The Indus Script and the Ṛg-Veda
The Indus Script and the Ṛg-Veda

Author: Egbert Richter-Ushanas

Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9788120814059

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The deciphering of the Indus script has met with suspicion and is exposed to ridicule even. Many people are nowadays of the opinion that the Indus script is altogether indecipherable, if not a bilingual of considerable size turns up. The approach to a decipherment presented in this volume makes avail of a bilingual, too, but its masterkey is the discovering of the symbolic connection of the Indus signs with the metaphoric language of the Rg-Veda. Nearly 200 inscriptions, among them the longest and those with the most interesting motifs, have been decoded here by setting them syllable for syllable in relation to Rg-Vedic verses. The results that were gained by this method for the pictographic values of the Indus signs are surprising and far beyond the possibilities of the most daring phantasy. At the same time many problems of the Rg-Veda could be solved or new insights be won.

Indus Writing in Ancient Near East
Indus Writing in Ancient Near East

Author: S. Kalyanaraman

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 574

ISBN-13: 9780982897188

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Based on corpora of Indus writing and a dictionary, the book validates Aristotle's insight on writing systems. Indus writing is composed using symbols of spoken words. The symbols are hieroglyphs of meluhha (mleccha) words spoken by artisans recording the repertoire of stone, mineral and metal workers. The writing results in a set of catalogs of metalworking of bronze age. Evidence of this competence in metallurgy which evolved from 4th millennium BCE of bronze age, is provided in corpora of metalware catalogs and a dictionary of melluhha (mleccha). Indus writing was a principal tool of economic administration for account-keeping by artisan and trader guilds and did not record literature or, history. Some sacred ideas and historical links across interaction areas between India and ancient Near East, may be inferred from the writing.

Indus Script Concordance
Indus Script Concordance

Author: Devajyoti Sarkar

Publisher: Vamra Vaikhanasa Publishing

Published: 2023-06-14

Total Pages: 6520

ISBN-13: 4991273927

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The Indus civilization was one of the earliest civilizations of the ancient world. At its peak, it was more than ten times larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined and three times their population. Yet it remains a riddle of prehistory. Its script is the last great script to remain undeciphered. This concordance is an attempt to make the corpus of Indus inscriptions organized and searchable in a digital format. It covers 3,649 objects with 5,037 inscriptions from across 40 Indus sites. At more than 10,000 pages, it is a comprehensive reference for the domain. It allows the reader to efficiently search and navigate the corpus by location, object types, and writing direction. It is the only resource that allows you to search the collection by letters, words, and patronymics. In order to help the first-time reader, the Introduction provides a background of the Indus civilization and its script. It presents a unique analysis of the typography of the Indus seals and compares it to modern fonts. It systematically analyzes the script down into constituent forms and links to resources for a Unicode encoding and an open-source font for the script. The book itself serves as an example of those resources. This concordance is based on a complete decipherment of the Indus script that I will publish separately. It leverages that to identify characters and words and present a consistent and complete coverage of the inscriptions.

Deciphering the Indus Script
Deciphering the Indus Script

Author: Asko Parpola

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-10-01

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9780521795661

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Of the writing systems of the ancient world which still await deciphering, the Indus script is the most important. It developed in the Indus or Harappan Civilization, which flourished c. 2500-1900 BC in and around modern Pakistan, collapsing before the earliest historical records of South Asia were composed. Nearly 4,000 samples of the writing survive, mainly on stamp seals and amulets, but no translations. Professor Parpola is the chief editor of the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions. His ideas about the script, the linguistic affinity of the Harappan language, and the nature of the Indus religion are informed by a remarkable command of Aryan, Dravidian, and Mesopotamian sources, archaeological materials, and linguistic methodology. His fascinating study confirms that the Indus script was logo-syllabic, and that the Indus language belonged to the Dravidian family.

