An excerpt from ‘Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia’, by Peggy Mohan.
An article from Scroll, Feb 19, 2025
Three stamp seals and their impressions bearing Indus script characters alongside animals "unicorn" (left), bull (centre) and an elephant. | ALFGRN, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There were probably many languages and dialects in the Indus Valley region, with one standard variety located at the centre of the civilisation. But it would make sense for many of the little languages and dialects of the region to have belonged to a larger family, though there would probably have been some unrelated languages also looking on from the sidelines. In such great cities there would definitely have been local minority groups, as well as diplomats and traders from neighbouring lands who left behind communities to keep the relationship going.
Much of the early search for a lost Indus Valley language centred on the seals that were found when the old cities were excavated by archaeologists. These were small reliefs, many of which depict animals or people interacting with animals, besides more abstract markings that would appear to be “writing” or some form of notation. What could these seals be? Could they be people’s names? Perhaps the names of important merchants who needed to put a stamp on their transactions? Edicts? They were too short to be full sentences. And if they were words, what did they sound like? Were these markings meant to represent sounds? Or were they just symbols for concepts, like numbers?
Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat and Michael Witzel did not think they were words. In 2004 they went so far as to say that the seals were not writing at all, noting the “extreme brevity”of the Indus Valley inscriptions, with the longest text having only seventeen symbols, something “unparalleled in any literate civilization”, which led them to declare the Indus Valley Civilisation pre-literate. They announced a prize of $10,000 for anyone finding “just one inscription that contains at least 50 symbols distributed in the outwardly random-appearing ways typical of true scripts contemporary to the Indus system.”
It isn’t as though relics have never been decoded. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics all over the walls of their tombs, temples and monuments, and in old papyrus scrolls, were eventually deciphered, but it was because of one amazing piece of luck. In 1799 French soldiers retrieved a granite slab from a pile of rubble in the town of Rosetta, on the Nile delta. Carved into the stone surface were three texts, written in three different scripts. On top was a section in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Below it was text in Demotic script, an ancient Egyptian script used for more secular commerce. And at the bottom was a section in ancient Greek. Was it possible that all three texts contained the same message? Could the Greek and the Demotic scripts be a key to deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics?
It took time. First, the Demotic script had to be matched to the Greek. Then the names in the text had to be found and deciphered from the Demotic script. But it wasn’t just a matter of finding one-to-one correspondences. The hieroglyphics were, after all, in a language, and that language had a grammar. The word order and grammatical markers in the three texts would not be the same. And the Demotic script, unlike Greek, turned out to be written from right to left, and was only partly phonetic, as it included symbols derived from hieroglyphs.
It was only when French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion approached the problem through his knowledge of Coptic, an old language still used by the Coptic Christian Church in Egypt, that he was able to make out that the syllables written in the Demotic script were words he recognised from Coptic. The language of the hieroglyphics was a close cousin of the one used in the sacred texts of Coptic Christianity. Champollion had found not only the meanings of the words written in the hieroglyphics, but also how they had been pronounced.