This book being the first critical assessment of all significant attempts at decipherment of the Indus script and technicalities involved in the models, explains how a breakthrough in decipherment has been achieved as a sequel to scientific analysis. It has highlighted the progress made in decoding the Indus people. The structural analysis of the Indus script not only meets this desideratum but also throws new light on the different approaches to the problems. It has convincingly demonstrated that the failure by most scholars to carry the structural analysis of all the compound signs in the Indus script to its logical conclusion and a-priori assumptions of a language of their choice were the stumbling block. It has cleared the mystery of the so-called undecipherable script and brought together all the ramifications of analysis and interpretation by various scholars and examined objectively. The evolution of Indus writing has been clearly illustrated through the process of simplification from partly pictorial and partly cursive and linear writing in the early stage towards cursive and linear writing by gradually dropping most of the pictorials in the late Harappan writing resulting in a reduction in the number of basic signs to 21. With such a small number of basic signs the Indus script must have been a phonetic writing only. The stages of development in identification of basic signs of the Indus script has been explained vividly with adequate analytical charts and examples and the languages as old Indo-Aryan in comparison with those of a known script. It has rendered signal service to the scholarly world by providing basic data needed for understanding the intricacies of a mixed writing of bygone days.
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