Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: blam
The Hindu sacred writings were produced by Aryans who migrated into India after the fall of the Indus civilization, long, long after this city was destroyed.

BTW, thanks for the link.

23 posted on 06/03/2002 4:57:55 PM PDT by colorado tanker
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies ]


To: colorado tanker
Those Aryan migrations into India have not been definitively proved (i.e., it is possible that the homeland of the Indo-European languages was or included India.) Further, even if the migrations occurred, they may have happened much longer ago than conventional Indo-Europeanists have supposed. And the Vedic literature may be quite a bit earlier than the conventional date of 1500 BC that is given to it.

See the new book by Edwin Bryant, The Quest For the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford U.P. 2001).

26 posted on 06/03/2002 6:35:23 PM PDT by aristeides
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies ]

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]
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]

Lost Languages: The Enigma Of The Worlds Undeciphered Scripts Lost Languages:
The Enigma Of The World's Undeciphered Scripts

by Andrew Robinson

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.

36 posted on 12/02/2004 10:44:28 PM PST by SunkenCiv ("All I have seen teaches me trust the Creator for all I have not seen." -- Emerson)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson