Is that what pajama boy called himself back then?
Nice bunny jamas....hahahahaha
Posted on 10/17/2014 10:28:15 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
In fact... I wonder if that whole text is about Soma — and if the plant on it is the mystery plant which was pressed for its juice.
Is that what pajama boy called himself back then?
Nice bunny jamas....hahahahaha
I can translate...see the jumping guy and that wine glass and the the football looking thing next to the guys head?
“You will jump for joy at our two for one drink special this NFL Sunday”
That could explain all the odd costumes and horns they were seeing. ;’)
Soma was made from a plant that doesn’t grow in the Indus Valley, too wet and hot down there. Soma comes from Afghanistan, is still used in traditional medicine, and turns the water a kind of pink color when steeped.
Soma isn’t known to have arrived until the Aryans arrived from Central Asia and brought it (and the literature about it) with them.
Good point. There must have been a literate class, at the very least, probably analogous to many an ancient civ’; the Egyptians and the Romans both relied on quasi-literacy among the general population, iow an understanding of a relatively few symbols (number system in Roman times; the Egyptians had symbols for “enter here” on the temples’ public entrances), with a fair percentage of people who could read and sometimes write.
In the Euphrates basin, regular flooding led to a need for both surveying (math) and recordkeeping (accounting, then writing) to make sure people were able to stay on their property and cultivate it. I’d be surprised if something along those lines didn’t happen along the Indus as well.
Settled agriculture is the basis for civilization, and leads to larger, healthier populations, larger families, more leisure time, and the development of other arts and industries, as well as standing armies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Sarianidi
http://www.ejvs.laurasianacademy.com/ejvs1102/ejvs1102article.pdf
http://www.ejvs.laurasianacademy.com/ejvs0901/ejvs0901d.txt
http://www.ejvs.laurasianacademy.com/ejvs0901/ejvs0901c.txt
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/aryans/index
About that statue of the “dancing girl”.
Her left arm. Couldn’t that be some form of armor or protective wear? What’s in her left hand?
Could she, possibly, not be “dancing” but geared up for a sport of some sort?
And, could that be proof that they were all left handed?
Heh.
Yeah, the world’s oldest sport. ;’)
Funny that the “solid gold plates”, in the dimensions that Smith describes, would weigh so much as to be unmovable by a single man.
It’s unclear whether the Indus Valley symbols are a form of true writing, or an icon-type symbol set that communicates a limited range of messages. The reason some experts suspect the latter is that no inscription containing more than a couple dozen symbols has ever been found.
The Mycenaeans are known to have used at least two different writing systems (Linear B, which records Greek, and cuneiform, the diplomatic script of the ancient world, in use longer than we’ve used the alphabet), and yet very few examples have survived (and AFAIK, no literature, just records of production and religious offerings) of one, and essentially zero of the other (in any known Greek context; the archival copy of at least one letter to the Greek high king is known from Hattusas). It was easy to regard pre-Classic Greece as illiterate, which is in fact what was believed, even insisted on, until Ventris cracked Linear B in 1953.
A better example is the Etruscans — they were literate and literary, with a robust tradition; today only a handful of longer undisputed Etruscan texts survive, and at least one of those uses an adaptation of the Carthaginian alphabet, and is scratched into a metal sheet, making survival more likely. I believe the longest of the texts was preserved on a mummy wrapping, which meant it had been sold for reuse, and suggests that much of their writing material simply vanished over the centuries. The Lemnian Stele from the Aegean is apparently a dialect of Etruscan. The rest of the Etruscan inscriptions are on gravestones and are, obviously, short and largely free of any meaningful grammar. A few words and phrases survive in Latin texts from the Roman era.
Since it was agglutinative, it could only be either Uralic or Dravidian (the others are too far away) - and since Sumerian and Elamite was agglutinative and these three were in contact with each other it's not too far fetched, in my opinion to construct a grand Elamo-Dravidian language tree.
I find the entire evolution of Hinduism as fascinating -- with the Vedas not mentioning (or mentioning only once) the current "Trinity" of Hindu gods: Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma. And the Vedic gods like Indra reduced to fools in the Christian era (under Krishna's thumb who teaches Indra a lesson that Indra's just a servant to him). I think Hinduism heavily changed from Vedic to the post-Jainic/post-Buddhist Brahmanical Hinduism and then was heavily influenced by Christianity and Manichaenism to make its Asuras into devils and take on the Trinity concept.
Satindoll is right — and also gives an explanation for the paucity of writings — perhaps they were written on material that was even more ephemeral?
At the time I posted the snark comment about sports, I did (and still) have the opinion that the girl statue did appear, to me, to be wearing an armor sleeve. The statue also gave (and still gives) me the impression of “hidden weapon” in the right hand.
IF I was an appropriately pedigreed archaeologist, I’d proclaim that statue representing a young woman in combative training.
But, I suspect it’s a much much older martial arts form than the one you mentioned. Possibly an original predecessor art form.
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