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

Previously, the Iron Age burial site of Adichanallur in southern Tamil Nadu had revealed an impressive collection of iron implements, currently housed in Chennai’s Egmore Museum, dated between 1000 BCE and 600 BCE.Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, while addressing the Tamil Nadu Assembly Monday, said: “It has been found that the date of the iron artefacts ranges from 2172 BCE to 1615 BCE. The results have reiterated the fact that the Iron Age of Tamil Nadu dates back 4,200 years, which is the oldest in India.”This finding has answered questions relating to the start of agricultural activity in Tamil Nadu, he...

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...

When tooth enamel forms, it incorporates elements from the local environment -- the food one eats, the water one drinks, the dust one breathes. When the researchers looked at remains from the ancient city of Harappa, located in what is known today as the Punjab Province of Pakistan, individuals' early molars told a very different story than their later ones, meaning they hadn't been born in the city where they were found... The text of the Indus Valley Civilization remains undeciphered, and known and excavated burial sites are rare. A new study, published in today's PLOS ONE, illuminates the lives...

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...

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) last week unearthed a Harappan seal from Karanpura in the Hanumangarh district of Rajasthan. “The seal consists of two Harappan characters, with a typical unicorn as the motif and a pipal leaf depicted in front of an animal. There is a knob behind the seal,” says VN Prabhakar, superintending archaeologist, who led the ASI team. Maintaining that the discovery ‘confirms’ that the site belongs to the mature Harappan period, the time when the civilization was at its peak (2600 BC to 1900 BC), he said: “A cubicle chert weight was also unearthed in a...

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...

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...

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...

Of the identified 429 signs, "a man with jar cup", a symbol unique to the Indus civilisation and other compound letters testified to remnants of the Harappan culture, spanning from 2300 BC to 1700 BC, in South India, Varier, who led the excavation at the caves said. The "man-with-the-jar" symbol, an integral remnant commonly traced in parts where the Indus Valley civilisation existed, has even more similarities than those traced in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, he said. The 'man-with-the-jar' has been a distinct motif of the Indus valley symbols. The Edakkal engraving has retained its unique style as the engraver...

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'...

WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet.The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are...

A University of Washington computer scientist has led a statistical study of the Indus script, comparing the pattern of symbols to various linguistic scripts and nonlinguistic systems, including DNA and a computer programming language. The results, published online April 23 by the journal Science, found the Indus script's pattern is closer to that of spoken words, supporting the hypothesis that it codes for an as-yet-unknown language... In 2004 a provocative paper titled The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis claimed that the short inscriptions have no linguistic content and are merely brief pictograms depicting religious or political symbols. That paper's lead...

[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...

The earliest settlement in the subcontinent with evidence of agriculture and domestication at Mehrgarh — now in Pakistan — is about 9,000 years old. This coincides with the peak intensification of the monsoon, the study said... The Arabian Sea sediments and other geological studies show that the monsoon began to weaken about 5,000 years ago. The dry spell, lasting several hundred years, might have led people to abandon the Indus cities and move eastward into the Gangetic plain, which has been an area of higher rainfall than the northwestern part of the subcontinent... About 1,700 years ago, the monsoon began...

The discovery of a Neolithic stone celt, a hand-held axe, with the Indus script on it at Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamil Nadu is, according to Iravatham Mahadevan, "a major discovery because for the first time a text in the Indus script has been found in the State on a datable artefact, which is a polished neolithic celt." He added: "This confirms that the Neolithic people of Tamil Nadu shared the same language family of the Harappan group, which can only be Dravidian. The discovery provides the first evidence that the Neolithic people of the Tamil country spoke a Dravidian language." Mr....

Artefacts dating back 4,000 years, unearthed at a burial site in Janabiya, are shedding more light on merchant movements during the Dilmun era. Dilmun seals found at the site are inscribed with an Indus Valley inscription. Indus Valley was an ancient civilisation that thrived in an area between Pakistan and India between 2,800BC and 1,800BC... This is not the first time that Indus Valley inscriptions have been found on Dilmun seals, but it is rare, said archaeology and heritage acting director Khalid Al Sindi.

...my friends like Asko Parpola, Professor Mahadevan, and the Russians Professors who have worked on this subject. They have all been working on the assumption that the language of the Indus people was Dravidian, that the people who build the Indus Civilization are Dravidian. But unfortunately I, as well as my friend Prof. B.B. Lal in India, have not been able to agree with this... On the other hand, I have been talking to Prof. Parpola that certainly this is an agglutinative language, there is no doubt. That has been accepted by all of us. Dravidian is an agglutinative language....

Decoding Indus Valley script TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19, 2002 12:57:48 AM ] ALLAHABAD: Director, Robertson Medical Institute and Ayurveda Ratna Gopalji Agarwal on Tuesday said he had deciphered the much-elusive Indus script which, he claimed, would prove historic in the realm of world history and civilisation. In his latest discovery Mysteries of the world history unfolded, Agarwal told Times News Network that deciphering the Indus script would lead to genetic and radical changes in the current world history books. He said his discovery had brought to surface mysteries shrouding Indus archaeological finds. He said interpretation of all...

Communicating through your thoughts alone is possible — with a little technical assistance. Scientists at the University of Washington's Center for Neurotechnology have figured out how to network human minds together to collaborate to move Tetris-like shapes on a computer screen using only thoughts. It works like this: Three players, including one main player, sit in separate rooms and watch game pieces cascade down a computer screen. Using telepathy (and a lot of hardware, including a heavily wired brain cap), two players "tell" the main player which way to move the pieces to clear the bottom row. I know because...