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Post Info TOPIC: “The Indus Script, Harappan Dravidian and the Wild Ass” by Asko Parpola and the debate thereafter


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“The Indus Script, Harappan Dravidian and the Wild Ass” by Asko Parpola and the debate thereafter
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“The Indus Script, Harappan Dravidian and the Wild Ass” by Asko Parpola and the debate thereafter

June 30, 2010

“The Indus Script, Harappan Dravidian and  the Wild Ass” by Asko Parpola and the debate thereafter

Vedaprakash

Venue (Backside of CPT): Roja Muthiah Research Library, 3rd Cross Road, CPT Campus, Taramani, Chennai 600113

28-06-2010 (Monday) 4,00 pm: when I entered the Roja Muthaiah research Library premises, Venkatachallam[1], the old man was sitting in the Indus Research Centre (IRC), a room allotted to them on RHS.  Then I saw K. V. Ramakrishna Rao[2] and Orissa Balasubramaniam[3]entering the room and all started discussing about something with some papers.

The women / girls started rearranging chairs and tables at the entrance hall leading to the lecture hall. Two persons started displaying the books they brought on the tables. Only three-four persons were there for attending the meeting.

4.22 pm: Iravatham Magadevan came inside the room of IRC. Then he went to meet Asko Parpola, who was there already in the Computer room. Few more added.

4.40 pm: Tea came. Stil, people started coming slowly. Most of them have been elite, rich coming in cars. Then one woman came, identified as Rani Gift Siromoney, the wife of Gift Siromoney.

Then came P. R. Subramaniam, Narasaiah, Ramamurthy, Kavitha, Solomon, Vasanthi, Subbu, Ravichandran, Malar Mannan, Haran, K. V. Gopalakrishnan, ……………………and so on. And of corse reporters from the media.

4.50 pm: People started going inside the lecture hall. Hardly 20-25 were there. Some went and sat in the first two rows and others were hesitating and settling down in the last rows.

5.20 pm: the lecture not started, obviously, they were looking for some group to come. Then came the group from the Madras Christian College.

Iravatham Mahadevan He started explaining his relationship with Gift Siromoney from 1968, when he met him at the 2nd World Tamil Conference, where both came to present papers. He was praising his analysis of Kolam carried with the primitive computer in those days. He claimed that Gift was responsible for finding out the significant of “Pulli ezhuthu” that differentiates Tamil Brahmi from other Brahmi. He pointed out how he prepared charts showing the inscriptional way of development of Tirukkural written. He told that one Abdul Haq was the first to bring out computer analysis of the IVC. Pointing to his wife, he lamented that Rani was so worried as Gift was quoting from his concordance brought out in 1968 than the Bible.

Prof. Mrs. Rani Siromoney started his speech invoking god etc., Repeating the above with intermittent invoking god for all happenings.

Mrs & Mr Siromoney

Mrs & Mr Siromoney

R.W. Alexander Jesudasan, though not introduced to the audience by name for unknown reasons, the Principal of the Madras Christian College was called to say few words and he started his sermon praising the lord, Gift and others. He claimed that the Tamil studies of the college might come to end, but continues. He mentioned about Parithimal Kalainjar (V. Suryanarayana Sastri) of their college. However, he did not explain how it continues (He did not mention about M. Deivanayagam[4] who has been creating problem now or Moses Micheal Faraday[5] who confuses Siddhas with Christians).

R W Alexander Jesudasan

 

R W Alexander Jesudasan
M. Deivanayagam

 

M. Deivanayagam
Moses Michael Farradey

 

Moses Michael Farradey

The invitation card read as follows: Indus Research Centre of the Roja Muthiah Research Library  invites you to the inauguration of theGift Siromoney Endowment Lecture Series Welcome address Dr. Iravatham Mahadevan Inaugural Lecture Prof. Asko Parpola on “The Indus Script, Harappan Dravidian and  the Wild Ass”.

Asko Parpola at RM 28-06-2010

Asko Parpola at RM 28-06-2010

6.10 pm: Asko Parpola started his speech showing the ppt. The first slide shoed that the same papers was presented on 25-06-2010 at Coimbatore on the occasion of the World Classical Tamil Conference. He delved upon the seal M-1690a, but revealed that it was missing long back.

