Was the Indus script the world's first writing?
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The Harappan script is very old, but writing appears a few centuries earlier in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Indus script is still not deciphered.
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Indian claim
The Indus script is the oldest writing in the world, and it has been deciphered as an early form of Sanskrit.
Evidence for the Indian claim
- Britannica dates the fully developed Indus script to about 2600 BCE, with some signs going back to earlier pottery marks.
- Thousands of Indus seals and inscriptions show a well-organised writing system used over a large area.
Commonly credited to
The first writing systems are Sumerian cuneiform in Mesopotamia and Egyptian hieroglyphs, from around 3200 BCE.
Evidence for the other claim
- The oldest written records in Mesopotamia are proto-cuneiform tablets from Uruk, about 3200–3000 BCE (Britannica).
- More than a hundred decipherments of the Indus script have been published but none is widely accepted; there is no bilingual inscription to check them against.
- A 2000 book claiming to decipher the script as Vedic Sanskrit included a 'horse seal' that Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer showed (Frontline, 2000) to be a computer-altered image of a broken unicorn-bull seal.
What historians and scientists say
The Indus script is one of the world's earliest scripts, but Mesopotamian and Egyptian writing came a few centuries earlier. Claims to have deciphered it, in Sanskrit or any other language, are not accepted.