Introduction

South Asia has been home to a nearly unique variety of writing systems over the past four millennia and more, comprising: one of a handful, worldwide, of script inventions out of nothing; two highly sophisticated adaptations of phonetic writing, grounded in preexisting linguistic theory; a plethora of paleographic, epigraphic, and typographic descendants; two successive adoptions of world scripts from the West; and a number of inventions of local scripts for local languages.

Indus script

Little can be said about the writing system that appears to have originated on South Asian soil, the so-called “Indus Valley” script, or Harappan (for the site where it was first found, in 1872–1873), because it has not yet been deciphered. One difficulty is that the inscriptions, virtually all of which are on small seals, are very short; another is that the language they record is not surely identified (though a form of Dravidian is the most likely candidate). Even the number of discrete characters is uncertain, since we cannot be sure which variants represent distinct signs, which might represent modifications of base forms, and which might simply represent scribal/artistic freedom.

The inscribed Indus seals date from about 2500 bce on and have been found throughout the Indus Valley region; a few have even turned up in Persian Gulf lands and Mesopotamia. They went out of use around 2000 bce, when their cities seem to have been abandoned due to climate change (rather than to invading Aryans, who appear on the scene perhaps half a millennium later).