“In a paper to be presented at the World Classical Tamil Conference, I am going to discuss recent developments in my study of the Indus script. In the book Deciphering the Indus Script (Cambridge 1994), I interpreted the ‘fish’ sign as Proto-Dravidian *miin ‘fish’ = *miin ‘star’, and its compounds with preceding signs as names of heavenly bodies attested in Old Tamil. One newly deciphered sign depicts “a hoofed animal’s hind leg.” It occurs once before the plain ‘fish’ sign. Old TamiltaaL ‘leg’ has a Toda cognate meaning “thigh of animal’s hind leg” and denotes a star in PuRam 395. The ‘hind leg’ sign once precedes a sign that depicts the wild ass. Is the reading taaL ‘(hind) leg’ meaningful in this context?

“Just one Indus seal has the wild ass as its iconographic motif; it was excavated in 2009 at Kanmer in the Kutch, next to the only wild ass sanctuary in South Asia. Bones of wild ass come from Harappan sites in Baluchistan, the Indus Valley and Gujarat; the salt deserts of this very area have always been the habitat of the wild ass. Bones or depictions of the domestic horse and the donkey are not found in South Asia before 1600 BCE.

“Tamil kaZutai or “donkey” has cognates in Malayalam, Kota, Toda, Kannada, Kodagu, Tulu, Telugu, Kolami, Naiki, Parji, Gondi and Kuwi. Bhadriraju Krishnamurti reconstructs *kaZ-ut-ay and asserts that Proto-Dravidian speakers knew of the donkey. More probably *kaZutaymeant ‘wild ass’ in Harappan Dravidian, and the term was transferred to the similar-looking donkey when this newcomer came to South Asia from the west through the Indus Valley. Rigvedic gardabha - ‘donkey’ has no cognates in Iranian; it is a Dravidian loan word with the added Indo-Iranian animal name suffix -bha-. I explain *kaZutay as ‘kicker of the salt desert’, from *kaZ(i) / *kaLLar ‘saline soil’ and *utay ‘to kick’. The wild ass lives in the salt desert and is a vicious kicker.

“There is a Hindu myth explicitly associated with the wild ass, the Dhenukavadha of Harivamsa 57. Krishna and Balarama came to a palmyra forest occupied by the fierce ass demon Dhenuka and its herd. Wanting to drink the juice of ripe palm fruits, Balarama shook the trees. Hearing the sound of falling fruits, the enraged ass demon rushed to the spot. Seeing Balarama beneath a wine palm, as if holding the tree as his banner, the wicked ass bit Balarama and started kicking him hard with its hind legs. Balarama seized the ass by those hind legs and flung it to the top of a palm. The ass fell down with its neck and back broken and died. Dhenuka’s retinue met with the same fate, and the ground became covered with dead asses and fallen palm fruits. The palm forest, horrible when terrorised by the asses, impossible for humans to live in, difficult to cross, and with a great extent and salty soil (iriNa), now became a lovely place.

“The description of the palm forest as a salt desert confirms that wild asses are meant. The palm tree, Sanskrit taala from Proto-Dravidian *taaZ, is prominent in the myth and its earliest sculptural representations. The wine palm is associated with the wild ass, which inhabits the palm forest and finally falls down from the top of the palm like its ripe fruits. The wine palm is connected also with the ass’ killer (his successor as the god of its drink), Balarama, whose addiction to toddy is “an essential part of his character.”

“The myth also refers to the palm emblem on Balarama’s banner (tâla-dhvaja). In the Rigveda, Indra is invited to drink Soma like a thirsty wild ass (gaura) drinks in a pond of salty soil (iriNa). In Kutch today, such ponds are called taalaab. This Persian word comes from Indo-Aryantaala ‘pond’, from Proto-Dravidian *taaZ ‘low place, depression.’ Like the camel, the wild ass can quickly drink an enormous amount of water, becoming through homophony the prototypal toddy-drinker. Further homophones of taaZ connect the wild ass with the ebb of tide and its mythical cause, the mare-faced demon of the netherworld who drinks the whole ocean.”

He also relied upon his paper “Equus hemionnus & Equus Kiang and their vernacular names” along with Juha Janhunen.

Though, he mentioned about “wild ass” i,e, Asiatic Wild Ass[6]prevalent in different parts of the world, Asia in particular, he kept silence as to how they crossed over to Kiang in China. However, he went on as follows:

The Asiatic wild ass in Harappan, Dravidian and Indo-Iranian record
Asko Parpola University of Helsinki, Finland This abstract summarizes my part of a longer paper written in collaboration with Juha
Janhunen (who deals with the Turkic, Mongolic and Tibetan terms), entitled “The Asiatic  wild asses (Equus hemionus & Equus kiang) and their vernacular names”, to be published in full in the Proceedings of this roundtable
[7].


