"The Indus Symbols: Can they be deciphered?"
Among the great civilizations of antiquity, the Indus Civilization stands out because of the large territory that it covered, the absence of evidence for powerful, despotic rulers, a standardized system of measures, and even indoor plumbing. Much about the social or belief system that may have sustained the Civilization is still a mystery. The widespread use of a system of written symbols might be expected to lift the veil of mystery, but controversies continue about the nature of the Indus Symbols, and repeated attempts to decipher them as a written form of language have failed to gain general acceptance. Moreover, one team of scholars questions whether the symbols actually constitute a writing system.
In this presentation I outline the problems that beset decipherment efforts and demonstrate the effect of these problems by discussing two recent proposals, one reading the Symbols as encoding a form of early Dravidian, the other as a form of Vedic Sanskrit. The conclusion must be that the brevity of “texts” ultimately precludes any successful decipherment.
