The Script of Harappa and Mohenjodaro and its Connection with Other Scripts c6: Introduction

The Script of Harappa and Mohenjodaro and its Connection with Other Scripts c6

Language: English

Introduction

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The existence of the script dealt with in this work has been known to Orientalists for half a century, or more. But it was not till the Archaeological Department of the Government of India took in hand the systematic excavation of the ancient sites now known as Harappa and Mohenjodaro that any considerable number of texts was forthcoming. Even now the texts we possess, though numerous, are very short, being mainly confined to engravings on seals. No stelae have as yet been found.¹ Nevertheless it is felt that the texts at our disposal are sufficiently numerous to justify the present attempt to collate them and classify their signs, and draw certain inferences regarding the nature of the script. Plates I to XXXVII indicate the extent of the discoveries of inscribed objects up to the close of the excavating season - late February - 1927. They are reproductions of autographic copies made by the writer at the Museums of Mohenjodaro and Harappa during March and April 1927. They reproduce, then, all the script that we at present possess with the exception of the following, which have already appeared elsewhere:- 1. 𐀀𐀁𐀂𐀃𐀄 R.A. Vol. 22, page 99.

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¹ Nor have we a single example of the clay tablet, so common in Mesopotamia.

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² Except no. 11, below, and the few texts which in the Tables appear with their number preceded by P in col. II. These are taken from unpublished photographs to which the author has had access.

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2. 𐀅𐀆 J.R.A.S. 1925, Pl. X, p. 698.

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3. 𐀇𐀈𐀉𐀊 C.A.R. Vol. V, Pl. XXXIII, and J.R.A.S. 1912, pp. 699, 700.

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4. 𐀋𐀌𐀍𐀎 J.R.A.S. 1912, pp. 699, 700.

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5. 𐀏𐀐𐀑𐀒𐀓 " " " " "

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6. 𐀔𐀕𐀖𐀗 U.H.I. Vol. I, Pl. XI.

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7. 𐀘𐀙𐀚 " " " " "

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8. 𐀛𐀜𐀝𐀞𐀟 R.A. Vol. 22, p. 56.

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9. 𐀠𐀡𐀢𐀣 D.C.C.O. Vol. I, Pl. 2, No. 8b.

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10. 𐀤𐀥𐀦𐀧𐀨𐀩 D.C.C.O. Pl. 25, No. 15. Del. en Perse, Vol. II, p. 129.

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1. Recopied from the originals.

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2. Shading indicates that the text is defaced or broken and incomplete.

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11. [Figure:] Not yet published.¹

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¹ Copied from the original in the Louvre Museum. The original is a seal, circular, of stone dark green in colour. The signs are written in the upper semicircle parallel to the circumference. The lower semicircle shows a bull.

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12. [Figure:] A.S.I.A.R. 1923-1924, Pl. XIV.²

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² Nos. 12 to 35 are reproduced here with the signs as they would read on an impression. The photographs in the Illustrated London News reproduce the actual seals. Those in the A.S.I.A.R. and the 'Times' do the same.

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13. [Figure:] " " " Pl. XIX.

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14. [Figure:] "The Times", Feb. 26th 1926.

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15. [Figure:] The Illustrated London News, Oct. 4th, 1924.³

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³ The Illustrated London News published other seals besides those given here. Their texts will be found on Plates I to XXXVII among the others, being copied direct from the originals in the Museums of Mohenjodaro and Harappa.

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16. [Figure:] " " " "

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17. [Figure:] " " " "

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18. [Figure:] " " " "

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19. [Figure: ] The Illustrated London News, Oct. 4th, 1924.

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20. [Figure: ] " " " "

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21. [Figure: ] " " " "

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22. [Figure: ] " " " "

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23. [Figure: ] " " " "

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24. [Figure: ] " " " "

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25. [Figure: ] The Illustrated London News 4-10-24.¹

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¹ Nos. 15-19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, were republished in Archaeological Survey of India, Annual Report, 1923-1924.

