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Posted: 30 Oct 2021

Taken: 29 Oct 2021

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Fig. 8.I The Indus script on coppr tablets from Mohenjodaro

Fig. 8.I The Indus script on coppr tablets from Mohenjodaro

Erhard Bernstein, Nouchetdu38, J.Garcia have particularly liked this photo

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
When Sir William Jones en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_William_Johnson,_1st_Baronet first spoke of the early literature of India he had absolutely no idea of the antiquity of Indian civilization. For many years, the material record did not go back much more before the time of King Ashoka in the third century BC., and the brief accounts of north India left by the commentators upon Alexander the Great’s travels and conquests in the previous century. It was not till the year 1921 that Sir John Marshall en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Marshall_(archaeologist) (with R.D. Banerji) made his great discovery of the Indus Valley civilization, with the investigation of two of its great cities Mohenjodao and Harappa. He found huge brick built cities in the fertile food plains of the river, with well-planned street layout and many of the features of urban life with which scholars were already familiar from the discoveries in Mesopotamia. Amongst these were a well-developed craft specialization -- for instance in pottery and bronze -- and no doubt a highly structured social organization, reflected in the citadel at each site, with its large public buildings. The civilizatin was already flourishing shortly after 3000 BC., but had gone into irreversible and rather rapid decline by 1800 BC

This was a literate civilization. Most of the inscriptions are preserved upon sealstones, generally with only a few characters each. This has allowed very thorough studies of the script, in which some four hundred signs were found, fifty-three of them used commonly. This suggests that it must be mixed hieroglyphic and syllabic script rather than a pure syllabic script like Minoan Linear B. There are of course too many signs for the alphabet, yet not enough for a true pictographic script like that of the Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Chinese script. Various efforts have been made to decipher this script, and the Finnish scholar A. Parpola has produced an impressively lucid analysis. At present, many specialists favour an interpretation using the assumption that the language of the sealstons is related to the Dravidian languages. These are the languages of modern central and southern India, consisting a different language group from the Indo-European languages are intrusive into the north of the Indian sub continent, and that the Dravidian languages were already there when they came. Other attempts at decipherment have been made on the alternative assumption that the script is related to proto-Elamite tablets have been found at the important site of Tape Yahya on the south Iranian plateau. Still other efforts to decipher the inscriptions have been made, assuming instead that the language of the Indus Valley sealstones is in fact in early form of Indo-European. In my view, it is difficult to feel that any of these decipherments has yet been particularly successful, not even that of Parpola or the Russian scholars who have claimed the inscriptions as early Dravidian. The difficulty is that in each case, for a successful decipherment, one needs to start with something that is known. So far, unfortunately there are no bilingual inscriptions involving the Indus script, nor can any proper names yet be recognized in it. So the present decipherments consist in assuming a solution, and then trying o show that the results are plausible. This can lead to a positive results, but again it can easily be an exercise in self-deception, and it is not clear that convincing progress has been made on the interpretation. This is not, however, to belittle the very important work which scholars have conducted in preparing a computer-based corpus of inscriptions, and an analysis of the occurrence and co-occurrences of the individual signs. ` Page 185
3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE
3 years ago.
 J.Garcia
J.Garcia club
Great pic and superb note!
Thank you very much for this very interesting subject, Dinesh
3 years ago.

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