The silent seals of Harappa: Revisiting the Indus script

From September 11 to 13, 2025, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) in New Delhi will host an international conference that aims to confront one of the greatest mysteries in archaeology — the Harappan (Indus) script.

The event, being organised by the union ministry of culture, has drawn archaeologists, linguists, engineers, computer scientists and even medical professionals, reflecting the script’s enduring allure. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to attend on on 12 September and union home minister Amit Shah on 13 September, underscoring the political significance of this undeciphered system of writing in addition to its cultural weight.

The conference comes against the backdrop of a renewed global push: earlier this year, Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin announced a $1 million prize for anyone who can credibly decipher the script. The announcement has revived both scholarly enthusiasm and political debate, making the IGNCA event as much a stage for identity politics as for academic discourse.

Despite nearly a century of research since the 1920s discovery of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, the script remains undeciphered — a fragmented jigsaw puzzle with too few pieces and no guiding picture.

A tapestry of theories

The Indus Valley Civilization (2600–1800 BCE), stretching from present-day Pakistan into northwest India, produced an urban society remarkable for its planning, trade and craftsmanship.

Its script, consisting of 400–700 distinct signs, has been found on over 5,000 artifacts — primarily steatite seals, terracotta tablets, copper implements and pot shard.

The inscriptions are tantalizingly short: most average five signs, rarely exceeding seven, with the Dholavira signboard being the longest at 26 characters. Their brevity frustrates efforts at identifying patterns of grammar or syntax. The inscriptions were typically carved onto seals, suggesting administrative or commercial use, though their meaning remains obscure.

The script’s right-to-left orientation, sometimes alternating boustrophedon, and its mix of logo-syllabic elements (akin to Sumerian or Egyptian writing) add layers of complexity.

New finds — such as a 2023 seal from Rakhigarhi with potential numerical notations — expand the data, but without longer texts or bilingual inscriptions like the Rosetta Stone, interpretation remains elusive.

The IGNCA conference brings together a range of competing theories about the script’s language and function:

Dravidian hypothesis: Building on the work of Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan, many scholars see links to Proto-Dravidian languages. For instance, the frequently occurring ‘fish’ sign may represent the word min (fish/star) in Proto-Dravidian, possibly denoting astral deities. The survival of Dravidian languages such as Brahui in Pakistan and genetic studies suggesting a pre-Aryan Dravidian presence lend weight to this theory.

Indo-Aryan hypothesis: Others, like S.R. Rao and more recently aerospace engineer Farrukh Naqvi, argue for Sanskritic or Vedic roots, pointing to links between signs and Rigvedic motifs or the Saraswati River system (Ghaggar-Hakra).

Tribal and Austro-Asiatic links: Scholars such as Prakash N. Salame claim up to 90 per cent decipherment through Gondi, while Prabhunath Hembrom explores Santali connections. Both proposals, however, face skepticism due to methodological gaps.

Non-linguistic theories: Bahata Mukhopadhyay, a software engineer, suggests the script encoded rules for taxation and commerce, rather than spoken language. This aligns with the controversial view of Steve Farmer, who argued the symbols functioned more like religious or political emblems than linguistic signs.

The diversity of views illustrates the core problem: each “solution” explains only fragments, often shaped by linguistic, political, or cultural biases.

The politics of its decipherment

The Harappan script is not just a scholarly puzzle — it is a contested symbol in India’s heritage politics.

• Hindutva narratives, building on archaeologists like B.B. Lal, often argue that the Harappans were Vedic people, thus aligning the script with Sanskrit and countering the Aryan migration theory.

• Dravidian politics, represented by Stalin’s $1 million prize, frame the script as a Dravidian inheritance, reinforcing southern identity in contrast to northern narratives.

• Historians like H.P. Ray caution against such reductionist readings, pointing out that the Indus civilisation spanned diverse linguistic and cultural groups across a vast region.

Ethno-historical clues, like megalithic graffiti in South India resembling Indus signs (noted by Gregory Possehl), hint at continuity, but not conclusively. Meanwhile, works like Peggy Mohan’s Father Tongue, Mother Land (2024) emphasise trade symbols such as crucibles and blowpipes, foregrounding commerce over ritual or Vedic associations.

Thus, decipherment debates often reflect present-day cultural politics as much as ancient realities.

Can’t modern technology help solve it?

Modern technology has injected fresh momentum into Indus script studies:

• Computational epigraphy: In 2009, Rajesh P.N. Rao used entropy analysis to show that Indus sign sequences resemble linguistic patterns, challenging non-linguistic theories.

• Computer vision: A 2024 study by Ooha Lakkadi Reddy applied hybrid vision models, finding similarities between Indus symbols and Tibetan-Yi scripts, though critics warn of false positives.

• Digital archives: The Indus Script Font (2017) by Pakistan’s National Fund for Mohenjodaro and ongoing digitisation efforts make inscriptions more accessible for AI-driven research.

Yet limitations remain. With only a few thousand short inscriptions, AI models lack the contextual anchors — like phonetic correspondences — that enabled breakthroughs with Linear B or Egyptian hieroglyphs. As one critic put it, algorithms can organise fragments, but they cannot conjure missing pieces.

And so, the puzzle persists... with high stakes

The barriers to decipherment remain formidable:

• No bilingual texts (no “Rosetta Stone”);

• Short inscriptions, too brief for grammatical reconstruction;

• Ambiguity of signs, many stylised to abstraction;

• Possible multilingualism, given the vast geographical and temporal spread of the civilisation.

While some signs — about 67 of them — occur frequently enough to allow statistical analysis, hundreds remain too rare to decode reliably.

If deciphered, however, the Harappan script could transform our understanding of:

• Administration and economy: If Mukhopadhyay’s taxation theory holds, the seals may reveal a highly bureaucratic state apparatus.

• Cosmology and religion: Astronomical references (like the fish/star sign) could shed light on ritual life and calendrical systems.

• Linguistic prehistory: Whether Dravidian, Sanskritic, or tribal, the linguistic roots would reshape the narrative of South Asia’s cultural evolution.

At stake is nothing less than the story of India’s (and the world’s) oldest civilisation — how its people traded, who or what they worshipped and the way they organised their urban lives.

Looking ahead: The jigsaw without a guide

At the IGNCA conference, scholars are here to present theories ranging from rigorous computational models to bold linguistic claims. Yet consensus remains distant. The Harappan script continues to be described as a jigsaw without its edge pieces — a mosaic of shadows from a civilisation that once thrived as urban planners, traders and astronomers between 2600 and 1800 BCE.

Its decline around 1900 BCE, linked to climate shifts and river changes, is clearer today than its language.

For now, the Indus script resists closure — standing as a reminder that some of history’s greatest achievements remain just beyond our grasp.

Perhaps the solution will come not in a single breakthrough, but in incremental progress through interdisciplinary collaboration — archaeology, linguistics, computation and careful contextual study. Until then, the silent seals of Harappa continue to whisper across the millennia, inviting us to listen with both rigour and humility.

Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. More of his writing may be read here.