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Cracking The Indus Script PDF
Cracking The Indus Script PDF
the world.
First, establish and fund a network of
flagship stations9 to monitor: concentra-
tions, fluxes, interactions and feedbacks
as well as more general air quality and
meteorology data. Around 58such
stations (costing between US$7million
and $11million each) would suffice
for a major city. These should be com-
plemented by mobile measurement
platforms on cars and aeroplanes, remote
sensing of air columns from the ground,
satellite observations and smog cham-
bers. Major sources of pollutants can be
identified using historic data.
Second, indoor air-quality meas-
urements and monitoring must be
conducted concurrently in a represent-
ative selection of residential and office
buildings.
Third, atmospheric chemists must
model secondary-pollutant production
pathways and feedback mechanisms
under high concentrations of various
pollutants. These models must then be
compared with observations.
Fourth, the links between air pollutants
and mortality and other health effects
need to be established. That way the
most health-relevant pollutants and their
sources can be identified and mitigated
first. A database should be developed to The mysterious Indus unicorn on a roughly 4,000-year-old sealstone, found at the Mohenjo-daro site.
track health impacts.
Cracking the
Fifth, long-term sustainable engineer-
ing solutions such as improving processes
and material flows in industry must be
implemented to maintain low levels of
Indus script
air pollution. This will require capacity
building across the Chinese authori-
ties and institutes on using air-quality
assessment data in decision-making, in
developing legislative tools and in clean-
air action plans. Andrew Robinson reflects on the most tantalizing of all
Only by understanding atmospheric the undeciphered scripts that used in the civilization
chemistry will China clean its air.
of the Indus valley in the third millennium bc.
Markku Kulmala is professor of aerosol
T
physics at the University of Helsinki,
Finland. he Indus civilization flourished culture of its period, with a population of
e-mail: markku.kulmala@helsinki.fi for half a millennium from about perhaps 1 million and a vigorous maritime
1. Lelieveld, J., Evans, J. S., Fnais, M.,
2600bc to 1900bc. Then it myste- export trade to the Gulf and cities such as
Giannadaki, D. & Pozzer, A. Nature 525, riously declined and vanished from view. Ur in Mesopotamia, where objects inscribed
367371 (2015). It remained invisible for almost 4,000years with Indus signs have been discovered.
2. Lim, S. S. et al. Lancet 380, 22242260 until its ruins were discovered by accident Astonishingly, the culture has left no archae-
(2012).
3. Zhang, J. et al. Lancet 375, 11101019 in the 1920s by British and Indian archae- ological evidence of armies or warfare.
(2010). ologists. Following almost a century of exca- Most Indus settlements were villages;
4. Guo, S. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, vation, it is today regarded as a civilization some were towns, and at least five were
1737317378 (2014).
5. Ding, A. J. et al. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 13, worthy of comparison with those of ancient substantial cities (see Where unicorns
58135830 (2013). Egypt and Mesopotamia, as the beginning of roamed). The two largest, Mohenjo-daro
6. Ding, A. J. et al. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 13, Indian civilization and possibly as the origin a World Heritage Site listed by the United
1054510554 (2013).
7. Xiao, S. et al. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 15, of Hinduism. Nations located near the Indus river, and
17691781 (2015). More than a thousand Indus settlements Harappa, by one of the tributaries, boasted
8. Kulmala, M. et al. Annu. Rev. Phys. Chem. 65, covered at least 800,000 square kilometres street planning and house drainage worthy
2137 (2014).
9. Hari, P. et al. Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss. 15, of what is now Pakistan and northwest- of the twentiethcentury ad. They hosted
2106321093 (2015). ern India. It was the most extensive urban the worlds first known toilets, along with
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COMMENT
er
Riv
cuneiform and the English alphabet, and in
us
non-linguistic systems, such as the computer
Ind
programming language Fortran and human
DNA. The conditional entropies of the Indus
script seem to be most similar to those of
Harappa Sumerian cuneiform. Our results increase
the probability that the script represents
PAKISTAN Rakhigarhi
language, the Rao group has written9. Sproat
Ganweriwala was
strongly disagrees10.
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, the two
largest Indus cities, boasted complex discovered in the 1970s, On the ground in Pakistan and India,
street planning and house drainage. but remains unexcavated. more inscriptions continue to be discovered
although not, as yet, any texts longer than
26characters. Unfortunately, less than 10% of
Dholavira INDIA the known Indus sites have been excavated.
