As a student, when you first saw images of the ruins of Harappa and Mohenjodaro in history textbooks, your teacher likely told you that deciphering the signs engraved on the tiny Indus seal would unveil grand secrets.My article, titled ‘Semantic scope of Indus inscriptions comprising taxation, trade and craft licensing, commodity control and access control: archaeological and script-internal evidence,’ was recently published in the peer-reviewed Nature group journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. In it, I say that the Indus script mainly encoded rules and information about ancient taxation, and commercial licensing. My previous article published in the same journal back in 2019 says that Indus script was mainly written with meaning-symbols, and word-symbols, and did not phonetically spell out words. This is disheartening news to those of us who believed that decoding the Indus script would mean we would directly identify the languages spoken in the Indus valley civilisation. However, I feel that my findings about the nature and content of the Indus script do not take away the possibility that when this enigmatic script will speak to us, we will get many keys to the various dimensions of an extremely intriguing ancient world.If Indus script signs were really used to phonetically spell out words (they are not), and if the script was really used for religious purposes, or to record names of people and places, as so many scholars have wrongly imagined and claimed, what kind of information could you really expect to extract from the brief formulaic inscriptions? Since the average length of the inscriptions is just around five signs, if you consider the script to be syllabic or logo-syllabic, then you cannot reasonably expect to decode more than a few names of ancient traders and rulers, or certain names of ancient deities and places. How could such names of people, places, and deities significantly enrich your understanding of the world of the Indus valley civilisation? Fortunately, Indus script signs were not alphabets or syllables, and did not merely encode proper names. Since each of these signs symbolically encoded specific meanings, by analysing them, we can actually get to know a lot more about the people of the Indus valley civilisation. Many of these signs have retained their pictographic natures (e.g., look at some anthropomorphic script signs above). Since symbols are deeply connected with the culture and the world views of their users, we get the opportunity to understand a lot about the ancient people by decoding their symbols. Thus, each Indus script sign has a rich and complex story to tell us, offering much more than a phonetic seal-script could have offered. Moreover, since we got our hands on an ancient mercantile script, its decoding will immensely help reconstruct the pre-historical economy, commerce, and material culture of its users. Ancient scripts often use different types of symbolism. For example, certain script signs can use metonymy, where the sign may resemble an object related to a concept, to signify that concept. Such signs are language agnostic, but often culture specific. For example, in England, a crown usually symbolises “king” or “queen”, whereas in ancient Egypt, sceptres were used as royal symbols. Many of the Indus script signs were such language agnostic meaning-units (sematograms) which either directly signified the object they resembled, or metonymically signified a meaning culturally associated with the object.However, in certain cases, language-specific homonymy might have been used. For example, since “flour”, and “flower” sound similar in English, if someone wants to write English words symbolically, they may use a specific flower’s image to signify “flour”, as it is more difficult to express “flour” by a direct symbol. Certain Indus signs were arguably logograms that used such homonymy and other linguistic symbolisms. Thus, even though we cannot directly discover the languages of the Indus valley civilisation by decoding the Indus script, if we can infer the civilisation’s languages from other sources, then certain symbolisms used in certain Indus logograms can corroborate our linguistic inferences. For example, based on various archaeological, historical, and linguistic evidence, my 2021 article has claimed that languages of ancestral Dravidian language groups were spoken by a substantial population of the Indus civilisation. Various other scholars from the fields of archaeogenetics, historical linguistics, ethnoarchaeology, and anthropology, have also claimed that there is a strong linguistic, cultural, and genetic link between the Indus people and the present speakers of Dravidian languages, most of whom live in South India. Thus, some of the Indus signs might have used certain ancient Dravidian symbolism that can also be traced in certain Proto-Dravidian root-words, and their homonymic usages. However, this does not at all mean that people of other speech communities did not exist in the one-million square kilometre expanse of the Indus civilisation (c. 2600 BC to 1900 BC). It is quite possible that people of another non-Dravidian speech community had the opportunity to use their symbolism for a commodity or craft they specialised in. If I narrate the novel findings of my three Nature.com articles on Indus script and languages, built on the fascinating works of other archaeologists, historians, and linguists, we get the