432 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 2 



The Government of India thereupon decided to concentrate on the 

 thorough excavation of Mohenjo-daro and, on a smaller scale, of 

 Harappa, and the work at the former site has for the past five 

 winter seasons been intrusted to Mr. Mackay, who came to it from 

 Kish. A recently published 3-volume book, Mohenjo-daro and the 

 Indus Civilization (168 plates), edited by Sir John Marshall,- deals 

 exhaustively with the discoveries up to 1927. A further large book 

 by Mr. Mackay, on the many new discoveries since that year will 

 shortly appear. 



The unraveling of this mystery of the past has, unfortunately, 

 been very heavily handicapped by the fact that the people of Mohenjo- 

 daro and the companion cities wrote upon some perishable material, 

 such as wood, or bark, or parchment. The finding of their seals as 

 far afield as the Sumerian cities shows them to have been great 

 traders, and they must have developed a system of receipts, contracts, 

 and other commercial documents on the same lines as did the Sume- 

 rian merchants of Ur. There is abundant evidence, too, that the 

 city was excellently administered and that litigation was developed 

 among its citizens ; legal documents must also have been customary. 

 But all have disappeared, destroyed by the dampness and salty 

 nature of the soil. 



The pictographic characters upon the many hundreds of seals that 

 have been found unfortunately hardly take us anywhere in the deci- 

 pherment of the language. They most probably give the names 

 of the owners of the seals, with perhaps a title here and there. A 

 careful compilation of the various characters on the seals shows, 

 however, that well over 300 were in use; the language was not an 

 alphabetic one, but syllabic. But without any inscriptions long 

 enough to give inflections and verbal forms there is at present little 

 hope of working out this ancient language of the Indus Valley. 

 Possibly, however, further finds in Iraq may come to the student's 

 aid. The Sumerians, and the Assyrians and Babylonians after them, 

 seem to have taken an interest in drawing up sign lists and compiling 

 grammatical forms. There is a chance that one day a tablet may be 

 discovered with the Sumerian equivalents of the Indus Valley picto- 

 graphs. Then it might be possible to identify the cities of the Indus 

 Valley with at present unidentified places with which the Sumerians 

 were wont to trade. For Mohenjo-daro is merely the modern local 

 name, "Place of the Dead"; of neither that city nor Harappa do 

 we know the name used by the inhabitants. 



In the same way that the absence of inscriptions rules out the 

 possibility of drawing up any " history " of the Indus Valley during 



2 Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization, edited by Sir John Marshall. 3 vols., 164 

 pis. Published by Arthur Probsthain, London, 1932. 



