The Script of Harappa and Mohenjodaro and its Connection with Other Scripts c3.2

c3.2

As to progress in the interpretation the way is completely barred by the lack of any conceivable clue for even a guess at a means of interpretation. Here is a civilisation of whose history nothing has survived. It is impossible to suggest even the name of an historical person or place of that time in India. No group of signs can be suggested as having any definite pronunciation and identified with any name which can be suggested. The only possible clue which suggests itself to me is that the Sumerians must have known this script in their intercourse with travellers from India who brought the Indian seals to Sumer. Fragments of lists of archaic signs have been preserved; on these tablets the Sumerians identify these archaic signs with signs of the classical Sumerian and Babylonian script. Naturally most of the archaic signs preserved and explained on these tablets are peculiar forms of old Sumerian signs, which can be fitted into their place in the history of Cuneiform epigraphy. But a few appear to me to belong definitely to the prehistoric Indus Valley script. I refer to two tablets both in the British Museum, 81-7-27, 49+50, published in Cuneiform Texts, Vol. V, Pl. 7 and three fragments all apparently from the same tablet, said to have been excavated in the S.E. Palace at Nimroud, K.8520 published by Houghton in *Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology*, VI 454. All these tablets come from Assyria, but the script used in the explanations of the archaic signs is that used in Babylonia *circa* 2000 B.C., a date not too far below the period in which Indus Valley seals are found at Kish, *circa* 2700 B.C. It is, therefore, entirely possible that the Babylonian epigraphists knew the Indus script. Now the scribe arranges the signs in order of the well known Sumerian Syllabary A and in CT.V7 Obv. 1 there is an extraordinary sign entered as the archaic form of NU, usual meaning negative "not", Sumerian value nu. This is totally unlike any archaic form of NU and may be the Indus sign 75 or 76 of my sign list. Naturally, if this thesis be true, all the scribe means to say is that the Indian sign means "not"; the phonetic value nu cannot be inferred unless the Indian language is Sumerian. *Ibid.* Rev. 11 2 there are extraordinary forms of the sign ŠAG "heart", restored by syllabary AII 52. One of these is identical with No. 87 of my list and two of them seem to be mere variants. If so, then the common Indian sign No. 87 means "heart", pronounced ša, šag in Sumerian. I do not mean to say that there is any certainty about this suggestion of the survival of Indian signs in the epigraphical texts of these Babylonian scribes. Sumerian texts of this kind or bilingual Sumerian and Indian inscriptions seem to offer the only possible help to which scholars may have recourse at present; for the Sumerians were the only literary people who knew this only possible help to which scholars may have recourse at present: for the Sumerians were the only literary people who knew this writing and language when it was still written and spoken.