Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.123

c12.123

As it stands, the Harappā script is unique, intrusive and without descendants. Its relationship to the ancient scripts of Mesopotamia is likely to be analogous to the Egyptian system of writing, itself wholly different from anything known in Sumer, but perhaps inspired by it, as far as the idea of representing a spoken language by a fixed set of symbols goes. The apparent priority of Mesopotamia in the invention of writing implies that India, like Egypt, derived the basic idea of a written script from that source, but, as in Egypt, the script early took on a characteristic local form. The type of language likely to have been spoken within the Harappā kingdom is as uncertain as the details of the script, except that we can fairly definitely rule out any of the Indo-European languages. The persistence of a Dravidian type of language ‘islanded’ in Baluchistan among the Brahuis has given rise to the supposition that the Harappā language also belonged to this group, but the Munda group now largely spoken by Proto-Australoids in India is another claimant. The fact that Dravidian can, like Sumerian, be described as an agglutinative language has been brought forward in support of the claim for this language-group, but all discussion must remain academic until the inscriptions are deciphered.