The Indus Valley Civilisation’s script may have encoded a language and its pattern shows affinity to linguistic systems like English, old Tamil, and ancient Sanskrit, a new study by a group of researchers from India and the US has indicated.
The Indus script has been known for almost 130 years, but attempts to decipher it have not succeeded so far. Some experts have even wondered if it amounted to a script at all. The civilisation was in existence for about 900 years from around 2600 BC to 1700 BC.
“The success of this study shows that Indus people wrote in a linguistic manner,” Ronojoy Adhikari of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences said. “It’s the first quantitative evidence of linguistic structure in Indus script.”
The group includes researchers from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR-Mumbai), Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences (Mumbai), University of Washington (US), Institute of Mathematical Sciences (Chennai) and Indus Research Centre.
“It’s a result of three years of systematic studies using a variety of mathematical tests to understand the structure of Indus writing,” Nisha Yadav from TIFR said.
The study, which was published online on Thursday by US journal Science, has found that “the Indus script’s pattern is closer to that of spoken words, supporting the hypothesis that it may have encoded an as-yet-unknown language”.
The writing is a structured sign system showing features of a formal language, it says. “The Indus script seems to have statistical regularities that are in line with natural languages,” Rajesh Rao from University of Washington, said.
The group has done a statistical study of the Indus script, comparing the patterns of symbols to various linguistic scripts and languages, including English, and non-linguistic systems, besides DNA sequences from the human genome and a computer programming language.
“It’s possible to distinguish a script as linguistic or non-linguistic without having deciphered it,” Adhikari said. “This is important as we can proceed to obtain exciting results, side-stepping the difficult question of what language underlies the Indus script.”
The next step will be to understand the grammatical structure, Mayank Vahia from TIFR said. “We’d like to make as much headway as possible and ideally, we’d like to crack the code. For now we want to analyse the script’s structure and syntax and infer its grammatical rules,” Rao said.
