Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c7.s2.t2.20

c7.s2.t2.20

It has already been mentioned (2.1.2) that such a connection between the protohistoric Indus writing and the later Brāhmī script should not be taken for granted, that is, it should not be assumed a priori that two scripts of the same cultural area but different periods must be historically or genetically connected. It is all too easy, given the large number of characters in the Indus script (over four hundred), to find superficial connections between similar shapes of some characters in the two scripts, but these are of little value unless and until the Indus script itself is convincingly deciphered and the alleged graphic similarities can be correlated to phonetic values. Various claims to decipherment of the Indus script based on such superficial comparisons with Brāhmī, such as that of Langdon and many since him, are not at all convincing and have little if any scholarly value. Equally unconvincing are the various claims put forward for the Vikramkhol and other pseudoinscriptions (see 2.1.2) as constituting a link between the Indus Valley and Brāhmī scripts.⁵³