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BHARATI SHELAT
SAMBODHI-PURĀTATTVA
The Indus valley Script
The archaeological excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daroʻrevealed the existence of a system of writing prevalent in India in the fourth millennium B.C. On the basis of the positive evidences this is the earliest system of writing current in India. It consists of pictographs, ideographs and syllables. Unfortunately it has not been satisfactorily deciphered as yet.
The seals and sealings with the writing on them have been found from Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Many Indian and foreign palaeograhists have tried to deciphere the script of the seals and sealings. According to Dr. Hunter's classification and analysis of the alphabets, the total number of single alphabets is 234 in which there are 102 original letters and the initial vowels have been added to them. Some of the letters are pictorial. They signify the symbols like human, slave, a man with the bow and the arrow, a bird, a fish, a plant, a jar, a spoked wheel, an umbrella, a horn, a lotus bud, a pipal leaf, a harp, a hand, a double axe, hill etc. (See Table 1.)
L. A. Waddell tried to read the inscriptions in Sumerian on the basis of a few apparent links and found in them the names of the Vedic and the Epic heroes. Pran Nath supposed the language to be some form of old Sanskrit and Prakrit and utilized the Brāhmi script of a much later date. The significance of the symbols might be arrived at on the basis of Tantric signs. Prof. B Hrozny tried to interpret the inscriptions with the help of the Hittite language. Father H. Heras assumed that the people were Dravidians and tried to reconstruct a proto-Dravidian language for them, and compared the Indus signs with Sumerian, hieroglyphic and proto-Chinese symbols. Meriggi believed the Indus script to be an ideophonographic system of writing and assumed some symbols to be ideograms a others phonemes.
Gadd, Sydney Smith, Hunter and Langdone chose to confine themselves to listing the signs, counting their use in the different inscriptions and suggesting their possible significance. Hunter followed the scientific method of tabulating every occurence of each sign.
As for the direction of the writing it has been suggested that the direction of writing is from right to left; i.e. it begins from the side of the animal's head and goes to its tail. Marshall argues that the writing which begins from the right is