story below:Was Rome built in a day? Neither was the Indus valley civilisation. Even in the early Food-Producing era of pre-7000 to 5500 BC (for example, at Mehrgarh), the ancestors of Indus valley civilisation did not only excel in agriculture and animal domestication, but also had significant craft-making and bartering skills. For example, they made exquisite gemstone and shell ornaments whose materials were procured from distant places. During the Regionalisation Era (ca. 5500 to 2600 BCE), various rural settlements in the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra river valleys slowly formed large towns and market areas, and formed distinct material cultures and craft specialisations. Then, in the Integration era (c. 2600-1900 BC) of this most expansive urban civilisation of the Bronze age, there was extensive trading and communication between various Indus settlements, and also significant trading with contemporary Near East, especially ancient Persia. Due to the extremely complex nature of Indus valley civilisation’s commerce, Indus elites made various innovations in their commercial administrative techniques. Many of the Indus settlements possibly had powerful oligarchies in the forms of merchant and artisan guilds, who were either directly governing those settlements, or had collaborative relationships with local or regional rulers. These guilds and region based governing bodies needed to collect taxes to develop and maintain the fortified settlements with well-planned streets, drainage systems, water management systems etc., made available as public goods to the city-residents, and the controlled and secure market areas which were used by traders, farmers, and artisans either residing inside the fortified settlements, or coming from surrounding rural or semi-urban settlements, and distant towns. The elite groups of Indus valley civilisation needed to standardise the taxation and commercial licensing across settlements, and also needed to establish value relationships or equivalencies between various commodities, and calculate the labour values used for various commercial activities, much before William Petty, John Locke or Karl Marx. For example, to standardise their trades and exchanges, they must have had to establish how much barley was equivalent to how much cotton, or silver. Mesopotamian texts provide ample evidence of similar equivalencies and standardisations. Unlike Egyptians or Mesopotamians, Indus people did not build unnecessarily extravagant monuments. They loved intricately made miniature objects of art, and intelligently constructed and controlled urban settlements. Similarly, while the contemporary seals of ancient Near East were often used to authenticate individual ownerships of merchandise packages or individual officer’s endorsements of legal documents, Indus people believed more in organisational control, and wanted to write information related to taxation and commercial licensing on their organisationally controlled and issued seals. Now, the ancient world was generally more multilingual than today. Thus, there were surely multiple languages, and dialects across the 1,000,000-km² span of the Indus valley civilisation. So, Indus elites did not use a phonetically written script on their seals, which would have been too language-specific and thus unintelligible for many of the stakeholders. It is possible that they had certain other phonetically written regional scripts which have been lost as they were mainly written on perishable materials. Even the highly advanced Linear B script of c. 1400 BC Greece, written mainly with syllables and certain ideograms used in commercial contexts, has been found only from a few palaces due to preservation through accidental fire. Thus, just because we have not found any phonetic script of the Indus era till now, it does not necessarily mean that they did not exist. However, since the tiny Indus seals were not used to write names of people or places, such phonetic scripts are not found on seals, the same way we do not find poetry written using English alphabets in modern documents written with morse codes. The purpose of a document decides the type of writing system used on it. An infographic summary of evidences that Indus seals and tablets were formalized data carriers used in commercial contexts where trade-control, standardisation and metrology played important roles.Indus seals were highly standardised regarding their materials, the style of using certain animal iconographies and religious iconographies on them, and the way certain signs were written on them in a formulaic way. These seals are seldom found in religious contexts. The iconographies of various animals and religious scenes found on them were emblems of their issuing organizations, rulers, or governing-bodies. However, just because religious scenes are carved on certain seals, does not mean that the seals were religious amulets. If we use the iconography of goddess Lakshmi on some of our currency coins, will it mean that the coins are religious tokens? Since the seals were not properties of individuals, and were not primarily used as religious amulets, they were never found in grave-goods unlike the seals of the ancient Near East. These seals were often found concentrated in places where tax-collection and commercial licensing were done. For example, near the narrow gates of certain fortified settlements, where incoming and outgoing packages of