Scientists have moved closer to deciphering the Indus Valley script, believed to be one of the three oldest languages. The language was spoken at least 4,000 years ago between 2500 and 1900 BC in what is now north-west India and the eastern part of Pakistan.
Earlier studies by linguists and historians claimed that the script did not represent language but is religious or political imagery. Now, a team of Indian scientists has reported in the latest of Science that the script is indeed a language.
The team: Rajesh P.N. Rao, computer scientist from the University of Washington; Hrishikesh Joglekar, a software engineer in Oracle India, Mumbai; R. Adhikari, faculty of the physics department at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai; and I. Mahadevan, researcher at the Indus Research Centre, Chennai, Nisha Yadav from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Mayank N. Vahia from the Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences in Mumbai.
Examples of the Indus script
Mint newspaper’s science reporter Seema Singh has a very good story that explains the background and the significance:
Among the linguistic scripts, texts of English, Old Tamil, Rig Vedic Sanskrit and of the Sumerian language spoken in Mesopotamia, another civilization that thrived around 4,000 years ago, were used for comparison. What was compared was the permissible randomness in choosing a sequence. It is this randomness, which allows flexibility in composing words or sentences. But even within this randomness, there is always a clear pattern in a script that represents a language. In contrast, DNA sequences are completely random.
The results show that the Indus inscriptions were different from any of the non-linguistic systems, says Rao of the University of Washington. The finding of the study marks a considerable leap from a provocative 2004 paper titled The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis that claimed the short inscriptions had no linguistic content, somewhat implying that the literacy of the Harappan civilization was a myth. Its lead author offered a $10,000 (Rs5 lakh) reward to whoever produced an Indus artefact that contained more than 50 symbols. More:
The following from Science Daily:
The Rosetta Stone allowed 19th century scholars to translate symbols left by an ancient civilization and thus decipher the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
But the symbols found on many other ancient artifacts remain a mystery, including those of a people that inhabited the Indus valley on the present-day border between Pakistan and India. Some experts question whether the symbols represent a language at all, or are merely pictograms that bear no relation to the language spoken by their creators.
A University of Washington computer scientist has led a statistical study of the Indus script, comparing the pattern of symbols to various linguistic scripts and nonlinguistic systems, including DNA and a computer programming language. The results, published online April 23 by the journal Science, found the Indus script’s pattern is closer to that of spoken words, supporting the hypothesis that it codes for an as-yet-unknown language. More:
Also read Wired and New Scientist stories
Similar Posts:
- Can computers decipher a 5,000-year-old language?
- The right chemistry
- Code unknown: the fierce argument over ancient Indian symbols
- Tiger or tigress? How to read the pugmark
- Crossing The Lines: The battle for Kashmir
0 Responses to “Cracking the Indus Valley script”
Leave a Reply