Illustrated Indus Script Concordance
Illustrated Indus Script Concordance

Author: Devajyoti Sarkar

Publisher: Vamra Vaikhanasa Publishing

Published: 2023-06-15

Total Pages: 11164

ISBN-13: 4991273919

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The Indus civilization was one of the earliest civilizations of the ancient world. At its peak, it was more than ten times larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined and three times their population. Yet it remains a riddle of prehistory. Its script is the last great script to remain undeciphered. This illustrated concordance attempts to make the corpus of Indus inscriptions organized and searchable in a digital format. It covers 3,649 objects with 5,037 inscriptions from across 40 Indus sites. At more than 10,000 pages, it aims to be a comprehensive reference for the domain. The drawings carved into the seals encode key identity and context information and represent iconic and culturally significant symbols. This illustrated concordance not only represents the full gamut of visual information available but also seamlessly integrates it into the overall search experience. It allows the reader to efficiently search and navigate the corpus by location and object types, by animals and other illustrations, by facing and writing directions. It is the only resource that indexes the collection by letters, words, and patronymics. In order to help the first-time reader, the Introduction provides a background of the Indus civilization and its script. It presents a unique analysis of the typography of the Indus seals and compares it to modern fonts. It systematically analyzes the script down into constituent forms and links to resources for Unicode encoding and an open-source font for the script. The book itself serves as a test case for those resources. This concordance is based on a complete decipherment of the Indus script that I will publish separately. It leverages that to identify characters and words and present a consistent and complete coverage of the inscriptions.

Indian Hieroglyphs
Indian Hieroglyphs

Author: Srinivasan Kalyanaraman

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 800

ISBN-13: 9780982897126

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The book links the invention of writing to the inventions of bronze-age technologies. Indus script is claimed to be one of the earliest writing systems of the world dated to c. 3500 BCE. The book claims that Indian language union (sprachbund or Indian linguistic area) dates back to the period when Indus script was used. About 1000 lexemes of Meluhha (mleccha) have been identified and explained in the context of ciphertext of Indian hieroglyphs. These substratum glosses are the foundation for further studies in the evolution of languages and linguistic features absorbed from one another, in Indian language union (sprachbund). Using evidence from almost all hieroglyphs in the 6000 + inscriptions, this book makes a contribution to an understanding of the middle phase in evolution of writing systems, a phase which bridged pictographic writing with syllabic writing to represent sounds of a language called meluhha (mleccha) in Indian language union - lingua franca of Harosheth hagoyim, smithy of nations. The continuum of hieroglyph tradition in Indian linguistic area is evaluated in the context of continued use of Indian hieroglyphs on thousands of punch-marked coins together with syllabic scripts of kharosti and brahmi . The book establishes that ancient India was a language union with speakers of Munda, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages learning technical words related to bronze-age metallurgy from one another. They used these words in the writing system. The book draws heavily from a multi-lingual dictionary of over 25 ancient languages called Indian Lexicon for unraveling the cipher of the Indus script, as an exercise in solving a cryptography problem. The writing system was called mlecchita vikalpa (Cryptography of Meluhhas/Mlecchas) and is mentioned in an 8th century BCE work by Vatsyayana. The Indian hieroglyphs find their echoes in the goat-fish hieroglyphs on a ritual basin of Uruk (Sumer) and the Egyptian hieroglyph for Bat showing a mudhif reed symbol which also occurs on Uruk basin. The 'reed' read rebus denotes Glyph: eruva 'reed'. Rebus: eruva 'copper'. Also discussed are some Egyptian hieroglyph parallels from the statue of Hathor-Menkaure-Bat triad of the fourth dynasty and the continued tradition of building reed huts by Todas comparable to the mudhifs of ancient Sumer. This book is a sequel to the author's Indus Script Cipher (2010). http: //tinyurl.com/7dflhyq

The Roots of Hinduism
The Roots of Hinduism

Author: Asko Parpola

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-07-15

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0190226935

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Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.