Deciphering the Indus Script

Deciphering the Indus Script
Author: Asko Parpola
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2009-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780521795661

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 Archaeology and Epigraphy of Indus Writing

The Archaeology and Epigraphy of Indus Writing
Author: Bryan K. Wells
Publisher: Archaeopress Archaeology
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Indus script
ISBN: 9781784910464

A detailed examination of the Indus script. It presents new analysis based on an expansive text corpus using revolutionary analytical techniques developed specifically for the purpose of deciphering the Indus script.

The Roots of Hinduism

The Roots of Hinduism
Author: Asko Parpola
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2015-07-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190226935

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 Deciphered Indus Script

The Deciphered Indus Script
Author: N. Jha
Publisher:
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2000
Genre: Harappa Site (Pakistan)
ISBN:

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.

Indus Valley Civilization Script Decoded

Indus Valley Civilization Script Decoded
Author: Prabhunath Hembrom
Publisher: Notion Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2020-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1646787293

Scientists discover Y-DNA haplogroups O2a and mt-DNA haplogroup M4a in the Rakhigarhi ancient DNA. These haplogroups are associated with the speakers of Austro-Asiatic languages such as Mundari, Santali and Khasi. These haplogroups and related languages are also present in Southeast Asia. In India, speakers of these languages are currently found mostly in Central and East India. Even though a prominent philologist of Harvard University, Mr. Michael Witzel, has argued the case for a language close to Munda (which he calls para-Mundari) being one of the languages of the erstwhile Indus Valley, a finding of this nature will come as a surprise to most others. So if the genetics do find haplogroups O and M4a in Rakhigarhi, some of our current understanding of Indian history may have to be revised. Tony Joseph in The Hindu, December 23, 2017

The Indus

The Indus
Author: Andrew Robinson
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2021-03-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1780235410

The Indus civilization flourished for half a millennium from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, when it mysteriously declined and vanished from view. It remained invisible for almost four thousand years, until its ruins were discovered in the 1920s by British and Indian archaeologists. Today, after almost a century of excavation, it is regarded as the beginning of Indian civilization and possibly the origin of Hinduism. The Indus: Lost Civilizations is an accessible introduction to every significant aspect of an extraordinary and tantalizing “lost” civilization, which combined artistic excellence, technological sophistication, and economic vigor with social egalitarianism, political freedom, and religious moderation. The book also discusses the vital legacy of the Indus civilization in India and Pakistan today.

Indus Script & It's Language

Indus Script & It's Language
Author: Rama Sarker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2002
Genre: Excavations (Archaeology)
ISBN: 9788185616704

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 Stages Of Development In Identification Of Basic Signs Of The Dug Script Has Been Explained Vividly Kith Adequate Analytical Charts And Examples And The Languages And The Languages As Old Indo-Aryan In Compariosn 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.

Indian Hieroglyphs

Indian Hieroglyphs
Author: Srinivasan Kalyanaraman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 800
Release: 2012
Genre: Hieroglyphics
ISBN: 9780982897126

The book links the invention of writing to the inventions of bronze-age technologies. Indus script is claimed to be one of the earliest writing systems of the world dated to c. 3500 BCE. The book claims that Indian language union (sprachbund or Indian linguistic area) dates back to the period when Indus script was used. About 1000 lexemes of Meluhha (mleccha) have been identified and explained in the context of ciphertext of Indian hieroglyphs. These substratum glosses are the foundation for further studies in the evolution of languages and linguistic features absorbed from one another, in Indian language union (sprachbund). Using evidence from almost all hieroglyphs in the 6000 + inscriptions, this book makes a contribution to an understanding of the middle phase in evolution of writing systems, a phase which bridged pictographic writing with syllabic writing to represent sounds of a language called meluhha (mleccha) in Indian language union - lingua franca of Harosheth hagoyim, smithy of nations. The continuum of hieroglyph tradition in Indian linguistic area is evaluated in the context of continued use of Indian hieroglyphs on thousands of punch-marked coins together with syllabic scripts of kharosti and brahmi . The book establishes that ancient India was a language union with speakers of Munda, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages learning technical words related to bronze-age metallurgy from one another. They used these words in the writing system. The book draws heavily from a multi-lingual dictionary of over 25 ancient languages called Indian Lexicon for unraveling the cipher of the Indus script, as an exercise in solving a cryptography problem. The writing system was called mlecchita vikalpa (Cryptography of Meluhhas/Mlecchas) and is mentioned in an 8th century BCE work by Vatsyayana. The Indian hieroglyphs find their echoes in the goat-fish hieroglyphs on a ritual basin of Uruk (Sumer) and the Egyptian hieroglyph for Bat showing a mudhif reed symbol which also occurs on Uruk basin. The 'reed' read rebus denotes Glyph: eruva 'reed'. Rebus: eruva 'copper'. Also discussed are some Egyptian hieroglyph parallels from the statue of Hathor-Menkaure-Bat triad of the fourth dynasty and the continued tradition of building reed huts by Todas comparable to the mudhifs of ancient Sumer. This book is a sequel to the author's Indus Script Cipher (2010). http: //tinyurl.com/7dflhyq