The Indus civilization was literate: steatite (soapstone) seals used for stamping the clay sealings on merchandise, copper tablets and some pottery objects all bear short inscriptions in an attractive pictographic script.
Sophisticated computer analyses show that the language that the script records was almost certainly an early form of Dravidian, distantly related to the modern languages of South India and once much more widely spoken.
Examination and comparison of Indus inscriptions shows that the writing went from right to left. There are several hundred different signs, showing that this script was a mixture of symbols representing things or ideas and symbols representing sounds.
Some depict easily recognizable things - a man, a crab, a fish; others are much less obvious, and scholars cannot agree on their meaning.
The Indus people probably wrote longer texts on perishable materials like wood, but all we have left are extremely short inscriptions on seals, which probably record the names or titles of officials or merchants: material clearly too restricted ever to allow the script to be read.
