The reconfirmation and reinforcement of the Indus script thesis: A logical assessment and inquiry as to the elusive and enigmatic nature of this script

The earliest known example of an Indus seal dates to 1873 in the form of a drawing published by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, thousands of examples of the Indus script have been discovered, and the Indus script has been subject to very serious analysis by many scholars from all over the world and still continues to fascinate, enchant and frustrate innumerable researchers who have made many a vain attempt to understand its true nature and meaning. The nature of the Indus script remains elusive and there are currently many different schools of thought – some think it represented a Dravidian language, some think it represented an IndoAryan language, while some are convinced it belongs to a third language group. Some argue that it represented a language while others argue it was only a complex ‘symbol system’, either with or without a linguistic content. In an earlier paper, ‘Syncretism and Acculturation in Ancient India; A new Nine Phase Acculturation model explaining the process of transfer of power from the Harappans to the Indo-Aryans’, which was published in two parts in the ICFAI Journal of History and Culture (January 2009 and 2010), we proposed methods to reconstruct the languages of the Harappans with ‘smoking guns’, and concluded that the Harappans spoke neither a Dravidian language nor Sanskrit but were intensely multi-linguistic and spoke several languages which included remote ancestors of languages which much later came to be known as Prakrits. In this paper, we take a parsimonious approach with regard to the Indus script, attempt to understand its nature, examine the logical flaws of current theories with regard to the Indus script and conclude that it is impossible to draw any hasty conclusions about the nature of the Indus script without building rock solid theoretical models and that the Indus script issue is probably less simple than the most simplistic of theories make it out to be. More importantly, we also refute ‘Sproat’s smoking gun’ which cannot prove that the Indus writing system was not stable, that is was not a writing system or that it did not have a linguistic component. We will conclude, that all things considered, further research is only likely to reinforce the idea that it was a logo-syllabic script and that any other scenario is highly unlikely.