Q1.
Looking at these three Harappan seals with some writing signs, what goes through your mind? Would you like to suggest any interpretations? Let your imagination run!
Answer
First, look hard at what is actually printed on page 99. All three seals are built the same way: a row of signs along the top and a single animal below, facing left, standing on a base line.
| Seal | Animal shown | What is striking about it |
|---|---|---|
| Fig. 6.13-1 | A unicorn — a one-horned animal | The commonest animal on Harappan seals, and an animal that does not exist in nature — so it must stand for an idea, a clan or a story |
| Fig. 6.13-2 | A bull | A real, powerful, everyday animal — the strength that pulled the plough and the cart |
| Fig. 6.13-3 | A horned tiger | A real animal given an impossible feature. Again, this is imagination at work, not a portrait |
What we know for certain: the seals are only a few centimetres across; they are made of steatite, a soft stone hardened by heating; thousands of them have been excavated from many settlements; the signs above the animal “are part of a writing system”; and “what is certain is that they somehow relate to trade activities.”
What we do not know — and this is the important half:
- The writing system has not been deciphered. Nobody today can read a single Harappan sign with certainty.
- The symbolic meaning of the animals is equally unknown.
- So any interpretation you offer — including the ones below — is a suggestion, not a translation.
Interpretations worth suggesting (this is what the box invites you to do):
- A merchant's name-tag. Pressed into soft clay on a bundle of goods, the seal says whose the bundle is — like a stamp or a signature. This fits the book's own explanation: traders needed “to identify their goods — and also each other”.
- A city or workshop mark, showing where the goods came from.
- A family, clan or guild emblem — the unicorn for one group, the bull for another, the way a school has a house symbol.
- A licence or permit issued by the city's administration to a trader.
- A protective or lucky symbol, since the animals include imagined ones.
Why the undeciphered script matters so much: writing is one of the seven characteristics of a civilisation, and the Harappans clearly had it. But because we cannot read it, we do not know their language, their rulers' names, their laws, their gods or their stories. Everything in this chapter had to be worked out from things — bricks, drains, beads, bones and pots. If the script is ever read, half of what you have learnt here may be rewritten.
Careful: you will sometimes see confident claims that the Harappan script has been ‘decoded’. Hundreds of such claims have been made and none is accepted. The correct sentence, and the one this textbook uses, is: “that system … is yet to be understood.”