Free Republic

Meluhha: the Indus Civilization and Its Contacts with MesopotamiaMark Kenoyer, University of Wisconsin, MadisonThe Oriental Institute | 211,313 views | October 7, 2010

Whatever their differences, all Indus researchers agree that there is no consensus on the meaning of the script. There are three main problems. First, no firm information is available about its underlying language. Was this an ancestor of Sanskrit or Dravidian, or of some other Indian language family, such as Munda, or was it a language that has disappeared? Linear B was deciphered because the tablets turned out to be in an archaic form of Greek; Mayan glyphs because Mayan languages are still spoken. Second, no names of Indus rulers or personages are known from myths or historical records: no...

Languages as diverse as English, Russian and Hindi can trace their roots back more than 8,000 years to Anatolia — now in modern-day Turkey. That's the conclusion of a study1 that assessed 103 ancient and contemporary languages using a technique normally used to study the evolution and spread of disease. The researchers hope that their findings can settle a long-running debate about the origins of the Indo-European language group...

Contact: Carrie Golus (773) 702-8359 cgolus@uchicago.edu New discoveries in Syria confirm theory on spread of early civilization Unique artifacts unearthed this season in Syria will force historians and archaeologists to rewrite the history books, because the traditional view of how civilization developed is looking increasingly wrong. A cooperative expedition between the University of Chicago and the Syrian Directorate of Antiquities has uncovered the hallmarks of urban life in Syria a little after 4,000 B.C., a time when civilization was thought to be restricted to Mesopotamia. Already during initial excavations in 1999, discoveries at Hamoukar in northeastern Syria began to suggest...

The recent International Conference on Harappan Archaeology produced an unexpected announcement from archaeologists BR Mani and KN Dikshit, both of the Archaeological Survey of India, who claim that new dates from excavations show the Harappan culture began around 2000 years earlier than previously thought.The ruins of the Harrapan city of Mohenjo-daro remained undocumented for over 3,700 years, until their discovery in 1922 by Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India. He was led to the mound by a Buddhist monk, who reportedly believed it to be a stupa. Image: Wikimedia commons Redating of Harappan culture Based on...

A group of nine Indus Valley copper plates (c. 2600–2000 BC), discovered from private collections in Pakistan, appear to be of an important type not previously described. The plates are significantly larger and more robust than those comprising the corpus of known copper plates or tablets, and most significantly differ in being inscribed with mirrored characters. One of the plates bears 34 characters, which is the longest known single Indus script inscription. Examination of the plates with x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrophotometry indicates metal compositions, including arsenical copper, consistent with Indus Valley technology. Microscopy of the metal surface and internal structure...

[Q:] There are periodic reports of Indus script being deciphered. Are there standard methods to test the validity of claimed decipherments? [A:] The best summary and evaluation of the work done so far is Gregory Possehl’s book, The Indus Age: Its writing. I myself have reviewed five claims to decipherment – two based on Sanskrit, two on Tamil and one claiming that the script is merely a collection of numbers. My conclusion is negative – that none of the decipherments has been successful... There is very little interest in the Indus script in the West – there are very few...

Scientists have used a computer program to decipher a written language that is more than three thousand years old. The program automatically translated the ancient written language of Ugaritic within just a few hours. Scientists hope the breakthrough could help them decipher the few ancient languages that they have been unable to translate so far. Ugaritic was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria and consists of dots on clay tablets. It was first discovered in 1920 but was not deciphered until 1932. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the program that the language was related to...

Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script. The team led by a University of Washington researcher has used computers to extract patterns in ancient Indus symbols. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows distinct patterns in the symbols'...

In what appears to be a new ground-breaking study, Unsealing the Indus Script: Anatomy of Its Decipherment released in November last year, author Malati J. Shendge claims that the riddles of the Harappan graphs which have bedevilled archaeologists, palaeographers and linguistic and other scholars for nearly a century have been largely deciphered. Shendge has decoded many of the seals, and the field is now open for a further understanding of a civilisation that came to an end with the invasion by the Indo-European peoples... Scholars tried to read linguistic elements into it; at times, the script was regarded as...

All those features of the Indus script which have been mentioned as proof for its not being a writing system, characterise also the Egyptian hieroglyphic script during its first 600 years of existence. For detailed counterarguments, see my papers at the website... The script is highly standardised; the signs are as a rule written in regular lines; there are hundreds of sign sequences which recur in the same order, often at many different sites; the preserved texts are mostly seal stones, and seals in other cultures usually have writing recording the name or title of the seal owner; and the...

