Indian Palaeography c9.s2.4

c9.s2.4

But while the Sumerian and the hieroglyphic writings have been successfully read, and the meanings of the inscriptions written in these characters have opened to us the minds of the builders of those civilizations, the Indus Script remains undeciphered. Only the material remains have acquainted us with the day-to-day life of the people who formed this civilization. Their language also remains a secret. The material remains have been interpreted in the light of the contemporary world or, more commonly, against the background of the succeeding historical cultures in the subcontinent, and various conclusions about the people and their language have been drawn. These are, of course, hypothetical. It is on these hypotheses that attempts at deciphering the script have been made. The first in the field was L. A. Waddell, who believed in the identity of the Sumerians and the Aryans, tried to read the inscriptions in Sumerian on the basis of a few apparent links, and found in them names of Vedic and Epic heroes. Dr. Pran Nath followed the same line, but supposed the language to be some form of old Sanskrit or Prakrit and utilized the Brāhmī script of a much later date to ascertain what he believed to be the correct sound value of the symbols. Another suggestion of Pran Nath’s, that the significance of the symbols might be arrived at on the basis of Tantric signs, was independently developed by Śankarananda and also by Dr. B. M. Barua, both assuming that the writing is alphabetic. Professor B. Hrozny took the people to be proto-Hittites, an earlier branch of the Indo-Europeans, and tried to interpret the inscriptions with the help of the Hittite language. As opposed to these suggestions, Father H. Heras assumed that the people were Dravidians and tried to reconstruct a proto-Dravidian language for them, and for his interpretation compared the Indus signs with Sumerian, hieroglyphic, and proto-Chinese symbols. Finding no clue to the people and their language, Sir Flinders Petrie tried to interpret the Indus symbols as ideographs, on the analogy of those of Egypt and on the further assumption that the Indus seals contain only titles of the officials. Later, Meriggi realized Petrie’s mistake in taking all the symbols as ideographs. He believed the Indus Script to be an ideo-phonographic system of writing and assumed some symbols to be ideograms and others phonemes. For determining their meanings he often referred to the Hittite vocabulary and to Hittite hieroglyphs. G. de Hévesy rejected all these suppositions and drew attention to the similarities between the Indus Valley Script and the script of Easter Island, maintaining that the latter was the progenitor of the former. But apart from a certain apparent similarity there is nothing to authenticate the antiquity of the script of Easter Island.