Deciphering the Indus script. By Asko Parpola, Rainer Hasenpflug; Kurt Schildmann
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 374.
Reviewed by Florian Coulmas, Chuo University
Language, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 167-170
'Read me!' This is the universal meta-message of all written texts, including those which cannot be read because the code is unknown. It is this message which makes the decipherment of unknown writing systems irresistible. This century has seen a number of spectacular decipherments of which Ugaritic cuneiform, Linear B, Hittite hieroglyphic, and, most recently, Mayan are the
most significant. Other ancient writing systems remain enigmatic. The Indus script is one of them. It is regarded as highly important because deciphering it can be expected to reveal information about the most ancient civilization on the Indian subcontinent, the Indus or Harappan civilization, which flourished c. 2500-1900 BCE in Pakistan, long before the earliest historical records of South Asia were drafted.
In this book, the author, who is also the editor of the Corpus of Indus seals and inscriptions, offers a comprehensive up-to-date overview of this work in progress. Cambridge University Press is to be commended for supporting his efforts by publishing this richly illustrated and carefully edited volume, a worthy reward for what appears to be rather thankless and unpromising toil; for Parpola is forced to the conclusion, mainly because of the brevity of the existing texts, that 'it looks most unlikely that the Indus script will ever be deciphered fully' (278). Why then publish such a costly book?
One answer to this question is that this book provides full documentation of virtually everything that is known about the Indus script, its sign inventory and graphical make-up, its close to 4000 excavated texts, and their temporal and geographical distribution across the vast area of archaeological sites. This makes it much easier for newcomers to this field to orient themselves and avoid duplicating work that has been done so far. For many years to come, this book will be an indispensable research tool for every scholar who takes an active interest in the Harappan civilization and its script.
A second answer is that this book is not only about the Indus script; it also deals with decipherment as such and can be read as a methodological guide and case study of what surely is one of the most fascinating intellectual pursuits. It is not primarily
the prospect that the messages contained in the texts will become comprehensible once the code is broken that drives decipherers
to go on with their work, trying ever new avenues of approach. In this particular case, the texts may eventually not reveal all that much. Short as all of them are, it is a distinct possibility that they consist of nothing but proper names and titles. However, cracking a code in the absence of anyone who knows it is an undertaking which, quite apart from any message contents, is every bit as interesting and challenging as uncovering the grammatical rules of a hitherto unrecorded language.
Actually, the decipherer's task is a much better analogy of first language acquisition which is so often likened to the grammarian's analysis of a language. The decipherer has no informants who can help solve segmentation problems or supply additional data if necessary. The text corpus cannot be extended at will and initially does not contain many hints about the linguistic units of which it is composed. Much as infants are told to understand but not how to go about it, undeciphered texts usually do not exhibit many hints about how they can be read.
Decipherments are of three kinds: the script, the language, or both script and language can be unknown. The third type is obviously the most difficult, and successful decipherments of this sort are rare. (Michael Ventris' discovery that the language of Linear B inscriptions was an archaic form of Greek is one.) Further, if no bilingual document provides an entering wedge in the form of proper names or other material that allows linguistic values to be assigned to written characters, the problems are really formidable. The Indus script belongs to this category. As P is well aware, the art of deciphering a historically grown code is a cumulative problem solving endeavor. Every decipherment benefits from building on the experience of previous solutions. He therefore devotes two entire chapters to reviewing early writing systems and their decipherment.
In cases where both the graphical code and the languages are unknown, the decipherer is concerned with two issues, analyzing the structural properties of the writing system and determining the language it represents. The former is fundamentally a linguistic procedure making use of frequency and distribution analyses. The direction of writing must be established before any syntactic analysis can be carried out. Where only very short texts are available, even this first step poses considerable difficulties. On the basis of an extensive review of the sign sequences found in the entire text corpus, P shows, convincingly to my mind, that the usual direction of the Indus script is from right to left with a few instances of boustrophedon writing. However, even if utmost care is taken in examining the available evidence, there will be no confirmation of this hypothesis before the first inscription can actually be read. Thus, many of P's analyses inevitably have a speculative character. True to his maxim that 'an uncertain but possible hypothesis is better than no hypothesis' (137), he is undeterred by this frustrating aspect of his work. Even with regard to script typology he cannot justify a more definite statement than that 'the Indus script is likely to be logo-syllabic' (85). To what extent the system relies on logographic and syllabographic signs, respectively, remains one of many open questions. This shows at just how early and tentative a level the decipherment of the Indus script is. Very few things can yet be said about the script with certainty.
The same holds for the other aspect of the decipherment, the Indus language. As the decipherment of the Mayan writing system (cf. Bill Bright's review of Michael Coe's book in Language 71.191-2) has demonstrated most vividly, decipherment in the proper sense of the word only takes off once a plausible hypothesis about the language written is in place. For writing is writing a language.
Nothing is known about the Indus language, whence its speakers came, what its cognates are, if and when its tradition as a spoken language came to an end. Yet, P makes a case, and this is the third rationale for his book. Combining archaeological findings and what little linguistic evidence can be inferred from the texts (e.g., Num+N sequences suggest that the Indus language prefers premodification and is hence, presumably, of OV type), he puts forth a bold hypothesis about the affiliation of the Indus language. According to his judgment, it is most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family. This claim has been made before, especially by Dravidian scholars, but not on such thorough footing. The two chapters the author devotes to establishing this hypothesis are central to his book. Even though the merits of the Dravidian hypothesis are yet to be proven, these two chapters are valuable in their own right as an informative and readable overview of the linguistic landscape between the ancient fertile crescent, Central Asia, and the Ganges delta. His method is ex negative: He looks for reasons that eliminate language families and languages that prima facie must be counted among the potential candidates of the Indus language-Sumerian, West Semitic, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic, and Dravidian. A variety akin to Proto-Dravidian is what he ends up with
as the least unlikely. This is not much, but then it is a well reasoned hypothesis which, perhaps, one day can be tested.
In the final chapters of the book, P suggests a number of Dravidian character interpretations, venturing far afield into Indian astronomy, astrology, and other domains of the subcontinent's culture. Rather than these learned speculations, it is the broad discussion of the linguistic environment of the Indus script and the thoughtful account of methods and theories of decipherment
that make this a book of lasting value.
