Special Lecture
Study of the Indus Script1)
Asko P ARPOLA
I NTRODUCTION
The International Conference of Eastern Studies has this year its 50th jubilee ssion. To deliver a special lecture on this occasion is a great honour, and I accepted the T o h o Gakkai’s kind invitation with hesita-tion, fully aware that there are many scholars who would be much more worthy of this honour. But I did not want to dismiss this opportunity to speak to a wide gathering of orientalists, as the study of the Indus script would certainly profit if experts in East Asian writing systems could be inspired to contribute with their insights.
The Indus Civilization
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First a few words about the historical context of the Indus script. The Indus or Mature Harappan Civilization was the most extensive urban culture of its time, about 2600–1900 BCE. Its area comprized one million square kilometres, and more than one thousand of its ttle-ments have been identified so f
ar. Yet the very existence of this Bronze Age Civilization was unknown until 1924, when Sir John Marshall announced its discovery on the basis of excavations that were started at the two largest sites, Harappa in the Punjab and Mohenjo-daro in Sind. Ever since, archaeological and other rearch has been constantly en-
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1)Paper read at the 50th ICES Tokyo Session on 19 May 2005 in Tokyo. I have shortened the text distributed at the conference and made a few additions (in particular, note 14 and consideration of two papers by Massimo Vidale that I received in a preliminary form in July 2005).
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larging our knowledge of this early civilization.2) Particularly important have been the long-continued recent excavations at Harappa3)and Dholavira.
The Indus Civilization came into being as the result of a long cultural evolution in the Indo-Iranian borderlands. From the first stage of development,4)about 7000–4300 BCE, some twenty relatively small Neolithic villages are known, practically all in highland valleys. People raid cattle, sheep and
goats. They cultivated wheat and barley, and stored it in granaries. Pottery was handmade, and human and bovine figurines attest to fertility cults. Ornaments reflect small-scale local trade.
Stage two, about 4300–3200 BCE, is Chalcolithic. Village size grew to dozens of hectares. Settlements spread eastwards beyond the Indus to Cholistan to the delta of the ancient Sarasvati river, apparently with asonal migrations. Copper tools were made, and pottery became wheel-thrown and beautifully painted. Ceramic similarities with south-ern Turkmenistan and northern Iran also suggest considerable mobility and trade.
Stage three is the Early Harappan period about 3200–2600 BCE. Many new sites came into existance, also in the Indus Valley, which was a challenging environment on account of the yearly floods, while the silt made the fields very fertile. Communal granaries disappeared, and large storage jars appeared in hou units. Potter’s marks suggest private ownership, and stamp als bearing geometrical motifs point to devel-opment in administration. Irrigation canals were constructed, and ad-
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2)The results are being collected in a book ries in progress called The Indus Age by Gregory L. Po
shl, with a monumental volume on The Beginnings (1999). Poshl has recently produced a summary for the general public (2002). Several other good surveys have come out during the past few years as well: Jann et al. 1991; Kenoyer 1998; Indus Civilization Exhibition, 2000; McIntosh 2002. There are also two good websites, one of them in Japan, providing up-to-date information: ; u-tokai.ac.jp/˜indus/english/index.html.
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3)See reports of the Harappa excavations by Meadow et al. and www.harappa. com.
4)I am following here the periodization suggested by Poshl (2002).
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vances were made in all crafts. Similarities in pottery, als, figurines, ornaments etc. document intensive caravan trade with Central Asia and the Iranian plateau. There were already towns with walls and a grid pattern of streets, such as Rahman Dheri. Terracotta models of bullock carts attest to improved transport in the Indus Valley. This led to considerable cultural uniformity over a wide area.
A relatively short but still poorly known transition pha, between 2700–2500 BCE, turned the Early
Harappan culture into the Mature Indus Civilization. During this pha the Indus script came into being. The size of the burned brick, already standardized during the Early Harappan period, was fixed in the ratio 1:2:4 most effective for bond-ing. Weights of carefully cut and polished chert cubes form a combined binary and decimal system.5) The society became so highly organized that it was able to complete enormous projects, like building the city of Mohenjo-daro around 2500 BCE.
我没有伤心The acropolis of Mohenjo-daro, a cultural and administrative centre, has as its foundation a 12 metre high artificial platform of 20 hectares. Just the platform is estimated to have required 400 days of 10,000 labourers. The lower city of at least 80 hectares had streets oriented according to the cardinal directions and provided with a network of covered drains. Many of the usually two-storied hous were spacious and protected from the dust and crowd of the streets and had bath-rooms and wells. The water-engineering of Mohenjo-daro is unparallelled in the ancient world: the city is estimated to have had some 700 wells constructed with tapering bricks so strong that they have not collapd in 5000 years. The Great Bath was made watertight with bitumen and a high corbelled outlet made it possible to empty it easily. The massive city walls are suppod to be mainly defens against flood water.
