It is a riddle that has confounded scholars for over a century. And now it carries a handsome cash prize: $1 million for anyone who can decipher the script of the ancient Indus Valley civilization.
Relatively little is known about the creators of the script, who built a sprawling urban system about 5,000 years ago across what is modern-day India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Excavations at more than 2,000 sites have unearthed a wealth of artifacts. But until the civilization’s script can be read, its language, culture and religion, as well as the history of its rise and fall, will remain shrouded in mystery.
The prize, announced by M.K. Stalin, the chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, is intended to renew efforts to decipher the script. The push, however, is not merely about historical scholarship. It is the latest front in a cultural war over India’s ancient past.
The country’s ascendant Hindu nationalists argue that the Aryan race, which brought the Vedic religion of Hinduism to India, represents the original Indian people. The claim is central to the concept of Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu supremacy promoted by the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Mr. Stalin’s party, and many others, hold a different view. They say that the Dravidians of southern India are the country’s indigenous people, and that the Aryans of northern India were invaders from Europe. (In reality, the distinction between Aryans and Dravidians is itself not clear-cut.)
Deciphering the script, the debate’s partisans believe, could help settle the question.
In Hindu nationalists’ conception of the past, the Indus script most likely has links to Sanskrit, a classical language of India and the one in which the Hindu scriptures were written.
In the minds of Mr. Stalin and others, the script most likely has Tamil roots. (Tamil, a Dravidian language, is another classical language of India.) That, in turn, would cement the Dravidian claim to being the original inhabitants of India.
It is not for a lack of trying that the script has remained undeciphered. Archaeologists, technology experts and linguists the world over have been endeavoring to unlock the script for years, Mr. Stalin said while announcing the $1 million prize.
Asko Parpola, a Finnish Indologist who has studied the Indus script since 1964, said that deciphering it could put the Indus Valley civilization in the realm of history rather than prehistory, giving new perspective to India’s cultural evolution.
But a politically motivated effort, he warned, could decide the results in advance and try to find evidence to justify them.
The Indus Valley civilization, also called the Harappan civilization, is seen by experts as on a par with the better-known ones of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China.
One of the earliest, it flourished on the banks of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers during the Bronze Age. It had planned townships, water management and drainage systems, huge fortified walls and exquisite pottery and terra cotta artistry.
Since the Archaeological Survey of India announced the first findings on the civilization in 1924, around 5,000 inscriptions have been excavated.
They are engraved in stone or metal, or stamped onto fired clay. The brevity of the inscriptions, along with the absence of a Rosetta Stone-like text showing its symbols in translation, are among the reasons the script has not been deciphered, scholars say.
Mr. Parpola postulates that the signs found on the clay tablets were pictures that should be read as complete words. They could also be read phonetically, for homophones, he argues.
He believes that his research offers proof of the script’s Dravidian roots. The fish signs found in many inscriptions, he theorizes, were pictograms that could also mean “star” — the Dravidian word for fish, “meen,” was a homophone for star.
Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, a researcher who has tried to decipher the script for 10 years, differs with Mr. Parpola on the fish hypothesis.
She argues that the fish signs were used to signify categories of shiny commodities like gemstones and polished copper and bronze items. Calling the Indus script a “mercantile script,” Ms. Mukhopadhyay said that examples in which fish signs were used consecutively represented the names of related commodities, and that the excavated clay tablets were tax stamps.
The script is meant to be read as symbols, not phonetically, Ms. Mukhopadhyay said. “To show ivory, for example, they simply used a tusk-like sign,” she said.
Mr. Parpola, who is working on the sixth volume of “Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions,” a database of all available material culture on the Indus civilization, said he had received a lot of mail over the years from enthusiasts and researchers claiming to have cracked the script or found new inscriptions.
Aziz Kingrani, an academic in Pakistan, shared on social media one such bit of correspondence. Mr. Parpola congratulated Mr. Kingrani on a book he had written, but expressed regret that his findings had not substantially advanced the deciphering of the script.
“Please do keep on searching,” Mr. Parpola wrote.