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''. The writing abovie it is inscribed in the mature Indus script.]] The term Indus script (Harappan script) refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Harappan Civilization ( Indus Valley Civilization ) of Ancient India (most of the Indus sites are distributed in present day Pakistan and North West India ) used between 2600 – 1900 BC , which evolved from an early Harappan script attested from around 3500 BC , and was followed by a late Harappan script used until around 1500 BC . They are most commonly associated with flat, rectangular stone tablets called seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials. The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1875 , in the form of a drawing by Alexander Cunningham . Since then, well over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. After 1900 BC , use of the symbols ends, together with the final stage of Harappan civilization. Some early scholars, starting with Cunningham in 1877 , thought that the script was the archetype of the Brahmi script used by Ashoka . Cunningham's ideas were supported by G.R. Hunter, and many Indian scholars continues to argue for the Indus script as the predecessor of the Brahmic Family . There are over 400 different signs, but many are thought to be slight modifications or combinations of perhaps 200 'basic' signs. ATTEMPTS AT DECIPHERMENT Over the years, numerous Decipherment s have been proposed, but none has been accepted by the scientific community at large. The following factors are usually regarded as the biggest obstacles for a successful decipherment:
The Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola , who has edited a multivolumed corpus of the inscriptions, surmises that the symbols represent a logo-syllabic script, with an underlying Dravidian language as the most likely linguistic substrate. If the signs are purely Ideographical , they may contain no information about the language spoken by their creators, and cannot be called a script in the true sense of the word. Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel make the case that the symbols were not coupled to oral language, which in part explains the extreme brevity of the inscriptions. This view has been challenged by Parpola, but has a growing number of adherents. Other writers, such as S. R. Rao , have attempted to prove that the script encodes Vedic Sanskrit . These theories are not accepted by most scholars. Another line of study, due to Kak , is to focus only on the morphological connection between Indus and Brahmi without stressing the question of the decipherment. This work indicates that Brahmi is derived from Indus . This view was first put forward by Cunningham in the 1870s, but is not accepted by any Western scholars. REFERENCES
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