Deciphering the Indus Script (book review)
Deciphering the Indus Script
book review published in
The Journal of the American Oriental Society (10-21-1996)
by Dr. Richard Salomon, University of Washington
Philologists tend to be a cautious and intellectually
conservative bunch. On the whole, this is as it should be, since caution tends to
produce good textual scholarship. It is not, however, conducive to the kind of
intellectual adventurousness and intuitive power that are often a necessary
ingredient for the decipherment of an unknown script. Although Asko Parpola is
a philologist of unchallenged credentials, such a spirit of adventure is
visible from the very beginning of his latest work on the Indus script, where
he sets forth his methodological principle: "Guesses that are as bold and
detailed as possible are not only the easiest kind to test but also wield the
maximum explanatory power if they turn out to be right" (pp. 3-4). Such a
comment might tend to set off an alarm in readers who are familiar with the
many bold, detailed, and totally worthless guesses that have been proposed to date
for the decipherment of the Indus script. But the guesses proposed in this book
are of a very different sort; that is, they are very well educated guesses, and
ones that deserve to be carefully and seriously considered. Moreover, unlike
some other writers on the subject, Parpola recognizes and concedes that they
are, in fact, guesses.
In the author's own words, "the method [of successful decipherments]
consists initially of proceeding as far as possible without making guesses. When
the time for guessing comes, the range of the guesses will have been limited by
the preparatory analysis" (p. 61). In the present case, such preparatory
analyses are scrupulously rigorous and well researched. The book begins with a
general chapter on "The Indus Civilization and Its Historical
Context," followed by chapters on "Early Writing Systems,"
"Deciphering an Unknown Script," and " Approaches to the Indus
Script." Each contains an exemplary presentation of complex subjects and
establishes that the author has done a vast amount of groundwork in the
relevant fields and has mastered the material completely. This much alone
justifies the price of the book and the time spent in reading it. It also
raises expectations for the arguments of the subsequent chapters, in which the
author applies his data and theoretical principles to the interpretation of
twenty-four of the graphic signs in the Indus seals (summarized on pp. 275-77).
Parpola's approach to the interpretation of the Indus script combines
several approaches, which, as usual, are all masterfully, if somewhat
speculatively, applied. Among the techniques employed are the analysis of
positional and segmentation patterns within the inscriptions, the detection of
interpretive clues from the objects themselves, the invocation of comparative
data from archaeological and ethnographic sources, and the visual analysis of
the signs of the script themselves. The first of these methods is elaborated in
chapter 6, "Internal Evidence for the Structure of the Indus Language,"
in which Parpola identifies three distinct positional groups, each of which
tends to contain particular signs or sign groups. Such patterns may provide
clues to the interpretation of the texts themselves, as shown, for example, by
the arguments for suspecting that position I phrases are likely to be titles
(p. 91). In theory, they should also yield information about grammatical
structures and inflections, although in this regard the author concedes that
"we must conclude by frankly admitting our present inability to identify
morphological markers with any certainty" (p. 97).
The analysis of the seals and other inscribed objects themselves can yield
similar clues. For example, in chapter 7, "External Clues to the Indus
Script," Parpola notes that the larger, more ornate, and more skillfully
made seals tend to have longer inscriptions and special iconographic features.
In such inscriptions we might expect to find prestigious titles such as
"king" (p. 116), and Parpola suspects that this is to be found in the
wheel-like symbol and its ligatures. In support of this tentative
interpretation he offers comparative data from both the ancient Near East,
describing the wheel sign as "strikingly similar to some prominent symbols
of kingship in Near Eastern . . . iconography" (p. 104), and from later
Indian traditions, referring to the persistent symbol of the cakravartin and
his dharmacakra (p. 106).
Such analogies, based on the well-attested archaeological links between the
Near East and the Indus culture, on the one hand, and on "concrete
evidence suggesting that the later South Asian tradition has preserved genuine Harappan
survivals" (p. 104), on the other, are exploited at length in support of Parpola's
other proposed "readings" of Indus script symbols. In these readings
he presents phonetic and/or logographic interpretations on the basis of
reconstructed proto-Dravidian words that can be associated with the presumed
iconic value of the written symbols. This approach is justified by the detailed
discussion in chapters 8 and 9 of the linguistic context of the Indus culture
and its writing, in which Parpola presents strong arguments for the position
that the Dravidian language family is the one most likely represented by the Indus
script.
This conclusion is offered, in the bold spirit that is so characteristic of
this book, on the grounds that "an uncertain hypothesis is better than no
hypothesis" (p. 137). As usual, the hypothesis is well grounded in hard
data, including geographical and linguistic patterns based on the distribution
of the Dravidian languages and related areal characteristics (see esp. p. 167),
and on archaeological facts, notably the complete absence of horse-related
relics in the Indus sites, which is taken to rule out an Indo-European language
and culture (p. 159). These arguments in favor of the Dravidian hypothesis are,
in general, already familiar to readers of recent studies of the decipherment
problem, including those of Parpola himself, and reinforce what is now
something like a majority consensus in its favor.
