An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology v1.c25.s4.12

v1.c25.s4.12

In recent years claims of decipherment of the Indus script have been made by Rao, 1971, 1972-3, 1973, Krishna Rao, 1969, 1973, and Fateh Singh, 1968, who have proposed various Sanskrit solutions to the problems of the Indus script. The Finnish team of scholars consisting of Parpola, Parpola and Koskenniemi (Parpola, 1970, 1979; Parpola *et al.*, 1969a and b) and the Soviet team consisting of Knorozov, Gurov, Volchok and others (Alekseev *et al.*, 1965; Gurov *et al.*, 1972; Knorozov *et al.*, 1968, 1970; also see Pande, 1969, 1973, and Zide and Zvelebil, 1976) have proposed the early Dravidian group of languages or 'Proto-Dravidian' as the language used in the Indus script. Mahadevan, 1970, also independently came to the conclusion that the language underlying the Indus script was Dravidian. The attempts of these scholars like that of Heras, 1953, are based on the assumption that the Harappan language belonged to the Dravidian group of languages and by reconstructing Proto-Dravidian they have tried to read the Indus inscriptions. However the phrases read by Heras in the Indus inscriptions are too obtruse and do not give any meaning, nor are his 'Proto-Dravidian' reconstructions based on sound historical and comparative technique and 'his "Proto-Dravidian" bears far too close a resemblance to Old Tamil than would be likely for a language of the (projected) age of "Proto-Dravidian"' (Zide, 1979, p. 257). According to Parpola, 1979, p. 174, the Indus script is 'morphographic' in which 'one and the same sign could be used in either semantic *or* phonetic function, having inherently both of the logographic *and* the syllabic value' and 'the Indus people learnt this *principle* of morphographic writing from the Proto-Elamites at Tepe Yahya in s.-e. Iran, where evidence has recently been found of both Proto-Elamite writing and of trade with the early Indus cultures in the early 3rd millennium B.C The actual pictograms however the early Harappans in all likelihood devised themselves, probably making use of the Early Indus pot marks and art conventions' (Parpola, 1979, pp. 174-75; also see Lal, 1975). The Finnish scholars, on the basis of grammatical analysis of the Indus texts, have come to the conclusion that the evidence 'points to an agglutinative language, in which the words are inflected by adding suffixes at the end, while prefixes are absent, and the attribute precedes the head noun' (Parpola, 1979, p. 175). According to Parpola, the archaeological evidence also supports the linguistic evidence.