    For the freedom you enjoyed yesterday... Thank the Veterans who served in The United States Armed Forces.     Looking forward to tomorrow's freedom? Support The United States Armed Forces Today!     ANCIENT WARFARE Part X: War in Ancient India   Naval WarfareThe old notion that the Hindus were essentially a landlocked people, lacking in a spirit of adventure and the heart to brave the seas, is now dispelled. The researches of a generation of scholars have proved that from very early times the people of India were distinguished by nautical skill and enterprise, that they...

The mixing of two distinct lineages led to most modern-day Indians. The population of India was founded on two ancient groups that are as genetically distinct from each other as they are from other Asians, according to the largest DNA survey of Indian heritage to date. Nowadays, however, most Indians are a genetic hotchpotch of both ancestries, despite the populous nation's highly stratified social structure. "All Indians are pretty similar," says Chris Tyler-Smith, a genome researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, who was not involved in the study. "The population subdivision has not had a dominating...

India's new government is poised to rewrite the history taught to schoolchildren after a panel of eminent historians recommended scrapping textbooks written by scholars hand-picked by the previous Hindu nationalist administration. Hundreds of thousands of textbooks are likely to be dropped by the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the central government body that sets the national curriculum for students up to 18. The move, one of the first made by the new Congress-led government, will strongly signal a departure from the program of its predecessor. The "saffronisation" of history, critics of the last government say, depicted India's Muslim...

Chronological History of Afghanistan Part I (50,000 BCE - 652) 50,000 BCE-20,000 BCE Archaeologists have identified evidence of stone age technology in Aq Kupruk, and Hazar Sum. Plant remains at the foothill of the Hindu Kush mountains indicate, that North Afghanistan was one of the earliest places to domestic plants and animals. 3000 BCE-2000 BCE Bronze might have been invented in ancient Afghanistan around this time. First true urban centers rise in two main sites in Afghanistan--Mundigak, and Deh Morasi Ghundai. Mundigak (near modern day Kandahar)--had an economic base of wheat, barley, sheep and goats. Also, evidence indicates that ...

Most modern Indians descended from South Asians, not invading Central Asian steppe dwellers, a new genetic study reports. The Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages—but it absorbed few genes—from the west, said Vijendra Kashyap, director of India's National Institute of Biologicals in Noida. The finding disputes a long-held theory that a large invasion of central Asians, traveling through a northwest Indian corridor, shaped the language, culture, and gene pool of many modern Indians within the past 10,000 years. That theory is bolstered by the presence of Indo-European languages in India, the archaeological record, and historic sources such...

Researchers examined the chemical composition of teeth from a Harappan cemetery used from roughly 2550 to 2030 B.C. The analysis showed that the city was a cosmopolitan melting pot. Many of the deceased had grown up outside Harappa... Many of the outsiders, surprisingly, are men buried near women native to Harappa. The findings are preliminary, but they suggest men moved in with their brides, even though in South Asia women traditionally move to their husband's homes... Bones from about 1900 to 1700 B.C. -- more than a millennium later than those examined by Kenoyer -- make it clear that at...

A study of human bones from the ruins of Harappa has revealed signs of lethal interpersonal violence and challenged current thinking that the ancient Indus civilisation was an exceptionally peaceful realm for its inhabitants. An American bioarchaeologist has said that her analysis of skeletal remains from Harappa kept at the Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta, suggests that women, children and individuals with visible infectious diseases were at a high risk of facing violence. Gwen Robbins Schug studied the skeletal remains of 160 individuals from cemeteries of Harappa excavated during the 20th century. The burial practices and injuries on these bones...

A linguistics researcher at the Macquarie University in Australia has discovered that the language, known as Burushaski, which is spoken by about 90,000 people who reside in a remote area of Pakistan, is Indo-European in origin. Prof Ilija Casule’s discovery, which has now been verified by a number of the world’s top linguists, has excited linguistics experts around the world. An entire issue of the eminent international linguistics journal the Journal of Indo-European Studies is devoted to a discussion of his findings later this month. More than fifty eminent linguists have tried over many years to determine the genetic relationship...

BRONZE Age cities archaeologists say could be the precursor of Western civilisation is being uncovered in excavations on the Russian steppe. Twenty of the spiral-shaped settlements, believed to be the original home of the Aryan people, have been identified, and there are about 50 more suspected sites. They all lie buried in a region more than 640km long near Russia's border with Kazakhstan. The cities are thought to have been built 3500-4000 years ago, soon after the Great Pyramid in Egypt. They are about the same size as several of the city states of ancient Greece, which started to come...