US scholars label the Indus Valley Civilization as illiterate

Indus Valley is the pride of people of Indian-sub-continent, as much a part of their civilized history as today’s culture. In its heyday the civilization rivalled Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. But the history of this civilization is surrounded in mystery. There is no written record of the entire civilization, except for a few tablets. Many experts in south Asia and elsewhere believe that symbols and marks inscribed on seals and other artefacts found here represent an as yet un-deciphered language.

However, recently experts based in the US have put forward another theory claiming that although the symbols may contain information, they are not a true language. They claim the judgement of their counterparts in south Asia may be swayed by regional nationalism.

In the early 20th century, Harappa Mohenjo-daro ruins in the south of Pakistan were excavated, and it was at that time many of the seals now on display in museums containing symbols and images of animals were discovered. And they have continued to beguile, fascinate and frustrate scientists, causing a running controversy that has played out on internet message boards, scientific papers and at academic conferences.

Indian experts believe that the Indus script may have been a forerunner of so-called Dravidian languages, such as Tamil, spoken today in southern India and Sri Lanka. In addition to technical clues, the continued existence of a Dravidian language in modern Pakistan – Brahvi, which is spoken by people in parts of Balochistan – supports this idea.

However, all these hypotheses still can't be proven. Part of the problem for the experts is that, unlike for those who cracked the hieroglyphics of Egypt, there is no equivalent of the Rosetta stone, the slab of granite-like rock discovered in 1799 that contained Egyptian and Greek text. In the 1950s, academic interest in Mayan hieroglyphics intensified when experts began to study modern spoken Mayan, but for the Indus scholars there is no agreement on which, if any, modern language is the successor to their script.

In 2004 three American scholars claimed the Indus symbols were not a language at all. In a paper provocatively subtitled “The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilisation”, they said there was insufficient evidence that the symbols constituted a proper language. They pointed to various factors: that there was no single long piece of text; that there was disagreement over the number of actual symbols and that other well-organised societies had been illiterate. The symbols, they argued, may well contain information in the same way that an image of a knife and fork together might represent a roadside eatery but they were not a language that could record speech.

The theory ensued an uproar from the sub-continent, who denounced the theory as a racist indulgence. This led to counter-research and within a couple of years a team of Indian scientists ran computer programmes which led them to conclude the symbols almost certainly constitute a language. Central to their claims was the theory of "conditional entropy", or the measure of randomness in any sequence. Because of linguistic rules – such as in English the letter Q is almost always followed by a U – in natural languages the degree of randomness is less than in artificial languages.

The US team didn't back down. They put forward a counter-arguement questioning Indian team’s conclusions and methodology. This ferocious pursuit by the US scholars has led many Asian experts to belive that the US researchers are following a racist agenda.