Decoding 6,000-Year-Old Language Can Bury North-South Divide

Brishti Guha
Mar 8, 2025 | 13:09 IST




Most earlier attempts at decipherment involved assigning values to very short inscriptions (one or two symbols long). However, when the same symbols occurred in longer inscriptions, the assigned values would fail to result in a meaningful phrase or a grammatically correct word – resulting in the decipherers assigning an entirely different possible meaning to the same symbols once they occurred in longer inscriptions. Thus, the number of possible solutions kept going up as more messages were read, so no one could say what the correct solution actually was.

As an example, suppose a decipherer finds three one-symbol inscriptions and thinks they mean “cat”, “jar”, and “go”. But he then finds a fourth inscription with all three of these symbols. It is hard to justify “cat jar go” as a meaningful sentence, and so he must assign a completely different meaning to this combination of symbols once they occur together.

Yajnadevam’s first task was to fix on a likely candidate for the language of the Indus script. At the outset, he was able to rule out a large family of languages called “agglutinative languages”, that include all Dravidian languages, and ancient middle eastern or near eastern languages like Sumerian, Elamite, and Hittite. This was because of several mismatches between the pattern that all these languages follow, and the pattern of the Indus symbols.

First, the Indus script had cases where the same symbol was repeated three times consecutively. This never occurred in Dravidian or other agglutinative languages, but it did occur in old Vedic forms of Sanskrit (for instance, jajaja which means “I fought”).

Second, agglutinative languages never had compound words composed of more than two root words, while the Indus script had such words, as does Sanskrit. Third, agglutinative languages had prefixes or suffixes that could not exist as separate words and that were always joined to the root word in a fixed order. However, the Indus script had possible prefixes and suffixes also occur as separate words, and they occurred in different positional order in different inscriptions. This was inconsistent with agglutinative languages, but consistent with Sanskrit. Thus, Yajnadevam started his decipherment taking Sanskrit to be the language of the Indus script.

By using standard code-breaking methods (first identifying the symbol with the highest frequency, then the symbol which occurs most frequently along with it, in a sequence until all symbols are identified), he assigned values to the symbols.

He then found, to his surprise, that the assigned values resulted in meaningful words and grammatically correct Sanskrit expressions. At this point, he was able to decipher and translate messages on individual Indus inscriptions and seals, eventually reading more than enough to satisfy Shannon’s threshold for uniqueness. This showed that not only was it possible to read the inscriptions in Sanskrit, but that it would not be possible to read the entire body of Indus inscriptions using a different language. He says his work establishes Sanskrit as the language of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).

The translated inscriptions mention Vedic deities (like Shiva/Rudra, Indra, and others), yajnas or havans, horses, food, and often ask the deities for blessings or protection for a sea voyage. There are messages where the writer mentions that the ocean is his home. This bears out archaeological evidence and Sumerian accounts of extensive international trade (including ocean trade) during the IVC.

Some messages were carved onto bangles and other ornaments, showing that both the craftsman and the buyer were literate. Some Indus script inscriptions found in foreign locations, like Susa or Ur, used Indus script to write words in Akkadian for specific traded goods, like “wine” or “cumin”. This was presumably done so that it would be understandable by both parties in an international transaction.

The next interesting thing that Yajnadevam did was to compare each Indus symbol with the symbol producing the same sound in Brahmi. He found an amazing physical similarity between Indus symbols and Brahmi symbols associated with the same sound. This, coupled with the existence of mixed inscriptions containing both Indus and Brahmi script, showed that Brahmi had naturally evolved from Indus script.

Such mixed inscriptions were found all over the country, even as far south as Keezhadi in Tamil Nadu, where 600 BCE mixed inscriptions could be read as meaningful Sanskrit words (for example, “powerful” was written on an axe). In fact, some mixed inscriptions persisted even into the Gupta age, while others were found in foreign countries like Vietnam (where they could also be read as Sanskrit).

How does this decipherment change our view of our history? First, the main tenet of the Aryan invasion/migration theory is that steppe invaders/migrants brought in Sanskrit into our country sometime around 1500 BCE. They then also imposed their culture, religion, and this language (Sanskrit) on us. However, the decipherment shows that Sanskrit was not only being spoken, but even written, way back in 4000 BCE, negating this.

Second, a main source of the north-south divide is also the Aryan invasion theory, which says northerners are descended from steppe invaders who drove away the original IVC inhabitants, who became the ancestors of the southerners. The decipherment, by beautifully establishing the linguistic, cultural, and religious continuity of our civilisation, has destroyed both these theories.

The writer is associate professor, School of International Studies, JNU
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