Abstract
Decipherment of the Harappan Script: An Assessment
Highlights
In the context of early Indian urbanization, the debate about whether the Harappan corpus of signs and symbols represent a script is a common one
Even if the archaeological evidence points that the Harappan complex of sites does represent a type of urbanization which reached a zenith before eventually declining
This paper would like to raise the question if every ancient civilization which is urbanized does need to have a script, even if quite incontestably they must have a language. It is to the credit of Mahadevan [1] that the entire set of signs and symbols as occurring individually and in conjunction have been identified
Summary
In the context of early Indian urbanization, the debate about whether the Harappan corpus of signs and symbols represent a script is a common one. Thereafter, a computer program called EBUDS (Extended Basic Unique Database Set) was prepared which would be able to pattern-search the set of signs and symbols to see if any sign or symbol was significantly associated with each other, to the point of a measurable level of statistical significance This computer program was applied to the visual database of the actual examples of Indus writing, on the basis of Mahadevan’s concordance, to search for which if any symbol was unique in it’s own right, and to search for significant correlation between one sign and another. Co-occurrence of these signs and symbols may have representational value in realms other than linguistic, such a measurement of weights, quantities, numbers of any kind as well, and not necessarily language per se Until it is identified which language it is which this script represents until a separation of even phonetic values or phonemes will not have much meaning, semantics will be even more elusive a goal.
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