commodities were examined, measured, and made to pay taxes, these seals are found with other tax-collection tools, such as the standardised cubical weights. These weights were used for tax-collection, not day-to-day barter, as established by archaeologists by analysing their distribution statistics and archaeological contexts. Most of these weights were less than 60 grams in weight, and the 13.6 grams weight was the most popular one. Moreover, the Indus weight system was based on India’s traditional gold-measuring unit. Thus, these weights were mainly used to collect taxes in the form of precious metals, indicating the existence of an ancient bullion standard. The seals often accompanied such weights near city-gates, and in the same rooms of ancient office buildings. Such seals and weights were often found concentrated near various craft workshops such as lapidary workshops or shell bangle workshops in several settlements. The seal-inscriptions had various commodity-types, craft-types, and tax/license-types encoded by various types of signs. Often certain stroke-numerals signifying craft/commodity/trade specific tax-rates and license-fees were mentioned before the commodity/craft signs and tax/license signs (below). After collecting tax on the merchandise of a trader, soft clay-tags stamped with inscribed seals (called sealings) were attached to the merchandise to indicate that it had paid a specific type of tax or license-fee for a specific type of commodity or commercial activity, usings a specific tax rate. Such pieces of information were cross checked at different imposts by designated officials, who compared the contents of the packages with the tax-payment information on the seal-stamp impressions attached to them, to ensure that the right type of tax was paid. Occasionally, the modes of tax payment (e.g., food grains, precious metals, etc.) were also mentioned in the seal-inscriptions. Many of such commodity-sealings, that were once attached to various types of containers, and were later preserved for auditing, are found in a warehouse-like structure in Lothal. Commodities of similar taxation categories were possibly also segregated in different chambers of such warehouses, as the inscriptions found on the commodity sealings, are also found on certain room-locking mechanisms sealed with similar inscriptions. After around 200 years of establishing the seal-based administration, certain miniature tablets were introduced which were used parallely and were closely related to the seals, as the obverse sides of these tablets mentioned identical or similar commercial records that are found on seals. The reverse sides of these tablets however mainly contained certain numerical and metrological notations (above) where the rimless-jar-like sign possibly represented a volumetric measurement used in license-fee collection, and metonymically signified corresponding licenses.The numerical signs preceding the rimless-jar-sign signified certain fixed licence-fees and licence-slabs. Often the same obverse inscriptions related to specific commercial activities and taxes (above) were applied to different license-slabs, such as below. This is functionally comparable to modern licensing systems. For example, the food-producing companies of modern India have to pay license-fees according to different license slabs based on the company’s food-producing capacity, amount of revenue, and the duration of the license.In the Localisation Era ( after 1900 BCE to 1300 BCE), when the decline of Indus economico-political units happened (for contentious reasons), it wiped out Indus valley civilisation’s large-scale organised trade, and related taxation and trade-controlling devices, such as seals, tablets, and standardised cubical weights. This can be compared to the demise of the inscribed “Bala” taxation tablets of ancient Mesopotamia, which disappeared after the UR state and its taxation system dissolved under the attack of the “Martu” tribes. Interestingly, the tax collection system and use of tax-seals mentioned in Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra of 400 BC have various similarities with the Indus taxation system reconstructed from archaeological and script-internal evidence, and arguably have an ancient Indus root, which got much more advanced, customised, and canonised by the Mauryan period. Have I decoded the Indus script yet? Yes, I claim to have partly decoded Indus script.I claim this as I have decoded its main mechanism of conveying meanings; the type of meanings encoded by it, i.e., its semantic scope; the type of information encoded by its different segments and sign-classes; and the specific meanings of a few Indus script signs. Some of the decoding are already published and presented in various seminars, while the others are being peer-reviewed, or are being written in the forms of articles. Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay is a software professional and an independent researcher. She researches the structural and semantic aspects of Indus script inscriptions and explores the linguistic identities of the people of the Indus Valley civilisation. She is a Bengali poet.The author would like to thank her senior colleague Hemant Shergare, the vice president of software at Infor Inc., and her father, Professor Amartya Mukhopadhyay, without whose moral support and encouragement, she would not have been able to continue her lonely journey in the Indus valley.