“After an introduction on the taxonomy and geographical distribution of the
different ass species and subspecies, I discuss one grapheme of the Indus script (no. 46 in the sign list of Parpola 1994: fig.5.1), proposing that it depicts the wild ass. The sign has realistic (cf. fig.1 a & b) and schematic variants (fig.1 c). The wild ass is present in the Harappan osteological record at least in Baluchistan, Sindh and Gujarat, but probably also in the Punjab and Rajasthan. Moreover, there are terracotta figurines of the wild ass, but it is
not among the “heraldic” animals of the Indus seals, probably because the ass was already an animal of ill omen: later on it was associated with Nirrti
‘Destruction’.


“The principal Harappan language, and apparently the only one in which the Indus texts from South Asia were written, was Proto-Dravidian (cf. Parpola 1994). Attested in 13 Dravidian languages, representing all the subgroups except North Dravidian, is a word for ‘ass’ (DEDR no. 1364). Bhadriraju Krishnamurti (2003: 12 and 525) reconstructs this  etymon for Proto-Dravidian as *kaz–ut-ay. Franklin Southworth (2005: 269-270) accepts this recontruction, proposing that instead of the domestic ass, the word originally denoted the wild ass, and that this animal was once present even in South India. This does not seem impossible in view of the continuous belt of semi-arid thorn-desert and dry tropical savannah from Kutch to Tamil Nadu, although there is little osteological support for this hypothesis. The wild ass assumption is endorsed by a new etymology that I propose for the word, as a Proto-Dravidian compound of *kaz- – ‘salt desert’ (DEDR no. 1359 + Turner 1966 no. 2954) and *utay ‘kick’ (DEDR no. 616). Desert, especially salt desert, is the habitat of the wild ass, and figures in the names of the onager in Sumerian (anše-eden-na) and Persian (χar-e daštī). On the other hand, the ass is famous for its kicking, and represented as kicking in the myth of the (wild) ass demon Dhenuka (cf. Harivamśa .57).  Sanskrit gardabha- ‘ass’ is very probably derived, with the animal name suffix -bha- (of PIE origin but still productive in Indo-Aryan), from the Dravidian word for ‘ass’, as proposed by Thomas Burrow and Murray Emeneau
.”

Conclusion: taaL (from *taaZ, preserved in Old Kannada) ‘(hind) leg, stem of tree’ (whence taaZ ‘tree with a prominent stem’ > ‘wine palm’) is in many ways connected with the wild ass[8].

7.11 pm: Discussion and questions: Surprisingly, Iravatham Mahadevan this time allowed questions from the audience with with conditions[9]. There were only six questions and they are as follows:

1. K. V. Ramakrishna Rao: your claim is confusing about the words – தாள்/தால்/தாழ், கழ்/கழு etc. What you mention about தாள் of Puram is different from your interpretation of தால்/தாழ்.

Asko Parpola accepted the possibility of other interpretations of the words. When Rao told that there had mean specific words used for ass and horse in the Sangam literature, he requested to provide them.

2. White bearded person: Taking the reference that Indra was invited to drink Soma like a thirsty wild ass (gaura) drinks in a pond of salty soil (iriNa), he asked as to whether the “wild ass” drank urine………so that it could be salty.

Asko Parpola replied that it was only figurative.

3. Dr. Vasathi: In our field excavations, we found the pictures / rock paintings of ass / horse and there have been may references in Sangam literature about ass / donkey. Whether the “koverukazuthai” and “wild ass” as mentioned by you are one and the same?

The Neolithic and megalithic findings of south India have been dated after the Wild ass of IVC.

4. A man with namam on his forehead: You mentioned about camel as one of five things to be sacrificed. Does camel to do anything in the context?

Asko Parpola went back to his slide that shown the five things for sacrifice:

   
ManPurushaKimpurusha
CowGauGavya
camel  
SheepMesha 
GoatAja 

He explained that hunting wild ass ws royal pastime and in ritual, it could have found place.

5. Kavitha (who does Ph.D in Indus script, as introduced by IM): Why there was no wild as in South India?

They entered India through IV before proto-dravidians.

