Decoding 6 K- year old Language can bury modern myths

Decoding 6K-Year-Old Language Can Bury Modern Myths

Work by an Indian cryptographer on the still-undeciphered Indus Valley script suggests Sanskrit may have been the root language. If true, it questions Aryan invasion theory as well as the north-south divide.

By Brishti Guha

Yajnadevam, aka Bharath Rao, is a rare cryptographer—among epigraphists, archaeologists, linguists, etc.—who can claim to have cracked the code deciphering the Indus Valley script.

The earliest pottery with Indus script symbols dates to 4,000 BCE. Ever since, the Indus script has resisted attempted decipherments.

Many ancient scripts were deciphered using bilingual or trilingual inscriptions. Champollion’s decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics was based on the fact that the Rosetta Stone (produced during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt) had the same Greek names written in ancient Greek and hieroglyphics.

Another famous decipherment was due to Henry Rawlinson, who traveled to the Zagros Mountains, where he saw a trilingual inscription in old Persian, Elamite, and Sumerian. Risking his life, he precariously climbed a sheer cliff and accurately copied the inscription, using his knowledge of Persian to also help decipher the Elamite and Sumerian scripts.

Similarly, a breakthrough in decipherment of the Brahmi script was made using a bilingual coin minted by the Indo-Bactrian king, Agathocles. The coin had his names in Greek on one side and in Brahmi on the other. However, Indus inscriptions were never conveniently accompanied with an identical message in a known script.

Yajnadevam used cryptography, building on a 1945 information theory. During WWII, Shannon was asked to determine if all codes could be broken. He found that once enough coded messages had been read, a unique solution would emerge.

Most previous attempts at deciphering the Indus script tried assigning values to very short inscriptions. However, when the same symbols occurred in longer inscriptions, the sheer number of possibilities made it fail to result in a meaningful phrase—resulting in decipherers assigning different possible meanings to the same symbol.

Thus, Yajnadevam started his decoding taking Sanskrit to be the language of the Indus script. By using code-breaking methods—identifying the symbol with the highest frequency, then the symbol that occurs most frequently alongside it, in a sequence, until all symbols are identified—he assigned values to the symbols. He found the assigned values resulted in proper words, grammatically correct expressions. He was able to decipher enough to satisfy Shannon’s threshold for uniqueness.

Per Rao, his decoding makes it possible to read Indus inscriptions in Sanskrit. Equally, it would not be possible to read the entire body of Indus inscriptions using a different language. Inscriptions mention deities, havans, horses, food. There are messages where the writer mentions the ocean is his home. This bears out archaeological evidence and Sumerian accounts of extensive international trade during the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC).

Yajnadevam compared each Indus symbol with the symbol producing the same sound in Brahmi, to find physical similarity. This, coupled with the existence of mixed inscriptions containing both Indus and Brahmi script, showed, he says, that Brahmi had evolved from the Indus script.

How does this decipherment change our view of history?

First, the main tenet of the Aryan invasion theory is that steppe invaders brought Sanskrit into the country sometime around 1,500 BCE. They then imposed their culture, religion, and this language (Sanskrit) on us. However, Rao’s decipherment suggests that Sanskrit was not only being spoken but even written, back in 4,000 BCE.

Second, part of the north-south divide rests on the Aryan invasion theory, which says northerners are descended from steppe invaders who drove away the original IVC inhabitants, who became ancestors of southerners. Yajnadevam’s study, by establishing linguistic, cultural, and religious continuity of our civilization, destroys these theories.

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

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