Nisha Yadav

The Indus Valley Civilisation was one of the four major civilisations of the Old World. Generally renowned for its impressive town planning, excellent water management systems and also its intricate craftsmanship. But what makes this civilization unique is its most enigmatic script, which has defied decipherment.

This script generally appears on these small objects, which are a few centimetre squares in size, and generally the script appears on the top part of the seals. The motif is generally an animal, most often it is a unicorn. By the count of the total number of signs that we find in the script, it generally ranges from 400 to 600.

Based on this, scholars generally classify the script as logosyllabic, that is a mixture of logographic and syllabic systems. Now, logographic means that each sign would stand for a complete word or idea, and syllabic means that that sign will have some phonetic element attached to it.

The texts are, first of all, very short and brief. OK, we do not have enough data to work on. Secondly, there is a lack of information about what language or languages these people were speaking. Third, we do not have a bilingual or multilingual object like a Rosetta Stone, which can help in decipherment.

Yeah, that's right. But here, in the case of Indus, we do not have that kind of object.

Certainly it can help, but human thought will also be very crucial over here because machines alone cannot provide us all the clues. But yes, together I think we can make considerable progress.

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the four major civilizations of the old world. Generally renowned for its impressive town planning, excellent water management systems and also its intricate craftsmanship.