6. Ramamurthy (very old man shaking…………As IM himself called him so): ……………………Researchers fall trap to such interpretations and also others to, but without coming to any specific conclusion……………………….

Asko Parpola accepted that his decipherment is incomplete and all the seals cannot be read like that and multi-interpretation is possibe! However, it s ironical that media reports that Asko reads IVC in Dravidian, Tamil and so on, as if, it is final. Iravatham Mahadevan intervened to accept that “multiple-interpretations of the seals are possible and nothing is final in the decipherment”.

Conclusion: The function started as Christian crusade, went on as Dravidian propgandist lecture and ended with confessional statement that the decipherment was not final!

Meanwhile, the press has carried on undue publicity about the meeting, of course, bth The Hindu and New Indian express do not publish the responses posted in their websites:

1. The Indus script and the wild ass – published on June 23, 2010

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article481104.ece

For this, “The Hindu” has published three responses in its site.

2. ‘Dravidians headed south before Aryans’ arrival’ -  published on 29-06-2010

http://expressbuzz.com/states/tamil-nadu/dravidians-headed-south-before-aryans-arrival/185399.html



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3. பேராசிரியர் அஸ்கோ பர்போலா சொற்பொழிவு

http://www.dinakaran.com/tamilnadudetail.aspx?id=9283&id1=4

Vedaprakash

30-06-2010


[1] An enthusiastic IVC researcher, who concentrates on the weights and measures of IVC. He was accusing that Bryan Wells used his findings without mentioning his name.

 

[2] Independent researcher in Chennai.

[3] Comes from Orissa, but now in Chennai doing maritime and other connected research  on the antiquity of the Tamil maritime activities etc.

[4] Incidentally, Deivanayagam claims that I Mahadevan helped Devakala his daughter for her Ph.D. Now, both father and daughter have indulged in attacking Tiruvalluvar, Hindus etc.

[5] Now he has been the HOD of Tamil department of the Christian College.

[6] Several authorities, including “Mammal Species of the World”, list as individual species Equus

hemionus, Equus kiang and Equus onager, and several subspecies are built on these, such as E.

kiang polyodon. Also Equus luteus has been used synonymously withonager and hemionus

[7] http://woodstove-jack.blogspot.com/

[8] Ironically, the entire thing was already published in “The Hindu” and there have been three responses also: see athttp://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article481104.ece

[9] I understand that K. V. Ramakrishna Rao requested IM that there should be discussion.



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The Indus script and the wild ass – Asko Parpola

June 23, 2010

Parpola brings out meaning of Old Tamil ‘taaL leg’
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Chennai/article490698.ece

“The Hindu” has come out immediately with the following brief, ignoring, the interactions that took place at Roja Muthaiah Library onn 28th evening, when he presented his paper on  “The Indus Script, Harappan Dravidian and  the Wild Ass” with ppt.

After discussion and answering to crucial questions, Asko parpola clearly accepted that he did not read all the seals and his decipherment was not final.

In fact, Iravatham Mahadevan accepted  that “multi-interpretations are possible”.

Asko Parpola at RM 28-06-2010

Asko Parpola at RM 28-06-2010

Noted Indologist Asko Parpola on Monday delivered the ‘Gift Siromoney Endowment Lecture Series”’organised by Roja Muthiah Research Library, trying to read the old Tamil ‘taaL leg’ in the context of the newly deciphered sign depicting “a hoofed animal hind leg.” He was talking on ‘The Indus Script, Harappan Dravidian and the Wild Ass.’

He said “Old Tamil ‘taaL leg’ had a Toda cognate meaning ‘thigh of animal’s hind leg’ and denotes a star in PuRam 395.” The ‘hind leg’ sign once precedes a sign that depicts the wild ass. Besides pointing to various physiological features of the animal, which lived in the desert and could survive even after losing 30 per cent of the water of its body, he narrated many stories associated with the wild ass.

Noted epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan said more young researchers should enter the field of epigraphy, continuing his work and that of Professor Parpola. He pointed out that he had already reached 81 and Parpola was only 10 years younger to him. Gift Siromoney was a professor at the Madras Christian College. Though a mathematics student, he had prepared many field reports, including the fauna of Tambaram area and Thirukkural written in different scripts of the last 2,000 years. Rani Siromoney, wife of Siromoney, also spoke.

