The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables c4.s5: 5. Earlier documentation of the Indus seals and inscriptions
The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables c4.s5
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5. Earlier documentation of the Indus seals and inscriptions
c4.s5.1
The collection, edition and careful indexing of all existing material is a basic requirement in the critical and methodical study of any unknown script.
c4.s5.2
A praiseworthy early undertaking in this task was the book by G.R. Hunter published in 1934⁴³. It contained drawings of all the Indus texts excavated by February 1927 (comprising 518 texts from Mohenjo-daro and 243 texts from Harappa), with a documentation of the excavation numbers, as well as a concordance to the occurrences of each individual sign within these inscriptions. Hunter further discussed this evidence and drew certain conclusions from it. Even if one disagrees with his general findings, Hunter is to be credited for a good number of pertinent observations and for the preparation of a valuable research tool.
c4.s5.3
⁴³ G. R. Hunter, *The script of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro and its connection with other scripts*, London 1934.
c4.s5.4
The official reports of the excavations at Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Chanhu-daro and Lothal⁴⁴ have included photographs and very substantial and comprehensive descriptions of most of the seals and inscribed objects discovered. It must be noted, though, that the photographs of many duplicate inscriptions from Harappa (and a few from Mohenjo-daro) were omitted from the excavation reports, being replaced in the data tabulations by the short statement "similar to....". Objects in a bad state of preservation were also excluded. The reports of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa further comprise sign lists which record occurrences of the individual pictograms. The sign lists are valuable, even include a few unpublished texts, but are not always accurate and are limited to a portion of the material *ancient scripts and writings*, transl. by Mervyn Savill, London 1961, 1973; E.W.J. Barber, *Archaeological decipherment*, Princeton 1974; and Maurice Pope, *The story of decipherment*, London 1975.
c4.s5.5
⁴⁴ See above, footnotes 4,5,7. These reports remain essential, and the reader is referred to them also because the detailed catalogue of the material published in this volume will be published later, in the third volume of the *Corpus*. It is, however, useful to keep in mind that a few mistakes have crept into the excavation reports, especially that of Harappa. Thus, pictures of two-sided tablets have occasionally been mixed up, so that the two sides of a given object actually belong to two different objects. Sometimes two sides of one object have been separated from each other and given separate numbers. The tabulations are not fully reliable, either: in addition to misprints, some objects have excavation numbers which are quite different from those written on the respective objects themselves.
c4.s5.6
Entitled *Sealed Secrets of the Indus*, a monograph on the problems relating to the script, language and religion of the Indus Civilization is being prepared by A. Parpola. Many issues have been dealt with by this author in the following overviews, the first three of which include extensive bibliographies: Tasks, methods and results in the study of the Indus script, *Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society* 1975: 2, 178-209; The problem of the Indus script, in: D.P. Agrawal and Dilip K. Chakrabarti (eds.), *Essays in Indian Protohistory*, Delhi 1979, 163-186; The Indus script: a challenging puzzle, *World Archaeology* 17:3, 1986, 399-419; Zur Entzifferung der Indus-Schrift, in: *Vergessene Städte am Indus: Frühe Kulturen in Pakistan* vom 8. bis 2. Jahtausend, Mainz 1987, 196-205; and Religion reflected in the Indus script: Penetrating into long-forgotten picto+graphic messages, *Visible Religion* 6, 1987. See also K. Koskenniemi, *Syntactic methods in the study of the Indus script, Studia Orientalia* 50 (1981), 125-136.
c4.s5.7
only.
c4.s5.8
A computer-drawn concordance to the Indus inscriptions was published in 1973 by a group of Finnish scholars.⁴⁵ In the preparation of this work, Dr Asko Parpola visited the principal museums in Pakistan and India in 1971 in order to compare the readings based on the published photographs with the original objects. To his surprise he found more than 400 seals and inscriptions from Mohenjo-daro and Harappa that had never been published.⁴⁶ Most of them came from the digs carried out by the custodians of the site museums after the official excavations and reported only very briefly in the Annual Reports of the ASI.⁴⁷ (Fortunately, the unpublished fieldbooks of these as well as of the official excavations have since been discovered in Pakistan, and are in the process of being published.⁴⁸)
c4.s5.9
⁴⁵ Seppo Koskenniemi, Asko Parpola and Simo Parpola, *Materials for the study of the Indus script, I: A concordance to the Indus inscriptions*, Acta Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae B 185, Helsinki 1973.
c4.s5.10
⁴⁶ Cf. *Newsletter of the Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies* 5, 1972, 12ff.
c4.s5.11
⁴⁷ Cf. *Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India*, 1930-31, 1931-32, 1932-33 & 1933-34, Calcutta 1936, 70-72; 1934-35, Calcutta 1937, 31-33 & pl. X; 1935-36, Calcutta 1938, 35-36; 1936-37, Calcutta 1940, 39-41. This was noted by I. Mahadevan, who had simultaneously made the same discovery.
c4.s5.12
⁴⁸ Michael Jansen and Günther Urban (eds.), *Mohenjodaro: Report of the Aachen University Mission 1979-1985. Section One: Data Collection. Vol. I: Catalogue and Concordance of the Field Registers 1924-1938. Part One: The HR-Area Field Register 1925-1927*. Leiden 1985. Five further parts of Vol. I are to follow.
c4.s5.13
Mr Mahadevan brought out his edition and concordance of the texts in the Indus script in 1977, improving upon the Finnish concordance in several respects.⁴⁹ Besides, Mahadevan could include more text material on the basis of the Photo Archive of the ASI, which preserves old unpublished photographs of objects since lost. On the other hand, however, Mahadevan excluded all material that Asko Parpola had discovered in the museums of Pakistan and that had been included in the Finnish concordance. Mahadevan's book further included a listing of the texts on which the concordance is based, good documentation, and several cross charts with interesting statistics of different kinds.
c4.s5.14
⁴⁹ Iravatham Mahadevan, *The Indus script: Texts, concordance and tables*, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India 77, New Delhi 1977. One improvement was the general arrangement of the concordance, which took the single sign as the basis, as in Hunter's concordance, while the Finnish concordance indexed the pairwise combinations of signs and left the isolated occurrences of signs unindexed.
c4.s5.15
Dr Parpola had gone through the Photo Archive of the ASI in 1975 and identified most of its material. In collaboration with Dr Kimmo Koskenniemi, he brought out a revised edition of the Finnish concordance in three volumes in 1979-1982, since there was still scope for improving upon the reading of the inscriptions and upon Mahadevan's work. The new version was published in a preliminary limited edition as research reports, because the work on the present Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions was expected to bring still further improvements upon the textual readings as well as new inscriptions.⁵⁰ The updated version will appear in print after the publication of the three volumes of the Corpus, for such a standardized and indexed text edition remains a necessary complement to the photographic Corpus.
c4.s5.16
⁵⁰ Kimmo Koskenniemi and Asko Parpola, *Corpus of texts in the Indus script*, Department of Asian and African Studies, University of Helsinki, Research reports 1, Helsinki 1979; id., *Documentation and duplicates of the texts in the Indus script*, Ibid. 2, Helsinki 1980; id., *A concordance to the texts in the Indus script*, Ibid. 3, Helsinki 1982. The reference numbers of the inscriptions in the Finnish concordance will be changed to those of the Corpus, so as to ease comparison with the photographs. The typological and iconographical classifications will be revised as well.