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1.* Meeting the challenge of the Indus script*

In 1920, excavations at Harappa brought to light the ruins of a large
brick-laid city, and soon a whole unknown civilization was uncovered in
and around the Indus valley (Figure 1).^1 <parpola14.html> The Indus
civilization, now dated to c. 2600-1800 B.C., collapsed some 500 years
before the composition of most of the hymns collected in the
Rgveda-Samhita, the oldest historical document of India. 	
1. <parpola15.html#1> The Ancient Indus Valley Region

No unambiguous information has been preserved to tell us the names of
the Indus kings or their subjects, the names of the gods worshipped by
them, or even what language they spoke.

The Indus (or Harappan) people used a pictographic script. Some 3500
specimens of this script survive in stamp seals carved in stone, in
moulded terracotta and faience amulets, in fragments of pottery, and in
a few other categories of inscribed objects. In addition to the
pictographic signs, the seals and amulets often contain iconographic
motifs, mostly realistic pictures of animals apparently worshipped as
sacred, and a few cultic scenes, including anthropomorphic deities and
worshippers. This material is of key importance to the investigation of
the Harappan language and religion, which continue to be among the most
vexing problems of South Asian protohistory.

The Indus script is an unknown writing system, and the inscriptions
discovered are very short, comprising no more than five signs on the
average. With good reasons, the prospects of a successful decipherment
have been considered meagre at best. But great problems wield a power of
attraction, and many attempts have been made to crack that posed by the
Indus script. Most of the tries, however, have been quite uncritical and
poorly informed.

Generally speaking, the standard of earlier research was rather low in
1964, when three young Finnish students entered the field. This
encouraged us to believe that something worthwhile might be achieved in
the study of the Indus script, especially as we could use the computer
as an aid. After all, there were a fair number of texts. We were
inspired by the phenomenal success of Michael Ventris' systematic
decipherment of the Mycenaean syllabic script, which at that time
started being universally accepted. Our Finnish team has collaborated in
producing several research tools, in developing a methodology for the
decipherment of the script and in putting this methodology into
practice. While the participants in the project have changed in part
from time to time, this work is still going on. The present article
reflects my own work chiefly, but its basic ideas stem from collective
work some two decades ago.
 


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