Zoomed Vinay Special · First-person editorial
The Average Indus Inscription Is Five Signs Long. Over a Hundred "Decipherments" Have Been Printed. Here's Why None of Them Holds
I opened the 1977 concordance that counted every Indus text, the Finnish scholar who has spent fifty years on a Dravidian reading, the 2004 paper that said it is not writing at all, the 2009 Science paper that said it is, and the magazine exposé of the "horse seal". The main claimed decipherments are graded here on the evidence, with page numbers. What we know, what we don't, and the one test nobody has passed yet.
The point of view
Let me take you to Mohenjo-daro, sometime between 1927 and 1931. A digger in the DK Area lifts a small broken seal. Its impression is photographed and printed as number 453 on Plate XCV of an official report. Seventy years later, that same impression, "computer enhanced", is published as evidence of horses at Harappa and of a Sanskrit reading. Two scholars later showed it was a cracked unicorn bull. The Indus script has about 400 signs, thousands of texts, and an average text of five signs. Over a hundred decipherments have been claimed. So why can't anyone read it? And who is closest?
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Source Library
Iravatham Mahadevan, The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables (Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India 77; New Delhi: ASI, 1977), pp. iii, vii, 3, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19
archive.org
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E. J. H. Mackay, Further Excavations at Mohenjo-daro, vol. II (Government of India, 1937–38), Plate XCV
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Archaeological Survey of India, Dholavira: A Harappan City, Nomination Dossier vol. I (2020), ch. 2, pp. 151–152 and "Stage IV"
archive.org
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Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access records 49.40.1, 49.40.4 (and 1984.482 checked), and /324065
metmuseum.org
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Asko Parpola, Deciphering the Indus Script (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 3, 58–61, 85
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Asko Parpola, A Dravidian Solution to the Indus Script Problem (Chennai: Central Institute of Classical Tamil, 2010; lecture of 25 June 2010), pp. 6, 10–11, 13, 15–17, 28, 34
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Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat and Michael Witzel, "The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization", Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies…
safarmer.com
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Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, "Horseplay in Harappa: The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax", Frontline 17(20), 30 Sept–13 Oct 2000, read via mirror
oocities.org
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Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari and Iravatham Mahadevan, "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script",…
homes.cs.washington.edu
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Richard Sproat, "Last Words: Ancient Symbols, Computational Linguistics, and the Reviewing Practices of the General Science Journals", Computational Linguistics 36(3) (2010),…
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Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, "Interrogating Indus inscriptions to unravel their mechanisms of meaning conveyance", Palgrave Communications 5:73 (2019), pp. 1–2
doi.org
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Yajnadevam, "A Cryptanalytic Decipherment of the Indus Script" (preprint, compiled 13 November 2024), p. 1
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