Tamil Nadu CM’s $1 Million Prize: Deciphering the Indus Script to Unravel Harappan Mysteries

Published : Mar 04, 2025 16:11 IST - 11 MINS READ Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. In her recent book on India’s linguistic prehistory, Father Tongue, Mother Land, Peggy Mohan mentions the decoding of two Indus script signs by one of the writers of this piece, Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay. The fish sign of the Indus script is possibly related to an ancient Dravidian symbolism that used mīn based words for shiny, glittering commodities such as gemstones, glazed ceramics, or highly polished copper/bronze objects. “Even with limited data, we can understand several important aspects of the Indus script inscriptions if we study them in an unbiased way, without imposing our preconceived religious, cultural, or politically motivated notions on them.” The other issues that stand in the way of decoding the Indus script are our limited knowledge of the languages spoken in the IVC, our limited understanding of how those languages influenced the symbolism of the script’s signs, and the absence of any ancient Indus document containing the same text written in an Indus script and any other known script and known language, that would have enabled us to decode the script through comparison. The Indus script inscriptions should be considered as partly decoded when we understand the structural mechanisms through which they conveyed meanings, the type of meanings they conveyed, and the specific meanings of some of the Indus script signs whose iconicity or symbolism match their archaeological contexts, script-internal patterns, and the symbolism associated with such meanings in ancient India.