For obvious reasons, deciphering the ancient writings It has been one of the objectives of historians and scholars of the cultures that created them:knowing how to read ancient texts, one would learn more and better about everything related to religion, customs, history and daily life. But some of these writings are not so easily unraveled. Since it is unusual to have a Rosetta Stone that makes things easier, as Champollion did have to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs, there are languages that remaininscrutable in whole or in part, such as Minoan Linear A, Italian Etruscan, or Easter Island Rongorongo. One of those who guard their secrets with the greatest zeal is the Proto-Indian or Harappan, the script used by the Indus Valley culture.
That civilization developed between 3300 a. C. and 1300 a. C., that is, simultaneously with the Bronze Age European, in a vast region that has the Indus River as the backbone and which is located between what are now Afghanistan, Pakistan and the northwestern part of India. It was made up of a thousand settlements, with a hundred somewhat larger towns but also five important cities, the two most prominent being Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa .
It was the most extensive culture of the time, with an agrarian life system based on the fluvial cycles of the Indus, just as it happened in Mesopotamia with the Tigris and the Euphrates or in Egypt with the Nile. They were advanced peoples :they had a planned urban development, drainage systems, houses with toilets, an exquisite goldsmith and many other peculiarities, being considered the origin of Hinduism.
One of its most unique features is the absolute absence of archaeological evidence of wars or armies. Perhaps for this reason –or not-, around the year 1900 B.C. the Indus Valley culture began to decline and ended disappearing without knowing how or why. Moreover, for four thousand years it fell into forgetfulness until in 1920 British and Indian archaeologists discovered its ruins and began to excavate them.
Among the many pieces recovered, there were sealed stones, terracotta tablets and even metal objects with strange inscriptions whose translation soon became an obsession. That writing It is made up of pictographic signs plus human and animal motifs, including, by the way, a disconcerting unicorn (photo and header). But the multiple attempts of the linguists were unsuccessful , despite the fact that other scripts have been falling over time, such as the Indian Brahmi (in 1830), the cuneiform (second half of the 19th century), the Mycenaean Linear B (1950s) or the Mayan glyphs (late 20th) .
The successive translation proposals based on comparison with Egyptian, Dravidian, or Sumerian hieroglyphs were inconclusive. There is also no agreement with the idea of resorting to Sanskrit, the ancestral language of the languages of North India, due to the accusation that it is actually based on an Indian nationalist approach. The absence of a reference , a Rosetta Stone or a comparative text such as the Spanish that served to unravel the Yucatec Maya, is a big problem, as is the ignorance of the names of the rulers of that civilization.
That is why now archaeologists, linguists and experts in computer techniques tend tojoin their efforts . Thanks to this and to works such as that of the indologist Asko Parpola or the archaeologist Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao, it has been discovered that it was written from the right to left and that it was a logo-syllabic script (similar to Sumerian cuneiform or Mayan glyphics) that used logographic signs to represent words and concepts, in combination with a subset of syllables. The base language would not be Sanskrit but a proto-Dravidian .
However, the brevity of the texts on which we are working (between five and twenty-six characters each) prevents us from clarifying whether these inscriptions represented a spoken language. or only written (of an administrative type such as cuneiform, which only records calculations of products and names of the officials in charge). The latter seems most likely due to the sequential order of signs, although there is no lack of authors who do believe in a spoken language, such as the team from Harvard University (the historian Steve Farmer, the computer linguist Richard Sproat and the Sanskrit expert Michael Witzel) who launched this controversial theory in 2004 .
Collaboration between study specialties seems to be the route chosen lately, with the decisive contribution that the computer can make. Another team, this one from the University of Washington (Seattle), led by Rajesh Rao , ratifies the similarities between the Indus script and the Sumerian cuneiform but with a novelty:it would be the representation of a language. Rao is an expert in digital research and used a curious technique to reach that conclusion:an analysis based on the combination of very different sequential systems, from programming language to DNA.
Since only ten percent has been excavated of what that civilization was, it seems reasonable to think that even more texts will appear and who knows if any of them may have the definitive key.