The term Indus script (Harappan script) refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Harappan civilization (Indus Valley Civilization) of ancient India (most of the Indus sites are distributed in present day Pakistan and North West India) used between 2600–1900 BC, which evolved from an early Harappan script attested from around 3500 BC, and was followed by a late Harappan script used until around 1500 BC. They are most commonly associated with flat, rectangular stone tablets called seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials. The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1875, in the form of a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, well over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. After 1900 BC, use of the

Attempts at decipherment

Over the years, numerous decipherments have been proposed, but none has been accepted by the scientific community at large. The following factors are usually regarded as the biggest obstacles for a successful decipherment:

• The substrate language has not been identified, nor the language family to which it belongs.
• The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being one of only 26 signs.
• No bilingual texts have been found.

The Finnish

If the signs are purely ideographical, they may contain no information about the language spoken by their creators, and cannot be called a script in the true sense of the word. Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel make the case that the symbols were not coupled to oral language, which in part explains the extreme brevity of the inscriptions. But this has been refuted by Asko Parpola.

Other writers, such as S. R. Rao, have attempted to prove that the script encodes Vedic Sanskrit. These theories are not accepted by most scholars.

Another line of study, due to Kak, is to focus only on the morphological connection between Indus and Brahmi without stressing the question of the decipherment. This work indicates that Brahmi is derived from Indus.

Late Indus script

Onshore explorations near Bet Dwarka in Gujarat revealed the presence of a late Indus seals depicting a 3-headed animal, earthen vessel inscribed in a late Harappan script and the large quantity of pottery similar to Lustrous Red Ware bowl and the Red Ware dishes, dish-on-stand, perforated jar and incurved bowls which are datable to 1600-1500 B.C. in Dwarka, Rangpur and Prabhas. The thermo-lumenescence date for the pottery in Bet Dwaraka is 1528 BC. This evidence suggests that a late Harappan script was used until around 1500 BC.

References

• Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization, EVJS, vol. 11 (2004), issue 2 (Dec) (PDF)
• Parpola's refutation of Farmer et al

Escritura del Indo Écriture de l'Indus インダス文字 Письменность долины Инда