The Indus script and the wild ass

Asko Parpola

http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article481104.ece

[Thanks to The Hindu for the photo and article. As "The Hindu" generally does not encourage the other view of any issue, we have no other way but reproduce it and circulate for discussion and debate]

 

Image of a modern impression of the seal M-290 from Mohenjo-daro, where the sequence 'hind leg' + 'wild ass' (to be read from right to left) occurs. Courtesy: Asko Parpola

Image of a modern impression of the seal M-290 from Mohenjo-daro, where the sequence ‘hind leg’ + ‘wild ass’ (to be read from right to left) occurs. Courtesy: Asko Parpola

In a paper to be presented at the World Classical Tamil Conference, I am going to discuss recent developments in my study of the Indus script. In the book Deciphering the Indus Script (Cambridge 1994), I interpreted the ‘fish’ sign as Proto-Dravidian *miin ‘fish’ = *miin ‘star’, and its compounds with preceding signs as names of heavenly bodies attested in Old Tamil. One newly deciphered sign depicts “a hoofed animal’s hind leg.” It occurs once before the plain ‘fish’ sign. Old TamiltaaL ‘leg’ has a Toda cognate meaning “thigh of animal’s hind leg” and denotes a star in PuRam 395. The ‘hind leg’ sign once precedes a sign that depicts the wild ass. Is the reading taaL ‘(hind) leg’ meaningful in this context?

Just one Indus seal has the wild ass as its iconographic motif; it was excavated in 2009 at Kanmer in the Kutch, next to the only wild ass sanctuary in South Asia. Bones of wild ass come from Harappan sites in Baluchistan, the Indus Valley and Gujarat; the salt deserts of this very area have always been the habitat of the wild ass. Bones or depictions of the domestic horse and the donkey are not found in South Asia before 1600 BCE.

Tamil kaZutai or “donkey” has cognates in Malayalam, Kota, Toda, Kannada, Kodagu, Tulu, Telugu, Kolami, Naiki, Parji, Gondi and Kuwi. Bhadriraju Krishnamurti reconstructs *kaZ-ut-ay and asserts that Proto-Dravidian speakers knew of the donkey. More probably *kaZutaymeant ‘wild ass’ in Harappan Dravidian, and the term was transferred to the similar-looking donkey when this newcomer came to South Asia from the west through the Indus Valley. Rigvedic gardabha - ‘donkey’ has no cognates in Iranian; it is a Dravidian loan word with the added Indo-Iranian animal name suffix -bha-. I explain *kaZutay as ‘kicker of the salt desert’, from *kaZ(i) / *kaLLar ‘saline soil’ and *utay ‘to kick’. The wild ass lives in the salt desert and is a vicious kicker.

There is a Hindu myth explicitly associated with the wild ass, the Dhenukavadha of Harivamsa 57. Krishna and Balarama came to a palmyra forest occupied by the fierce ass demon Dhenuka and its herd. Wanting to drink the juice of ripe palm fruits, Balarama shook the trees. Hearing the sound of falling fruits, the enraged ass demon rushed to the spot. Seeing Balarama beneath a wine palm, as if holding the tree as his banner, the wicked ass bit Balarama and started kicking him hard with its hind legs. Balarama seized the ass by those hind legs and flung it to the top of a palm. The ass fell down with its neck and back broken and died. Dhenuka’s retinue met with the same fate, and the ground became covered with dead asses and fallen palm fruits. The palm forest, horrible when terrorised by the asses, impossible for humans to live in, difficult to cross, and with a great extent and salty soil (iriNa), now became a lovely place.

The description of the palm forest as a salt desert confirms that wild asses are meant. The palm tree, Sanskrit taala from Proto-Dravidian *taaZ, is prominent in the myth and its earliest sculptural representations. The wine palm is associated with the wild ass, which inhabits the palm forest and finally falls down from the top of the palm like its ripe fruits. The wine palm is connected also with the ass’ killer (his successor as the god of its drink), Balarama, whose addiction to toddy is “an essential part of his character.”

The myth also refers to the palm emblem on Balarama’s banner (tâla-dhvaja). In the Rigveda, Indra is invited to drink Soma like a thirsty wild ass (gaura) drinks in a pond of salty soil (iriNa). In Kutch today, such ponds are called taalaab. This Persian word comes from Indo-Aryantaala ‘pond’, from Proto-Dravidian *taaZ ‘low place, depression.’ Like the camel, the wild ass can quickly drink an enormous amount of water, becoming through homophony the prototypal toddy-drinker. Further homophones of taaZ connect the wild ass with the ebb of tide and its mythical cause, the mare-faced demon of the netherworld who drinks the whole ocean.

