Indus (Harappan)

The Indus script (also called the Harappan script) was used by the Harappan cultures living in the Indus valley between roughly 3000 - 1900 BC. Although the script was discovered in 1875 and there have been numerous attempts to decipher it, little is known about the configuration of the symbols. There are no remaining examples of the formative stages of the script, so it is not possible to trace a genetic affiliation to any other known script. Furthermore, the script died out in 1900 BC with the Indus Valley Civilization, leaving no descendents.

There has been some controversy surrounding the script, as to whether it represented a spoken language at all, or whether the symbols were merely religious or political symbols having no linguistic content. In 2004 a paper entitled \\\The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis\\\" (this can be read in full  here) was the first widely-read suggestion that the symbols discovered in the Indus Valley may not have represented a language. The authors claims were refuted by a statistical study comparing the pattern of symbols to other linguistic and non-linguistic systems