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Imagine going back thousands of years. You’d find these incredible cities, the Indus Valley Civilisation, with streets laid out perfectly, fancy drains, and markets buzzing with trade. They were really advanced! But here’s the thing – we can’t read their writing. It’s like they left us a message we just can’t understand. All these symbols are carved into old things, and we’re still trying to figure out what they mean. It’s a really cool but completely puzzling part of their story.
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What is the Script of the Indus Valley Civilisation?
As we all know, the art of Indus Valley Civilisation showed a different level of expertise of the people, and they left behind almost 400 different symbols that were carved into the seals, pots, and tablets. It seems like they are trying to tell us something, but we still have not figured out their language signs, so it can’t make any sense to us. It’s a whole language we can only see, but we can’t understand that— it feels like a voice coming from really far away, but that’s not just reaching us.
What We Know About the Script of Indus Valley Civilisation?
- So, when you see these symbols, they’re usually in little strings, about five of them together. And they’re common on these small square seals, which also have animal pictures on them, like bulls, unicorns, and elephants.
- They put their writing on these seals made of soft stone as well as on copper plates and clay pots. That tells us they probably used these symbols for something specific, like when they were trading or doing government things, or maybe even in their religious ceremonies.
- Most experts think they wrote from right to left, like how you sometimes see words backward. They figured this out because sometimes the symbols overlap, and it makes more sense if you read them that way.
- The main thing is, we’re just guessing about what these symbols are supposed to tell us. Are they like letters or like pictures that mean whole words? Who knows! To make it even harder, we don’t even know what language they speak. It’s like trying to read a book in a language that doesn’t exist anymore.
Also Read:
- Indus Valley Civilization: Time Period, Culture & Excavation Sites
- Male Torso Sculpture: Indus Valley Civilization
The Challenges of Decipherment
Cracking the code behind any lost language is not an easy task. When we talk about the script of the Indus Valley Civilisation, it seems like they made it extra hard for scholars to understand.
- The writing they left is really short, like just a few words; that is also the reason to figure out what it means.
- Scholars were once able to understand the Egyptian language with the help of the Rosetta Stone, which had the same text in two languages. However, with the script of the Indus Valley Civilisation, researchers do not have anything to compare it with, which also makes the language hard to understand.
- We don’t even have any idea about what language they were using while communicating, so it’s really hard to use any language tricks to figure it out.
- They have made many different symbols, and some seem a lot different from others. It’s not like they used everything evenly.
Theories and Attempts
While facing all these hurdles, researchers have put forward a lot of theories. Some of them have suggested that the script of the Indus Valley Civilisation is most likely to be linked with Dravidian Languages, which are still spoken in southern India, while some have linked it with Indo-Aryan languages. They tried their best to understand the language and pattern while using statistics and computers that might match known languages.
The thing is, none of these attempts have really cracked the code. We’re still stuck with this mystery of the script of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Why It Matters
Imagine finally understanding their writing! We’d get to see how their society was organised, what they prayed to, how they traded goods, and even their daily lives. It’d be like opening a window to their past. And those symbols? They’re not just marks on rocks. They’re a silent story from a lost world, a puzzle we’re trying to solve. With new technology and research, maybe one day we’ll finally connect with them like we’re listening to their stories after all these years.
FAQs
The script of the Indus Valley Civilization is a writing system where the inscriptions found have almost 400 different symbols. It is considered a mystery because even after trying hard, we still cannot read them.
Examples of the Indus Valley Civilization’s script are most commonly found on small, square stamp seals. It has also been found on pottery and copper plates made of various materials.
The script of Indus Valley writing is important because it could tell us about their language, how they organized themselves, and what they believed, things we’re really curious about but don’t know yet.
The leading theory about the script of Indus Valley civilisation is that people think that maybe it is connected to the Dravidian or Indo-Aryan languages. But it is still just a guess— nothing’s been proven.
Most researchers believe that the script of Indus Valley Civilisation was usually written in right to left direction.
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