Conclusion: taaL (from *taaZ, preserved in Old Kannada) ‘(hind) leg, stem of tree’ (whence taaZ ‘tree with a prominent stem’ > ‘wine palm’) is in many ways connected with the wild ass.

(The author, who will be the first recipient of the Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Award, is Professor Emeritus of Indology, Institute of World Cultures, University of Helsinki.)



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Questions posed to Iravatham mahadevan and Asko Parpola.

June 21, 2010

Questions posed to Iravatham mahadevan and Asko Parpola.

Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola have to answer many questions without mincing words, which are pointed out as follows:

1. The expression, “Vedic scholar-turned-Dravidianist” proves the change in ideology that is not good for any scholar of his stature. IM has already brought Michael Witzel, the Rig Vedic Pundit last year here in Chennai and he talked differently. Of course, IM prevented native Pundits to question nand test his Sanskrit capabilities. He was struggling to repeat few words mentioned by one of the audience.

2. That he has academic credentials “to prove that the Indus Civilisation was pre-Aryan and that its writing encoded a Dravidian language”, makes no credentials, as researchers have such qualifications and acumen in their steadfast work carried on for years. Scholars respect scholars till they are biased with other motives.

3. “Even though the Indus script remains undeciphered, as Professor Parpola readily admits, his theoretical groundwork on the Dravidian character of the Indus Civilisation and the script, and the fact of Aryan immigration into India after the decline of the Indus Civilisation, have been accepted by most scholars in the world“. Acceptance or non-acceptance of any hypothesis, theory etc., cannot be a criteria for coming to any final conclusion in a research plan, particularly, where the script remains undeciphered.

4. “When the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu’s award is given to me for a Dravidian solution of the Indus enigma, this award will inevitably be interpreted by many people as politically motivated”. Definitely, because, he has been known for his extremist views, racist bias and linguistic fanaficism and all couched with anti-Hindu, anti-Sanskrit, anti-Hindi, anti-north, anti-Brahmin and so on. Moreover, award for Dravidian solution of the Indus enigma, reminds the the world war period, where the racists scholars used to be honoured in the same way by the racisr regimes, because any other solution means no award!

5. “Nevertheless, I am ready to fight for the truth, and in my opinion, the Tamils are entitled to some pride for having preserved so well the linguistic heritage of the Indus Civilisation”. Why some pride, they have “full / more” pride, whether they preserve or not the linguistic heritage of the Indus civilization. In fact, the queation is whether the Indus cicilization had any preserved linguistic heritage f the Tamils conclusively, instead of taking few seals and giving convenient interpretation.

6. “At the same time, it must not be forgotten that though their language has shifted in the course of millennia, people of North India too are to a large extent descended from the Harappan people, and have also preserved cultural heritage of the same civilisation.” Had both people descended from the same lineage, where is the question of linguistic heritage preserved by one group of people and cukltural heritage by other group? His theory that “Aryan immigration into India after the decline of the Indus Civilisation” shows after the decline of the Indus civilization, the Dravidians moved to north and then canme down to south. Aryans came thereafter and moved in the same way.

7. When Aryans immigrated after the decline of Indus-Dravidian civilization, there was no “Aryan invasion”. Karunanidhi would not accept such academic exercise.

8 . The time gap between the two historical processes has to be specified and explained. The peak period of IVC has been c.2250-1950 BCE. The Sangam period starts from c.300 BCE. Why then, the “Dravidian speaking people” took nearly two millinea to shift from IVC to north and north to South?

9. Why they should have taken such a long period to compose Sangam literature only at Tamizhagam insyead of IVC or north India? It is also surprising that they could not develop any script during those 2000 years!

10. The earliest Tamil inscriptions date from the Mauryan Era. That Asoka should copy from the Persians and start indscribing on the stones so that Indians could read at different paerts of India in the same language or in their languages! And the intelligent Dravidian speaking people / immigrant Tamils from the IVC should wait for Asoka and start cpying his script to write in Tamil only from that particular period!

11. As the IV Dravidian speakers had been the expert makers of the seals, why they should wait for 2000 years to copy script from Asoka? Does it make sound?

12. Asoka and even Kharavela, whose territories were threatened with the “confederation of Dravidian kings” could write many lines, how is that the Dravidian speaking people could leave only few-line inscriptions, broken ones etc?