Having presented this background for his decipherment, Parpola boldly
ventures in the remainder of the book (chapters 10 through 15) to posit actual
Dravidian readings for specific graphemes and sequences. His starting point for
this is the interpretation of the frequent "fish" symbol and its
variants as a rebus sign for 'star' on the basis of the homophony of
proto-Dravidian min 'fish' and min 'star' (p. 181). This too is familiar from Parpola's
earlier publications, but here it is developed in greater detail and
interpreted in terms of a supposed Indus valley cult of star and planet
worship, supported by ethnographic observations of similar practices in
classical and modern India. By way of illustrating Parpola's methods, the
following is a summary of his interpretation (presented in chapter 13,
"Evidence for Harappan Worship of the God Muruku") of the combination
of the fish/star graph with six short vertical lines, presumably indicating the
number six:
The combination of 'star' and 'six' denotes the Pleiades, and by association
the Dravidian god Muruku/Murukan, who in later Indian mythology is identified
with the wargod Skanda, the son of the Pleiades. It
is "most likely that Murukan and Rudra-Skanda are both descended
from one of the principal deities of the Proto-Dravidians, and that his name or
names occur in the Indus inscriptions" (p. 226). The combination
'six-star(s)' alternates in one pair of seal inscriptions (M-112 and M-241)
with the sequence 'intersecting circles-pair of vertical lines' , which
therefore "may be a name of Skanda" (ibid.). The sign
'intersecting circles' can be connected to Muruku by way of a rebus reading of
Proto- Dravidian *muruku 'ring', from *murV 'to twist'. This interpretation is
supported by the fact that the sign 'intersecting-circles' occurs frequently in
the inscriptions on Harappan bangles. Moreover, the sign 'pair of vertical
lines' associated with it in M-241 can be read as an iconic representation of
Proto-Dravidian veli 'enclosed or intervening space' used in rebus fashion to
represent the compound name muruka- vel attested for the war-god in Old Tamil
literature.
This is only a brief summary of a much more complex presentation, but it may
suffice to illustrate in a general way the techniques and principles by which
Parpola justifies his "readings." The arguments are invariably
ingenious, well informed, and amply documented. The analytic, linguistic, and
ethnographic data are woven together into an interpretative tapestry that is
highly attractive, but not exactly seamless. For although each specific link is
justified, the thread of associative argumentation sometimes seems too long and
tangled. By way of illustration of the doubts that these interpretations
arouse, I here summarize another argument (pp. 261ff.):
The inscription on the famous 'fig-tree' seal from Mohenjo-daro (M- 1186)
includes a sign 'fish with a dot inside' which "is likely to represent the
deity depicted on the seal" (p. 261). The deity, interpreted as a goddess
of fertility and victory analogous to the later Hindu Durga, may be associated
with the personified star Rohini 'the red (female)'. In later Hindu ritual,
both of these deities are associated with fish. The dot sign inside the fish
thus could be interpreted as representing the Dravidian word *pottu 'dot, spot,
round (red) mark on the forehead' and its homophone *pottu 'kind of fish'. The
red forehead dot is in modern Hindu tradition associated with Rohini, which
word can also denote 'a marriageable young virgin'. The vermilion used for
marking the forehead of the bride in modern Bengal is kept in a fish-shaped
box. Thus, "The menstrual blood (rohita) in the womb of the sexually
mature girl (rohini) corresponds to the icon of 'a dot inside a fish' in the
Indus pictogram that we have supposed to signify the star Rohini"; and
"The fish-shaped vermilion box with its contents, the red powder, is
another instance of such a correspondence of image with the Indus sign."
(p. 267)
Here it is hard to avoid the impression of over-interpretation of data that
are connected only distantly at best. Granted, each association has some
validity in and of itself; but when we step back and look at the whole, is it
believable that the fish-shaped vermilion box used in modern Bengali weddings
is in any way relevant to the interpretation of a particular graph on the Mohenjo-daro
fig-tree seal? This strains credibility. Nor am I convinced, by the conclusion
to this chapter, that "the Indus sign turns out to be not simply a
phonetically used grapheme, but a highly condensed religious symbol, which
suggests . . . that the still surviving ancient Hindu habit of making a red
mark on the forehead probably goes back to the third millennium BC" (p.
272). Such a loading of multiple levels of meaning onto what is presumably a
logogram and/or a phonetic rendering thereof goes against too much of what we
know about early logo-syllabic writing systems (as clearly summarized by the
author himself in chapter 2 of this book). If, contrary to what we might have
expected from reading the earlier chapters, the Indus script turns out to work
quite differently from the other most ancient scripts, in incorporating
multiple levels of symbolic and visual values in addition to the normal
logographic and phonetic ones, this would be most surprising - not impossible,
but surprising - and such a hypothesis requires more justification on a
theoretical and comparative level.
After all this, the book has something of a surprise ending. Having
developed at length his provisional case for a decipherment, Parpola concludes
that "it looks most unlikely that the Indus script will ever be deciphered
fully, unless radically different source material becomes available" (p.
278). Yet he adds, in the last sentence of the book: "That, however, must
not deter us from trying." The sentiment is quintessentially
characteristic of the spirit of the book as a whole. The author is not timid
about making bold hypotheses, and in some places he seems to have overshot the
mark. But this is not to say that his ideas are easily disregarded. On the
contrary, in some ways this is the best informed, most cogently argued, and
important work to date on the Indus script. If a definitive, even if only
partial, decipherment is ever achieved, it would not be at all surprising if
the general outlines of the interpretations proposed by Parpola prove to be
correct, even if some of the specific details will probably not. The
methodological reservations expressed above notwithstanding, it may well turn
out that Parpola's approach to the phonetic identification of Indus characters
is in broad outline correct. In any case, this book will define the study of
the Indus script for years to come, whether positively or negatively, or, more
likely, both.
Richard Salomon, University of Washington
Salomon, Richard, “Deciphering
the Indus Script” (book reviews). Vol. 116, The Journal
of the American Oriental Society, 10-21-1996, pp. 745(3)
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