Earliest Indus Script Signs Appear at Harappa

Date

c. 3300 BCE

Category

Culture, arts & philosophy

Region

Indus Valley (Pakistan/NW India)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

During the Early Harappan (Ravi and Kot Diji) phases, the first known symbols of what would become the Indus script appear, incised on pottery at Harappa, with occupation levels dated to roughly 3500-3300 BCE.

These proto-writing marks gradually developed into a system of some 400-700 distinct signs used on stamp seals, sealings, copper tablets and pottery during the Mature Harappan period. Inscriptions are characteristically very short, averaging about five signs, and no bilingual text or 'Rosetta Stone' has ever been found. Despite well over a century of effort and more than a hundred claimed decipherments, the script remains undeciphered, and scholars cannot even agree whether it encodes a spoken language or a non-linguistic symbol system. Its emergence places South Asia among the small handful of regions of the ancient world that independently developed writing, alongside Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, making it a foundational milestone even though its messages stay silent.

Related culture, arts & philosophy events

• Megalithic monuments of Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe
  c. 3700 – 2900 BCE
• Behavioural modernity and major Out-of-Africa dispersal
  c. 70,000–50,000 years ago
• Göbekli Tepe – monumental architecture by hunter-gatherers
  c. 9,600–8,000 BCE
• Upper Paleolithic art and symbolic explosion
  c. 40,000+ years ago
• World's earliest figurative and narrative cave art on Sulawesi
  c. 51,000 – 45,500 years ago
• Chauvet Cave: early masterworks of figurative cave art
  c. 36,500 years ago

Further reading

The Story of Art

The wider story

The Story of Art

E. H. Gombrich

The best-selling art history ever written, from cave paintings to the modern age.

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