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.
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.
Since the discovery of the Indus Civilization, the meaning of the enigmatic Indus script remains hidden in its four hundred characters. While many would-be-decipherers have attempted to unravel its meaning with the aid of a presumed underlying language, none of these attempts has proven successful. In response, the approach taken in this work does not preclude an underlying language, but offers an alternate approach where the positional patterns of the Indus signs are investigated in an attempt to segment the character strings. Michael Korvink is a former instructor of International Studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and now works in the private sector.
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.
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.
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.
This pioneering book with many interesting illustrations provides new Vedic interpretation for the Indus valley seals or the Harappan seals, with a particular emphasis on the single horned bull and the manger like structure. The analysis builds a strong linkage for the significance of bull to the manger like structure, hither to not explored. The book focuses on a scientific approach on how the words of Vedas got created, how it got structured with meter into poetry. The book presents a hypothesis on how over 10500 verses of Rig Veda and other Vedas were memorized while maintaining the purity of the composition in an ancient period when no script existed.
The present volume is devoted to the study of the Indus script and its decipherment. It offers a methodology for reading the Indus script by combining paleography with ancient literary accounts and Vedic grammar.These illustrate the methodology and also help shed new light on the Harappans and their connections with the Vedic Civilization.The language of the seals is Vedic Sanskrit,with a significant number of them containing words and phrases traceable to the ancient Vedic glossary Nigha, compiled from still earlier sources by Yaska.
