An Honest Analysis of Harappan Script Speculations Since their discovery around 1920, the Harrapan seals of the Indus Valley Civilizations (circa. 2600–1900 B.C.) have been a topic of debate. Said seals contain pictures of unicorn-like cow creatures, human figures, and short bursts of symbols, seemingly crammed onto the seal as an afterthought . Scholars are unable to come to any sort of consensus on the issue and have resorted to publishing articles that focus more on why everyone else is wrong than attempting to decipher the strange artifacts. This is particularly true when it comes to the odd symbols. While it seems to be the natural order of things, the manner in which scholars approach decipherment of this mysterious script is counterintuitive
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According to Rajesh Rao (not to be confused with S. R. Rao), we can tell that the writing goes from left to right. Rajesh Rao and his team have been using computers to analyze the Indus text. In his TED talk called Computing a Rosetta Stone for the Indus Script based on his team’s article called A Markov Model of the Indus Script he says “If you look at the left-hand side of the two texts, you 'll notice that there 's a cramping of signs, and it seems like 4,000 years ago, when the scribe was writing from right to left, they ran out of space. And so they had to cram the signs.” There is no need for a specific direction of the script if it served a similar function to road …show more content…
Beyond this, there is no way to determine what language the script encodes without a good deal of speculation. Especially considering that the Indus Valley was likely home to more than one language. Farmer et al. summarizes Michael Witzel’s article Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages : “Studies of loan words in the earliest strata of Vedic texts (Witzel 2009, 2003) suggest that just like northwest South Asia today, Indus territories may have been heavily multilinguistic.” The implication being that a written language could not work in such an environment. This could be explained by considering the languages of the world today. English and the various Scandinavian languages are considerably different from one another in the way they sound, even though they all use largely the same alphabet with the exception of three characters; Ä, Å, and Ö. This does, however, make it much more difficult to defend Parpola’s argument that the writing is Dravidian or S. R. Rao’s that it’s
According to Rajesh Rao (not to be confused with S. R. Rao), we can tell that the writing goes from left to right. Rajesh Rao and his team have been using computers to analyze the Indus text. In his TED talk called Computing a Rosetta Stone for the Indus Script based on his team’s article called A Markov Model of the Indus Script he says “If you look at the left-hand side of the two texts, you 'll notice that there 's a cramping of signs, and it seems like 4,000 years ago, when the scribe was writing from right to left, they ran out of space. And so they had to cram the signs.” There is no need for a specific direction of the script if it served a similar function to road …show more content…
Beyond this, there is no way to determine what language the script encodes without a good deal of speculation. Especially considering that the Indus Valley was likely home to more than one language. Farmer et al. summarizes Michael Witzel’s article Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages : “Studies of loan words in the earliest strata of Vedic texts (Witzel 2009, 2003) suggest that just like northwest South Asia today, Indus territories may have been heavily multilinguistic.” The implication being that a written language could not work in such an environment. This could be explained by considering the languages of the world today. English and the various Scandinavian languages are considerably different from one another in the way they sound, even though they all use largely the same alphabet with the exception of three characters; Ä, Å, and Ö. This does, however, make it much more difficult to defend Parpola’s argument that the writing is Dravidian or S. R. Rao’s that it’s