The Decipherment Of The Indus Script

Of the writing systems of the ancient world which still await deciphering, the Indus script is the most important. It developed in the Indus or Harappan Civilization, which flourished c. 2500-1900 BC in and around modern Pakistan, collapsing before the earliest historical records of South Asia were composed. Nearly 4,000 samples of the writing survive, mainly on stamp seals and amulets, but no translations. Professor Parpola is the chief editor of the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions. His ideas about the script, the linguistic affinity of the Harappan language, and the nature of the Indus religion are informed by a remarkable command of Aryan, Dravidian, and Mesopotamian sources, archaeological materials, and linguistic methodology. His fascinating study confirms that the Indus script was logo-syllabic, and that the Indus language belonged to the Dravidian family.

The deciphering of the Indus script has met with suspicion and is exposed to ridicule even. Many people are nowadays of the opinion that the Indus script is altogether indecipherable, if not a bilingual of considerable size turns up. The approach to a decipherment presented in this volume makes avail of a bilingual, too, but its masterkey is the discovering of the symbolic connection of the Indus signs with the metaphoric language of the Rg-Veda. Nearly 200 inscriptions, among them the longest and those with the most interesting motifs, have been decoded here by setting them syllable for syllable in relation to Rg-Vedic verses. The results that were gained by this method for the pictographic values of the Indus signs are surprising and far beyond the possibilities of the most daring phantasy. At the same time many problems of the Rg-Veda could be solved or new insights be won.

Why and how is Indus script in Tamil? Starting from the author's ground breaking work "Read Indussian"(2012), more undeniable evidences have come up in support of the Tamil scripts of Indus valley civilization. Rosetta like seals which are the ultimate mode of proving an ancient language have been elucidated in this book with gratitude to I.Mahadevan and A.Parpola for the picture references from their Concordances, Texts and Tabulations of Indus scripts.

The Book Demonstrates That The Harappan Script Is Well On Its Way To Decipherment.

This is a path-breaking work as significant as the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Champollion. For nearly130 years, the Indus script has remained a challenging enigma to scholars of languages, writing systems and civilization studies. The script was invented and used over an extensive area of what is called the Indus or Sindhu-Sarasvati civilization. Over 2000 or 80% of archaeological sites are found on the Sarasvati River basin, a river adored in a very old human document called the Rigveda and which dried up due to tectonic and resulting river migration causes. In 1822, history was made when Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered by Jean-Francois Champollion from parts of the Rosetta Stone. Champollion showed that the Egyptian writing system, c.3000 BCE was a combination of phonetic and ideographic glyphs. The Rosetta Stone is dated196 BCE and had a decree in three versions: one in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, one in the Egyptian demotic script, and one in ancient Greek. Since alphabets of ancient Greek were known, Champollion used the trilingual inscription to validate his historic decipherment. Indus Script Cipher makes history recording hundreds of hieroglyphs of India. Absence of a Rosetta Stone which has been the principal impediment in validating any decryption of Indus script cipher is thus overcome. Further validation comes from evidences of the historical periods in India from c. 600 BCE showing continued use of Indus script hieroglyphs which evolved from c. 3300 BCE. This book details a decipherment.of the Indus script using the same rebus method used by Champollion to read ancient phonetic hieroglyphs of Indiat. By demonstrating an Indian linguistic area of cultural and language contacts and history of language changes, this is a landmark contribution to civilization studies of the world and will promote efforts to rewrite the ancient socio-cultural and economic history of a billion people in India and neighboring regions.

The present volume is devoted to the study of the Indus script and its decipherment. It offers a methodology for reading the Indus script by combining paleography with ancient literary accounts and Vedic grammar.These illustrate the methodology and also help shed new light on the Harappans and their connections with the Vedic Civilization.The language of the seals is Vedic Sanskrit,with a significant number of them containing words and phrases traceable to the ancient Vedic glossary Nigha, compiled from still earlier sources by Yaska.

Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.

The languages of the ancient world and the mysterious scripts, long undeciphered, in which they were encoded have represented one of the most intriguing problems of classical archaeology in modern times. This celebrated account of the decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris was written by his close collaborator in the momentous discovery. In revealing the secrets of Linear B it offers a valuable survey of late Minoan and Myceanean archaeology, uncovering fascinating details of the religion and economic history of an ancient civilisation.