The difficulty apart from funding is the
politically troubled nature of the region. Many
City of the most promising unexcavated sites lie
Archaeological site
in the Pakistani desert region of Cholistan
Extent of Indus valley region
Disputed territory
near the tense border with India. One such
is the city of Ganweriwala, discovered in the
1970s and apparently comparable in size with
in the Indus script. In 1982, archaeologist Sproat (now a research scientist at Google) Mohenjo-daro and Harappa.
Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao published a and Sanskrit researcher Michael Witzel If these sites, and some others within Paki-
Sanskrit-based decipherment with just at Harvard University caused a stir with stan and India, were to be excavated, there
62signs4. Parpola put5 the number at about a joint paper7 comparing the Indus script seems a reasonable prospect of a widely
425 in 1994 an estimate supported by with a system of non-phonetic symbols akin accepted, if incomplete, decipherment of
the leading Indus script researcher in to those of medieval European heraldry or the Indus script. It took more than a cen-
India, Iravatham Mahadevan. At the other the Neolithic Vina culture from central and tury to decipher the less challenging Mayan
extreme is a high estimate6 of 676 signs, southeastern Europe8. script, following several false starts, hiatuses
published this year by archaeologist and This theory seems unlikely, for various and extensive excavation throughout the
epigrapher Bryan Wells. reasons. Notably, sequential ordering and twentieth century. Indus-script decipherers
Nevertheless, almost every researcher an agreed direction of writing are universal have been on the much barer trail older
accepts that the script contains too many features of writing systems. Such rules are by two millennia for less than a century,
signs to be either an alphabet or a syllabary not crucial in symbolic systems. Moreover, and excavation of Indus sites in Pakistan has
(in which signs represent syllables), like the Indus civilization must have been well stagnated in recent decades.
LinearB. It is probably a logo-syllabic script aware through its trade links of how cunei-
such as Sumerian cuneiform or Mayan form functioned as a full writing system. Andrew Robinson is a science writer
glyphs that is, a mixture of hundreds of Nevertheless, the brevity of Indus texts based in London. He is the author of Lost
logographic signs representing words and may indeed suggest that it represented only Languages: The Enigma of the Worlds
concepts, such as &, and %, and a much limited aspects of an Indus language. This is Undeciphered Scripts and, most recently,
smaller subset representing syllables. true of the earliest, proto-cuneiform, writing The Indus: Lost Civilizations.
As for the language, the balance of on clay tablets from Mesopotamia, around e-mail: andrew.robinson33@virgin.net
evidence favours a proto-Dravidian 3300bc, where the symbols record only
1. Wheeler, M. The Indus Civilization 3rd edn 101
language, not Sanskrit. Many scholars calculations with various products (such as (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968).
have proposed plausible Dravidian barley) and the names of officials. 2. Fairservis, W. A. Sci. Am. 248, 5866 (1983).
meanings for a few groups of characters 3. Parpola, A. et al. (eds) Corpus of Indus Seals
and Inscriptions Vols 13.1 (Suomalainen
based on Old Tamil, although none of DIGITAL APPROACH Tiedeakatemia, 1987, 1991, 2010).
these translations has gained universal The dissident paper has stimulated some 4. Rao, S. R. The Decipherment of the Indus Script
acceptance. fresh approaches. Wells a vehement (Asia Publishing, 1982).
A minority of researchers query whether believer that the Indus script is a full writing 5. Parpola, A. Deciphering the Indus Script
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).
the Indus script was capable of expressing system working with the geoinformation 6. Wells, B. K. The Archaeology and Epigraphy of
a spoken language, mainly because of the scientist Andreas Fuls at the Technical Uni- Indus Writing (Archaeopress, 2015).
brevity of inscriptions. The carvings aver- versity of Berlin, has created the first, publicly 7. Farmer, S., Sproat. R & Witzel, M. Electron. J. Vedic
Stud. 11, 1957 (2004).
age five characters per text, and the long- available, electronic corpus of Indus texts 8. Lawler, A. Science 306, 20262029 (2004).
est has only 26. In 2004, historian Steve (see www.archaeoastronomie.de). Although 9. Rao, R. P. N. et al. Science 324, 1165 (2009).
Farmer, computational linguist Richard not complete, it includes all the texts 10. Sproat, R. Language 90, 457481 (2014).