Replies

"Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu
by T.S. Subramanian
Monday, May 01, 2006
According to Mr. Mahadevan, the first sign on the celt depicted a skeletal body with ribs. The figure is seated on his haunches, body bent and contracted, with lower limbs folded and knees drawn up. The second sign showed a jar. Hundreds of this pair have been found on seals and sealings at Harappa. Mr Mahadevan read the first sign as "muruku" and the second sign as "an." In other words, it is "Murukan." The earliest references in Old Tamil poetry portrayed him as a "wrathful killer," indicating his prowess as a war god and hunter. The third sign looked like a trident and the fourth like a crescent with a loop in the middle.
Sembiyan Kandiyur yields many a megalithic vestige
Staff Reporter
Monday, May 01, 2006
Four Harappan symbols have been recognised from the stone axe. The first one symbolises a human skeletal body with prominent row of rib seated on his haunches, body bent and contracted with lower limbs folded and knees drawn up, the second one resembles a jar symbol and the third one is like a trident and the last one is a vertical crescent with loop in the concave middle portion.

from the following title:

Parpula's two volumes of photographs covering the collections of India and Pakistan, which appeared in 1987 and 1991... and his 1994 sign list, containing 386 signs (as against Mahadevan's 419 signs), are generally recognized as fine achievements, not least by Mahadevan... This is a significant figure. It is too high for a syllabary like Linear B... and too low for a highly logographic script like Chinese. the nearest comparison... are probably the Hittite hieroglyphs with about 500 signs and Sumerian cuneiform with perhaps 600+ signs... Most scholars therefore agree that the Indus script is likely to be a logosyllabic script like its west Asian contemporaries. [pp 281-284]

These Dravidian speakers are presumably remnants of a once-widespread Dravidian culture submerged by encroaching Indo-Aryans in the 2nd millennium BC... The Indo-Aryan hymns, the Vedas... recount tales of conquest of the forts of the dark-skinned Dasa or Dasyu... the Vedas repeatedly mention the horse in their descriptions of warfare and sacrifice, and this animal was clearly a vital part of Indo-Aryan society... But there is not horse imagery at all in the Indus Valley civilization and virtually no horse remains have been found by archaeologists. Hence the Indus civilizations is unlikely to have been Indo-Aryan. [pp 290-291]

Lost Languages:
The Enigma Of The World's Undeciphered Scripts
by Andrew Robinson

Robinson mentions "a substantial inscription found at Dholavira near the coast of Kutch in 1990, which appears to have been a kind of sign board for the city." [p 295]

Uncracked Ancient Codes
(Lost Languages reviewed)
by William C. West
Sanskrit and early Dravidian, the ancient languages of India, seem to be the keys to deciphering the highly challenging script of the Indus Valley civilization of the third millennium b.c. in what is now Pakistan and northwest India. As with other languages, a photographic corpus of drawings, a sign list and a concordance must be compiled before decipherment will be possible. Work has proceeded along these lines for inscriptions on some 3,700 objects from the Indus Valley, most of them seal stones with very brief inscriptions (the longest has only 26 characters)... Robinson's descriptions of such analysis, and his accounts of both successful and unsuccessful decoding attempts, are clear, provocative and stimulating.
One sees what one wants to
by Iravatham Mahadevan
I agree with Rajaram that it is time we put this 'horse business' behind us and look at the decipherment itself. I have done so. The Jha-Rajaram 'decipherment' is completely invalid. It is, in fact, a non-starter for the simple reason that the direction of reading adopted by the authors is wrong, as demonstrated by Witzel and Farmer (Frontline, October 13, box item at p.12). The 'decipherment' makes as much sense as you would get out of this page if you try to read it from a mirror reflection.
Of Rajaram's 'Horses', 'decipherment', and civilisational issues
by Asko Parpola
It is sad that in South Asia, as elsewhere in the world, linguistic and religious controversies are the cause of so much injustice and suffering. We should remember that from the very beginning, Aryan and non-Aryan languages and associated cultures, religions and peoples have intermingled and have become inextricably mixed. Every element of the population has contributed to the creation of Indian civilisation, and every one of them deserves credit for it.

Deciphering the Indus Script
by Asko Parpola Early Tamil Epigraphy
from the Earliest Times
to the Sixth Century A.D.
by Iravatham Mahadevan


Deciphering the Indus Script by Asko Parpola	Early Tamil Epigraphy from the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. by Iravatham Mahadevan