Four Thousand Messages, Five Signs Long: The Script of the Indus Cities

2026-08-22 · True Mysteries Editorial Desk · Unsolved Ciphers · 8 min read

The object is smaller than a matchbox. It is a square of steatite, a soft grey stone, about two and a half centimetres on a side, pierced on the back so it could be worn on a cord. On the front an animal stands in profile, an ox-like creature with a single curved horn. Above the animal runs a line of marks: a jar, a fish, a set of vertical strokes, a figure like a man with raised arms. There are about four thousand objects like this. Nobody alive can read a single one of them.

The first of them reached print in 1875, when Alexander Cunningham, the first director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India, published a seal that had turned up at a mound called Harappa in the Punjab. The signs on it matched no script anyone knew. Cunningham assumed it was foreign, some import from a place that would eventually be identified. For nearly fifty years it sat in the literature as a curiosity with no context.

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