The most enigmatic objects from the
Indus Valley civilization are small
square or rectangular-shaped pieces of
soapstone, which are believed to have
been official seals for merchants and
other individuals. Archaeologists have
unearthed more than two thousand of
these seals, which generally combine a
pictorial image with an inscription.
Most of the seal images are common
domestic animals, particularly the bull,
but a few portray mythical beasts such
as a unicorn, or even more intriguing
human figures. One well-known example of the latter shows a human figure—
perhaps a mythic hero—strangling a
tiger with each hand. Other figures
include a horned man, in one case
standing in front of a table and in another
sitting in a yoga-like position. He is
sometimes identified as an early form of
the god Shiva and cited as evidence that
this deity’s cult came from the Indus
Valley cities.
Far less is known about the seal
inscriptions, since the writing system
for these inscriptions has never been
deciphered, although many different
theories have been advanced. One reason for the disagreement is the division of opinion regarding the Indus
Valley culture itself. Those who believe
that Indus Valley culture preceded the
arrival of the Aryans, and was distinct
from it, tend to look for evidence in
the Dravidian language family, which
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Indus Valley Seals
is linguistically distinct from the IndoAryan language family. Those who
espouse the Indigenous Aryan view,
which identifies the Indus Valley culture
with that of the Aryans, tend to seek
their evidence in the earliest Sanskrit
texts known as the Vedas.
None of these theories have proved
irrefutable, and part of the difficulty in
deciphering this script comes from the
inscriptions themselves. Linguists have
identified 419 different symbols, which
seems too many for the script to be
alphabetic, but too few for each of these
symbols to stand for a single word, as is
the case in Chinese. The seals’ small size
also means that these inscriptions tend
to be extremely short. Such brevity
makes the text difficult to understand,
since one lacks the contextual patterns
that a longer text would supply. In their
efforts to decode these inscriptions, linguists are working with a series of short
and unrelated textual fragments. The
script could probably be definitively
deciphered with the discovery of a bilingual inscription, but in the absence of
such a key, the problems may prove to
be insurmountable. For further information see F. Raymond Allchin, The
Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia,
1995; and Romila Thapar, Interpreting
Early India, 1992. For the Indigenous
Aryan viewpoint, see David Frawley, The
Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India,
1994; and Vedic Aryans and the Origins
of Civilization, 1997.