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26. [Figure: ] " " " " "

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27. [Figure: ] " " " " "

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28. [Figure: ] " " " " "

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29. [Figure: ] " " " " "

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A cursory examination of the script of Mohenjodaro and Harappa will reveal that it is distinctive. It is neither Sumerian, nor any other known script, though it bears certain resemblances to several. Some of these are doubtless coincidental, since in the very nature of pictographic writing it is hardly possible to avoid some similarity in depicting the same object. A closer examination will establish that it is precisely the commoner signs of our texts that are the most distinctive - e.g. 𐀀 𐀁 𐀂

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At the same time it would be rash, in the present state of our knowledge on the subject, to rule out of court the hypothesis of a common descent from some remote ancestor for the script of Harappa and any other pictographic script. We know so little, after all, of the ultimate pictographic ancestry of any script, even Sumerian.

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Let us now refer briefly to circumstances and considerations that should be borne in mind when examining this script.

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Race. It is not likely that the originators of the script were Aryans, since the latter are not believed to have entered India before 1200 B.C., at the earliest, whereas the script, as proved by Mr. Mackay's find at Kish,¹ existed many centuries before that date. It is probable that the Indus Valley prior to the arrival of the Aryans was inhabited by Dravidians, and that the Brahuis of the neighbourhood are a remnant of this stock; but this is not certain, nor would it exclude the possibility of a riverine or maritime folk of a different race being responsible for Mohenjodaro and Harappa.

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¹ 1.

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There is a natural temptation to look for a connecting link between the agglutinative languages of ancient Sumer and Elam and the agglutinative languages of Modern India; and in this connection not only Brahui is of interest, but also the ancient tongue so far represented by a solitary cuneiform inscription from Herat.² It is of course obvious that the finding of a linguistic connection between Sumerian or Anzanite or the language of the Herat seal on the one hand, and any modern language of India of pre-Aryan origin on the other, taken in conjunction with the undoubted fact of intercourse between India and Sumer and Elam, would be a likely clue to the identity of the language of our inscriptions. But so far this connection has not been found. Meanwhile, in looking for it the peculiarities of the Munda languages should not be ignored. That their present speakers are even more primitive than the Dravidians is historically not repugnant to the possibility of their ancestors having evolved an elaborate civilization five thousand years ago.

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² See Sayce. Antiquity. June 1927, p. 206.

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It is unfortunate that little information of an ethnological order has been yielded by the excavations:—a few skeletons, the position of which leaves it open to doubt whether their owners were not the victims of a mediaeval 'dacoity'; and a couple of busts of which Sir John Marshall has stated that their heads are unlike those of any modern race of Indian. But one would like to know whether any anthropometrical survey of the region has been made, and especially of the predominantly Brahui tracts of Baluchistan.

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However, it is equally possible that the people of our script were a seafaring race, foreign to the India into which they had penetrated up the navigable Indus and its affluents. In support of such a contention it might be urged that the sites so far known of this civilization are confined to the banks of navigable rivers; that the fish (?) sign is peculiarly in evidence in their script; that they certainly brought bitumen overseas (from Mesopotamia ?) for the swimming bath at Mohenjodaro; and that while an abundance of seals have been found which were certainly used for stamping the sealings of merchandise, as is proved by the sealing acquired by V. Scheil (no. 8 above), which still bears on it the traces of the fabric to which it was attached, such sealings are noticeably absent among the finds at Mohenjodaro and Harappa; suggesting that the seals were principally employed for stamping merchandise destined for abroad, and that Mohenjodaro was a great emporium.

