and Tamili 
  • The findings of a two-year-long project of the TNSDA, called ‘Documentation and Digitisation of Graffiti and Tamili (Tamil-Brāhmī) Inscribed Potsherds of Tamil Nadu’, have formed the basis of the monograph.
  • Aimed at documenting, compiling and analysing the graffiti bearing potsherds and Tamili inscribed potsherds unearthed in archaeological excavations of the State, the project, launched during 2022-23, seeks to compare those graffiti marks with the Indus script to explore whether any cultural relationship existed between the two.
  • The datasets from the project suggested that 15,184 graffiti-bearing potsherds were reported from 140 sites in the State and nearly 14,165 sherds were documented.
  • Of them, nearly 2,107 signs had been morphologically categorised within a group of 42 base signs, 544 variants and 1,521 composites.
  • Any additional strokes added to the base signs were considered variants of the base signs while a group of signs containing more than one base sign was regarded as a composite sign.
  • Several signs encountered in Tamil Nadu had exact parallels in the Indus scripts.
  • Likewise, some signs had near parallels. These signs probably evolved from the base signs. Out of 42 base signs and their variants, nearly 60% of them found their parallels in the Indus script,” .
Source- The Hindu

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