Indian and American researchers are close to breaking the code behind the script of the Indus Valley civilisation, which flourished on the India-Pakistan border 4,000 years ago.
Indian and American researchers are close to breaking the code behind the script of the Indus Valley civilisation, which flourished on the India-Pakistan border 4,000 years ago.
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The script, found as inscriptions on numerous objects dating from that period, has puzzled archaeologists ever since Harappa was discovered in 1842.
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A study, a joint effort of Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Chennai’s Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the University of Washington, was published this week in Proceedings of the Natio-nal Academy of Sciences.
It says there are distinct patterns in the hieroglyphics used by the script, and creates a statistical model for the unknown language.
“The model provides insights into the underlying grammatical structure of the script,” said lead author Rajesh Rao, associate professor of computer science, University of Washington.
Western archaeologists have often sought to debunk the claim that the symbols comprised a script at all.
While scholar Natwar Jha, in his book on Indus Valley in 2000, claimed the inscriptions found on the artefacts were a form of Vedic Sanskrit, others have maintained it was some kind of Dravidian language.
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Rao, however, said calculations with the help of computers and mathematical models had shown that the order of the symbols on the artefacts was meaningful for the discovery of an unknown script representing a distinct language.
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Rao, however, said calculations with the help of computers and mathematical models had shown that the order of the symbols on the artefacts was meaningful for the discovery of an unknown script representing a distinct language.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