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It is also to be remarked that the houses are all small and surprisingly uniform in their dimensions, and that nothing resembling a king's palace has so far been discovered. This would also seem to point to a democratic (or oligarchic) trading community rather than to a native monarchy. Were these people the Phoenicians of the East? There are times when one is almost tempted to credit the legend of a lost Atlantis, placing it, however, rather in the Pacific and around Easter island than in the atlantic, and to wonder whether there, in early times, did not arise a Neolithic civilization and neolithic script which, spreading thence West and East overseas was the ultimate parent alike of Central American and Indo-Sumerian civilization. One thing that is certain is that there was much more travel and intercourse in archaic times than has been generally supposed. The history of navigation, from the time when the ocean-going ships of Tyre were succeeded by the coasting galleys of Athens down to the days of the Northmen, seems to be one of decay rather than progress. But before the Phoenicians it would seem to have been otherwise, and what was a daring voyage of discovery for Nearchus was perhaps a commonplace of normal trading for the sailors of Mohenjodaro. Indeed, it is possible that the sailors of Mohenjodaro embarked upon voyages much longer than that from the Indus to the Euphrates. I would invite a comparison of the seal¹ published as No. 13, a, b, c, d, (Δ 28) on plate 59 of M. Delaporte's Musée du Louvre, Cylindres et Cachets Orientaux, with the triangular prismatic objects of similar size found at Harappa (Pl. XXX, Nos. 62-83). The design on the side 16E of this Cretan seal may be compared with [Figure:] (see Table LXXI, col. IV) in Proto-Indian texts.

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¹ Provenance Crete, part of the Demargne collection, D.C.C.O. p. 94. There are several similar 3-faced, prismatic seals from Crete in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

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Date. Seals like the one found by Mr. Mackay have been found in abundance at various levels at Mohenjodaro and Harappa. The square seal portraying a bull, with one horn visible, standing in profile (facing right), with the symbol [Figure:] in front of his fore-feet, and the text written horizontally across the upper portion of the face of the seal¹, is the commonest find at either site. Now this is the only Indus Valley find in Mesopotamia that can be approximately dated, unless we accept as of Indian provenance the seal found recently by Mr. Woolley, and accept also the genuineness of the cuneiform characters it bears. The latter, which was recently on temporary exhibit in the Assyrian basement of the British Museum would appear to belong to the third millennium B.C. The Kish seal also is not later than 2000 B.C. Meanwhile in India itself, while there is evidence of intercourse with Mesopotamia,² that evidence is insufficient to enable us satisfactorily to date any particular stratum of the ruins. There are a few square seals of black marble, similar in shape and size to those found in Mesopotamia of the archaic period. Some of these bear no legend, and have therefore not been included in these plates. But the ordinary square seal with inscription, that has been yielded in hundreds by Mohenjodaro and Harappa, is different as to material, shape, and the ring attachment on the reverse from these archaic seals. On Sumerian and Elamite analogy, then, one would be inclined to ascribe the archaic-looking seal to the fourth millennium B.C.; while on the evidence of the Kish seal one would ascribe the ordinary seal with ring attachment to the third millennium and perhaps to part of the second also. This does not preclude the possibility of their survival into a later period.

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¹ See Plate I, No. 390.

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² Some of the pottery shows affinities with that of Monssian, of Susa of the second period, and Jemdet Nasr, circa 3500 B.C.

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The few circular, flat, clay objects, sometimes bearing a stamped inscription, and in appearance not unlike Phoenician Tesserae, which have been yielded by the excavations, may be of later date. There are objects very similar in appearance from Susa, exhibited in the 'salle dite de Mastaba' of the Louvre. Another object apparently of late date is the fragment of a silver bar shown on Plate XXVII (No. 518). If the signs thereon are cuneiform of the 'nucleiform' variety, as they appear to be, it would seem that here we have a Babylonian export of comparatively late times. And this is about all the material we at present possess that can assist us in dating our texts.

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It is clear then that we have no ascertained upper and lower limits, except that the lower limit was probably pre-Buddhist since a Buddhist stupa of the third century B.C. crowns the acropolis (?) of Mohenjodaro. Again the complete absence of Achaemenid remains at Mohenjodaro suggests that it was evacuated at latest before the establishment of Persian rule in that area. The upper limit may well be beyond 4000 B.C. The considerable depth of superimposed buildings all in burnt brick, evidently of successive epochs, which the excavations at Mohenjodaro have revealed suggest that this civilization had a very extended duration. It is true that the script seems to have undergone remarkably little transformation throughout the period. But this need not surprise us when we remember the history of the monumental script of Egypt. The comparatively rapid changes in Mesopotamian cuneiform may be attributed partly to the invention of the clay tablet, and partly to the influence of foreign conquerors with no interest, religious or national, in preserving either cumbrous forms or ideographic values.¹ But in the Indus Valley the negative evidence is clear that the clay tablet failed to establish itself, while there is no positive evidence of foreign conquest. The various successive cities of Mohenjodaro do not appear to have been burned.

