The Indus script has been called, with irony, the most deciphered script in the world. The first claim to a decipherment, based on the Sumerian language, was published as early as 1925. More than a hundred published claims have been made since then, including the controversial example published in 2000 in the Deciphered Indus Script: that the Indus language is Vedic Sanskrit. But although there has been some definite progress in understanding the script over the decades, none of the “decipherments” has persuaded anyone other than the proposer and a few others.
Even the number of texts is open to debate. Parpola counts about 5,000, Mahadevan 2,906 and Bryan Wells 3,835 inscribed objects. The total depends on how one assesses fragmentary and damaged inscriptions. The vast majority of the inscriptions – some 85%, according to Mahadevan – were found at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. About 60% are on seals, but some 40% of these are duplicate inscriptions, so the useful total for the would-be decipherer is not as large as it seems. More inscriptions were found in the 1990s, but the Indus script corpus is not abundant. Then an inscription is tantalisingly brief: many consist of only a single character, the average...
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