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Bryan Wells, a visiting scholar at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences who wrote his doctoral thesis on the Indus Valley symbols at Harvard, agrees, in theory, with Mahadevan and Adhikari – that the symbols form a script. “But I don’t know why you need mathematical models to know it’s a language. You just have to look at the damn thing.” Nathan G for The National

Code unknown: the fierce argument over ancient Indian symbols "Our algorithm looked at a corpus of 417 Indus Valley symbols, from 2,906 individual texts,” Adhikari says. “Then it ran every possible two-character combination to compute the probabilities.” For comparison, the team also turned the program loose on Sumerian, English and Old Tamil scripts, and on two control batches of non-linguistic symbols. The results, plotted as a graph, look striking. The curve representing the Indus Valley symbols sits, along with the other known languages, in a dense bunch, which looks like a quartet of snakes trying to eat each other. The plots for the non-linguistic symbols, meanwhile, float serenely far above and below this intertwined bundle. On this metric, the Indus Valley curve coincides nearly exactly with that of Old Tamil, the most ancient of the known Dravidian languages. “When we published our results,” Adhikari says, “we were immediately called Dravidian nationalists.”

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Beyond boundaries: Explaining his motivations, Singh referred back to his origins in Sindh (the province famous for its syncretistic and tolerant Hindu-Muslim culture) and suggested that he could only mourn the subsequent division of pluralist communities on the basis of abstract and singular religious identities. “In Jaisalmer,” he said, “Muslims don’t eat beef, Rajputs don’t eat pork.” Singh went on to speak wistfully of a famous shrine in Indian Sindh that is revered by both Muslims and Hindus.