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¹ Cf. the writing of Anzanites in the cuneiform script in the days of Naram-Sin.

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Language. If as I think Professor Langdon is right in deriving the Brahmi² script from that of Harappa and Mohenjodaro,³ it follows that some of the latter's signs had acquired phonetic values by the time they were borrowed by the Hindus or - that which is equally possible - by an earlier race who passed them on to the Hindus. But little else follows. It certainly does not follow that the 'Indians' of Harappa and Mohenjodaro spoke Sanskrit - as Colonel Waddell appears to have thought - any more than that the Phoenicians spoke Greek! The possibility that the people of Mohenjodaro were the ancestors of the Brahui has already been suggested.

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² Another alphabetic script that may owe something to that of Harappa and Mohenjodaro is the South Semitic.

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³ In an article not yet published.

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Civilization. The people of the Indus Valley were in point of general civilization similar to their Sumerian and Babylonian contemporaries. Their brickwork¹ is excellent; especially in the construction of their drains, which remain watertight to this day. Incidentally the size of the surface drains suggests that the rainfall, if seasonal, was heavy. Perhaps the monsoon visited Mohenjodaro in those days. There is no inherent meteorological improbability. In 1926 Karachi received over 10 inches of rain in two successive days, though the normal annual rainfall in modern times is under 10 inches. The apparent absence of irrigation works at Mohenjodaro would also suggest that in ancient times the rainfall was adequate. The presence of the elephant and the rhinoceros, and the absence of the camel in their glyptic designs supports the same conclusion. These people were clever craftsmen, working in many metals and stones. They made excellent pottery, which they decorated with taste. Some of these designs are still in local use today.²

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¹ It is interesting to note that in point of size and shape the bricks are similar to modern bricks, and quite different from the large square Babylonian brick. They resemble rather the bricks excavated by Professor Langdon at Jemdet Nasr. All the bricks are burnt. The finding of these perfectly-made, modern-looking bricks even at the lowest levels is one of the curiosities of Mohenjodaro.

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² See an article by the writer in the 'Times of India, Illustrated Weekly', May 7th, 1927.

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Method of writing. The examples of direct writing that we possess are confined to objects of copper and stone.³ On clay we have only stamped impressions. But it is obvious that the literature of this people was not confined to the 700 odd seals and amulets etc. unearthed. The absence of lengthier documents among the finds suggests that for ordinary purposes perishable materials were used. That clay was not among them has already been inferred. Perhaps they utilised skins, as Herodotus tells us the Phoenicians did, perhaps papyrus or silk. The signs themselves, on some of our seals, suggest the influence of painting with a brush,¹ being splayed at the extremities. It is quite possible that here we have indications of a change of style due to the introduction of a new writing material, which, as future specimens come to light, may be of aid in dating our finds. The signs are traced vertically from top to bottom, and are arranged horizontally. The animal, in cases where there is an accompanying animal design, is usually placed immediately below the script, and faces to the right.² There are, however, some half-dozen cases in which the animal faces left.³ The large number of signs yielded, after allowing for probable variants, makes it clear that the script is not alphabetic. It was probably, like Sumerian, a mixture of the phonetic and the ideographic. The first point to determine in any attempt to elucidate the script is the direction in which it reads. In accordance with Egyptian usage one would expect it to begin over the head of the subjacent animal and read towards the tail, i.e., in our case, from right to left. And this, as we shall presently show, is what we do find. It is interesting to note however that in the body of our texts the animal designs face to the left;⁴ that is the script reads 'over their backs' so to speak, as in the Meoritic inscriptions. The anthropomorphous signs however face right.⁵ Another observation is that the second line, when the space left by the subjacent animal permits, is frequently complete on the left; while, if sufficient signs to fill the line are not required, it is the space to the right that is left vacant. This in some instances is due to boustrophedon writing. But where we find two-lined inscriptions with both lines reading from the right, and in the second line a blank space left on the right, we may attribute this to an artistic or epigraphic tradition which required the end of the last line to contain the end of the inscription, just as the beginning of the first line contains the beginning of the inscription. The Sumerians evidently had the same convention. Reading from left to right they left the left end of the last line blank. Cf. Gudea, Cylinder A, Col. I, cases 6, 10, 14 - and passim in Sumerian inscriptions.

