Between Script and Symbol: A Critical Review of Indus Seal Interpretation, Decipherment Efforts, and Scholarly Traditions

摘要

This review article synthesizes the archaeological background of the Indus seals, the present status of decipherment, the major international interpretive traditions, and the profile of Chinese scholarship on the subject. Although the Indus seals are among the most iconic artifacts of the Bronze Age, no decipherment has yet won broad scholarly acceptance. A narrow but important consensus does exist: the inscriptions are very short; the predominant direction of writing on most seal inscriptions is right-to-left; the sign inventory is substantial but unstable because of allography, ligaturing, and segmentation problems; and no secure bilingual key has been found. Within language-based hypotheses, a Dravidian orientation remains the strongest mainstream candidate, not because it has solved the script, but because it aligns better than most rivals with cumulative philological work, substrate evidence, and regional historical plausibility. Sanskritic or Indo-Aryan decipherments, by contrast, often face chronological and methodological objections. The nonlinguistic thesis made an important critical intervention by exposing the weaknesses of many earlier decipherment claims, but it may overstate the negative case when it treats the absence of a conventional phonographic script as evidence that no structured linguistic or semi-linguistic coding was present. Recent semasiographic and administrative models have redirected attention from full translation toward institutional meaning, especially in relation to trade regulation, taxation, craft licensing, sealing practices, and access control. Computational and artificial-intelligence approaches have improved corpus management, allograph detection, image archiving, and the testing of structural claims, but they have not resolved the language question by themselves. Chinese-language scholarship has contributed through comparative philology, seal studies, and debates about whether writing should be treated as a universal criterion of civilization; independent Chinese-language decipherment claims also exist, but they have not been accepted internationally. The study argues that future progress will depend less on dramatic claims of complete decipherment than on a disciplined integration of archaeology, epigraphy, historical linguistics, seal-use contexts, and reproducible digital methods.