Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.119

c12.119

The Harappā script seems to have employed a total of about 400 characters, but, excluding variants, they can probably be brought down to not more than 250 different symbols. This in itself shows that we are encountering the script at a late stage of its development, for if we turn to Mesopotamia for analogies we find that the Early Dynastic Sumerian script employs about 900 characters and the number in the Uruk period syllabaries is believed to be something like 2,000. There is a tendency to reduce the number of characters as language and writing develop, and this evidence of maturity in the Harappā script is in precise accordance with the other evidence, so often stressed in this book, that we know the culture only in its later phases. And one of the most striking proofs of the essential stagnation of the Harappā civilization is the fact that there is no development at all in the script throughout the whole history of the long occupation of the great cities.