The abnce of palaces and temples—which may well be illusory6)—________________________
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5)The ratios are 1/16, 1/8, 1/6, 1/4, 1/2, 1 (=13g), 2, 4, 8, 16, ...800.
6)Massimo Vidale (in press b) suggests the prence of a palace complex that consists of “hous” (including a private bath rembling the Great Bath) in the HR area of Mohenjo-daro.
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makes the Indus Civilization strikingly different from its counterparts for instance in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Another reason is the Harappan concern for civic amenities such as wells and drains, with the result that their cities attest to considerable social egality. It is thought that the political power was less centralized and more corporate.7) Development of water traffic made it possible to transport heavy loads along the rivers, and to start direct a trade with the Gulf and Mesopotamia. Over thirty Indus als and other materials of Harappan origin, such as stained carnelian beads, have been found in Western Asia. On the other hand, a single Gulf al excavated at the Harappan port town of Lothal is the only object of clearly Western Asiatic origin discovered in the Greater Indus Valley.
Around 2000–1900 BCE the Indus Civilization came to an end in the Indus Valley, although it lingered some centuries longer in Gujarat and Maharashtra. Multiple reasons are assumed to have caud this down-fall of urban life, which led also to the disappearance of the Indus script. The Harappans are estimated to have numbered about one million. This population continued to live, but the culture gradually changed. One important factor of change was that new people started coming to Greater Indus Valley. First among the were the long-time neighbours of the Indus Civilization, people of the Bactria and Margiana Archaeo-logical Complex (c. 2600–1400 BCE).8)
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芒果简笔画7)Cf. Poshl 2002: 56–57, 148–149.—One could compare the ‘republics’ of northeastern India in early historical times, governed by a ga n a or sa mgha, and described by Sharma (1968). They have roots in Vedic times, when “the many r denied permanent overlordship to any in their midst” (Scharfe 1989: 233; cf. Sharma 1968: 8–12).“According to a later Buddhist tradition there were 7,007 r a jan-s in Vai s a li ruling jointly through their asmbly; K[au t ilya’s] A[rtha s a rastra] XI 1, 5 speaks of the men of the sa mgha-s that live on the title r a jan” (Scharfe 1989: 233). Strabo (Geography 15,1,37), referring to anonymous writers in the plural (Megasthenes is mentioned as the source in the next ntence), states: “They tell also of a kind of aristocratic order of government that
was compod outright of five thousand counllors, each of whom furnishes the [[new]] commonwealth with an elephant” (tr. Jones 1930: VII, 65; I suggest deleting the word new in Jones’ translation of tôi koinôi) (cf. Scharfe 1989: 233, n. 24).
8)For the BMAC, e especially Sarianidi 1986; 1990; 1998a; 1998b; 2001; 2002; 2005; Amiet 1986; Hiebert 1994; Kosarev et al. (eds.) 2004 [2005]; for new evidence from
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Attempts at Deciphering the Indus Script
Attempts at deciphering the Indus script started even before the exist-ence of the Indus Civilization was recognized. When Sir Alexander Cunningham reported the first known Indus al from Harappa in 1875, he assumed that this unique find was a foreign import. A few years later he suppod that the al might bear signs of the Brahmi script from its unknown early pha. After Cunningham, many scholars have connected the Indus script with the Brahmi script, which was ud in India about 1500 years later. Among them was G.R. Hunter, who in the late 1920s studied the Indus inscriptions at first hand in Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, and analyzed them structurally in his valuable doctoral disrtation, where he also compared the script with other early writing systems. T
he archaeologist S.R. Rao in his book The decipherment of the Indus script (1982) maintains that the Indus script is the basis of not only the Brahmi script but also of the Semitic consonantal alphabet, which most scholars derive from the Egyptian hieroglyphs and take as the basis of the Brahmi script. Like so many other Indian scholars, Rao reads the Indus texts in an Aryan language clo to Vedic Sanskrit. Immediately after the discovery of the Indus Civilization became known in 1924, the British Assyriologists A.H. Sayce, C.J. Gadd and Sidney Smith pointed to its remblance to the Elamite and Mesopotamian civilizations and compared the Indus signs with the pictograms of the Proto-Elamite and archaic Sumerian scripts. In 1974, the British Assyriologist James Kinnier Wilson tried to revive the hypothesis that the Indus language is related to Sumerian in his book Indo-Sumerian.
The Czech Assyriologist Bed r ich Hrozn∞ in his youth recognized that the cuneiform tablets found in Anatolia were written in an Indo-European language, Hittite. He immediately became famous and later on tried to decipher many unknown scripts, including the Indus script. Hrozn∞’s starting point was an Indus-like al with three somewhat
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Gilund, a site of the Chalcolithic Ahar-Banas Complex of Mewar, Rajasthan, e Poshl et al. 2004. See also Parpola 2002a; 2002b.
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