Deciphering the Indus Script.

AuthorSalomon, Richard

Philologists tend to be a cautious and intellectually conservative bunch. On the whole, this is as it should be, since caution tends to produce good textual scholarship. It is not, however, conducive to the kind of intellectual adventurousness and intuitive power that are often a necessary ingredient for the decipherment of an unknown script. Although Asko Parpola is a philologist of unchallenged credentials, such a spirit of adventure is visible from the very beginning of his latest work on the Indus script, where he sets forth his methodological principle: "Guesses that are as bold and detailed as possible are not only the easiest kind to test but also wield the maximum explanatory power if they turn out to be right" (pp. 3-4). Such a comment might tend to set off an alarm in readers who are familiar with the many bold, detailed, and totally worthless guesses that have been proposed to date for the decipherment of the Indus script. But the guesses proposed in this book are of a very different sort; that is, they are very well educated guesses, and ones that deserve to be carefully and seriously considered. Moreover, unlike some other writers on the subject, Parpola recognizes and concedes that they are, in fact, guesses.

In the author's own words, "the method [of successful decipherments] consists initially of proceeding as far as possible without making guesses. When the time for guessing comes, the range of the guesses will have been limited by the preparatory analysis" (p. 61). In the present case, such preparatory analyses are scrupulously rigorous and well researched. The book begins with a general chapter on "The Indus Civilization and Its Historical Context," followed by chapters on "Early Writing Systems," "Deciphering an Unknown Script," and "Approaches to the Indus Script." Each contains an exemplary presentation of complex subjects and establishes that the author has done a vast amount of groundwork in the relevant fields and has mastered the material completely. This much alone justifies the price of the book and the time spent in reading it. It also raises expectations for the arguments of the subsequent chapters, in which the author applies his data and theoretical principles to the interpretation of twenty-four of the graphic signs in the Indus seals (summarized on pp. 275-77).

Parpola's approach to the interpretation of the Indus script combines several approaches, which, as usual, are all masterfully, if somewhat speculatively, applied. Among the techniques employed are the analysis of positional and segmentation patterns within the inscriptions, the detection of interpretive clues from...

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