Indus Script



Welcome to Indus Script.

A collaborative project to decipher the Indus script.

Dravidian is the prime candidate for the elite language of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), known in Mesopotamia as Meluḫḫa.

Traces of the Meluhhan language are attested as loan words in Mesopotamia, including words for IVC imports such as pīlu (ivory) and eḷḷu (sesame oil), cognates with Dravidian. Dravidian loan words are also found in the Rig Veda, which was composed in north west India circa 1500-1000 BCE.

The word Meluḫḫa (also pronounced melukhkha) is possibly cognate with the words mleccha and milakkha, words initially used by Indo-Aryan speakers to refer to foreign speech. Later literature explicitly relates milakkha languages with Dravidian languages such as Tamil.

Following the pioneering works of Steven Bonta and Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, the Indus Script is unlikely to encode normal human language, and most probably encodes metrology related information. Readers are recommended to familiarise themselves with the works of both these scholars.

Despite this, individual symbols are still likely to have linguistic meaning. This project aims to collate all plausible meanings of the various Indus symbols and to correlate them with known Dravidian words.

Link to full corpus of symbols

Project coordinator - Dr. Karan Damodaram Pillai (School of Oriental and African Studies).