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.

India's Ancient Past
India's Ancient Past

Author: R.S. Sharma

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-10-20

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0199087865

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This book presents a complete and accessible description of the history of early India. It starts by discussing the origins and growth of civilizations, empires, and religions. It also deals with the geographical, ecological, and linguistic backgrounds, and looks at specific cultures of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Vedic periods, as well as at the Harappan civilization. In addition, the rise of Jainism and Buddhism, Magadha and the beginning of territorial states, and the period of Mauryas, Central Asian countries, Satvahanas, Guptas, and Harshavardhana are also analysed. Next, it stresses varna system, urbanization, commerce and trade, developments in science and philosophy, and cultural legacy. Finally, the process of transition from ancient to medieval India and the origin of the Aryan culture has also been examined.

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.

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.

The Art of Ancient India
The Art of Ancient India

Author: Susan L. Huntington

Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 849

ISBN-13: 8120836170

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To scholars in the field, the need for an up-to-date overview of the art of South Asia has been apparent for decades. Although many regional and dynastic genres of Indic art are fairly well understood, the broad, overall representation of India's centuries of splendor has been lacking. The Art of Ancient India is the result of the author's aim to provide such a synthesis. Noted expert Sherman E. Lee has commented: –Not since Coomaraswamyês History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927) has there been a survey of such completeness.” Indeed, this work restudies and reevaluates every frontier of ancient Indic art _ from its prehistoric roots up to the period of Muslim rule, from the Himalayan north to the tropical south, and from the earliest extant writing through the most modern scholarship on the subject. This dynamic survey-generously complemented with 775 illustrations, including 48 in full color and numerous architectural ground plans, and detailed maps and fine drawings, and further enhanced by its guide to Sanskrit, copious notes, extensive bibliography, and glossary of South Asian art terms-is the most comprehensive and most fully illustrated study of South Asian art available. The works and monuments included in this volume have been selected not only for their artistic merit but also in order to both provide general coverage and include transitional works that furnish the key to an all encompassing view of the art. An outstanding portrayal of ancient Indiaês highest intellectual and technical achievements, this volume is written for many audiences: scholars, for whom it provides an up-to-date background against which to examine their own areas of study; teachers and students of college level, for whom it supplies a complete summary of and a resource for their own deeper investigations into Indic art; and curious readers, for whom it gives a broad-based introduction to this fascinating area of world art.

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