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³ Except for two signs scratched on a piece of pottery. See Pl. II, No. 21.

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¹ See Pl. I, Nos. 89, 301, 409. There were several other examples showing an approach to this style of script. But it was not found feasible to reproduce in the autographs minute variations in the thickness of the signs.

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² It is of course to be understood that when speaking of direction in connection with seals it is always the direction of the impression taken from the seal that is intended.

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³ Nos. 513 to 517.

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⁴ See in particular Pl. XIV et seq. Nos. 277,292,365,406,451.

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⁵ See Table XLIX,

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The dominant impression mentally registered after a survey of the sites and the remains of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, and especially of the inscribed objects, is that this civilization was independent: remarkably independent when its undoubted commercial connection with Mesopotamia is recalled. Consider the evidence of epigraphy alone. Among nearly 800 inscribed objects we have, to date, not a single inscribed brick tablet, cylinder,¹ cone or mace-head. This civilization vanished. How, when, and why is at present a mystery. The evacuation of Mohenjodaro seems to have been peaceful, and, judging by the comparative paucity of the finds of intrinsic value, deliberate. Probably a sudden shift in the course of the Indus - it is now four miles distant - was sufficient cause. But for the abandonment of the whole region a wider explanation must be sought.

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¹ The cylinder seal found at Susa is presumably the work of a Mesopotamian craftsman to the order of an Indian client.

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Possibly progressive desiccation of the neighbourhood was the cause. Meanwhile, this civilization does not appear to have vanished without leaving any influence on its successors. As already stated, Professor S. Langdon detects its influence on the Brahmi script, Sir John Marshall on Hindu religious symbols. But for Colonel Waddell's supposition that the people of Mohenjodaro and Harappa were the ancestors of the Hindu Aryans there is at present no evidence.

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In the present fragmentary nature of our knowledge it is not possible to arrive at any final conclusion regarding the Proto-indian script and its affinities. The provisional conclusions that I have reached on an examination of the evidence are these:-

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1. The script as we have it is mainly phonetic.
2. It had a pictographic and ideographic origin.
3. That origin was many centuries before 3000 B.C., as is shown by the highly conventionalised form of the majority of the signs at that date.
4. There are clear affinities with Sumerian and Proto-Elamitic, which, in the case of Sumerian, increase as the difference in date increases, i.e., the resemblance of the script of Mohenjodaro to that of Jemdet Nasr (3500 B.C.) is much greater than its resemblance to the Sumerian of contemporary date (3000-2000 B.C.), showing that the common ancestry (or mutual borrowing) of the three scripts dates to before 4000 B.C..
5. That the homomorphous signs (Table XLIX), which are invariably silhouette, and are thus in marked contrast to the Sumerian (which used the head, neck and bust, but never the complete silhouette) suggest borrowing from Egypt.
6. That the superficial (?) resemblances to Cretan, suggest the possibility of the existence in remote times of a very widespread race using a single pictographic system of writing.

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7. That the Brahmi, Sabaean, a portion of the Cypriote and a portion of the Phoenician scripts are derived from Proto-Indian, due in the last three cases to commercial intercourse by sea via the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. It is possible that the Indians had the monopoly of seafaring as far as the Gulf of Suez, which would account for Hiram's eagerness for an alliance with Solomon that would allow the Phoenicians to establish a base at Eziongeber.¹

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¹ 3rd Kings, Ch. IX 26 - 28.

The Script of Harappa and Mohenjodaro and its Connection with Other Scripts c6: Introduction

Introduction

Linked texts (3)