Vedaprakash

20-06-2010



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War of words in the cradle of south Asian civilisation!

May 14, 2010

War of words in the cradle of south Asian civilisation

In the heart of Pakistan, the ruins of a 4,000-year-old city have spawned a cross-continental row about language, culture – and racism in academia, By Andrew Buncombe, Thursday, 25 March 2010

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/war-of-words-in-the-cradle-of-south-asian-civilisation-1927005.html

 
Curator Mohammed Hassan 
ANDREW BUNCOMBECurator Mohammed Hassan

 

 

At the quiet ruins of Harappa, one of the two main centres of an ancient civilisation that once spread from the Himalayas to Mumbai, Naveed Ahmed took in the arid hills dotted with thorn-bush. “I think the people who lived here were very different from us,” said the part-time guide. “The stones and the beads [they made]; it was as if they were more sophisticated.”

 

 

However peaceful this ruined city of the Indus civilisation may appear, the former residents of Harappa and the remnants of their society are today at the centre of one of the most acrimonious disputes in academia, a controversy that has allegedly led to death threats and claims of racism and cultural chauvinism.

Many experts in south Asia and elsewhere believe that symbols and marks inscribed on seals and other artefacts found here represent an as yet undeciphered language. Arguing it may be the predecessor of one of several contemporary south Asian argots, these experts say it is proof of a literate Indian society that existed more than 4,000 years ago.

But other experts based in the West say although the symbols may contain information, they are not a true language. They claim the judgement of their counterparts in south Asia may be swayed by regional nationalism.

Mohammed Hassan is curator of the museum beside the dust-blown ruins. Before leading a tour, the government official served tea and biscuits in his office and insisted the people of Harappa must have possessed a written language to store information. “If they were not literate, then how could they do so many things?” he said. “They had well-made pottery, big cities that were well-planned. They had a lot of knowledge about these things. They grew cotton, wheat, rice and barley. They traded with other cities.”

The Indus civilisation covered more than 500,000 square miles and lasted, during what experts term its “mature phase”, from 2,600 till 1900 BCE. The ruins, 100 miles south-west of the Pakistani city Lahore, the ruins were rediscovered in the early part of the 19th century.

The skills of its residents – at least in terms of making bricks that could endure centuries – were revealed by two British engineers, John and William Brunton, who were building the East Indian Railway Company line to connect Lahore and Karachi and needed ballast for their track. The engineers later wrote that locals told them of well-made bricks from an ancient ruined city that the villagers had made use of. With little concern for preserving the ruins, huge numbers of the Indus-era bricks were reduced to rubble and used to support the tracks heading west.

In the early 20th century, excavation of Harappa proceeded along with that of the other Indus city at Mohenjo-daro, in the south of Pakistan, and it was at that time many of the seals now on display in Mr Hassan’s museum containing symbols and images of animals were discovered. And they have continued to beguile, fascinate and frustrate scientists, causing a running controversy that has played out on internet message boards, scientific papers and at academic conferences.

Like Mr Hassan, Iravatham Mahadevan, an expert in epigraphy from southern India who has been awarded the country’s highest civilian award for his work, has no doubts the symbols on the Indus seals represent a genuine language. “Archaeological evidence makes it inconceivable that such a large, well-administered, and sophisticated trading society could have functioned without effective long-distance communication, which could have been provided only by writing,” he wrote last year in a magazine.

“And there is absolutely no reason to presume otherwise,considering that thousands of objects, including seals, copper tablets, and pottery bear inscriptions in the same script throughout the Indus region. The script may not have been deciphered but that is no valid reason to deny its very existence.”

Mr Mahadevan believes the Indus script may have been a forerunner of so-called Dravidian languages, such as Tamil, spoken today in southern India and Sri Lanka. In addition to technical clues, he says the continued existence of a Dravidian language in modern Pakistan – Brahvi, which is spoken by people in parts of Balochistan – supports his idea.

Over the years, there have been plenty of other theories both from established experts and enthusiastic amateurs. Some, with the backing of Hindu nationalists, have claimed the script may be an early Indo-European language and that remnants of it may even exist in Sanskrit, an ancient language that is the root of many present languages in north India, including Hindi. It has even been claimed the Indus script belonged to metalsmiths, and others believe it died out with the city of Harappa itself and gave rise to no successor.

Part of the problem for the experts is that, unlike for those who cracked the hieroglyphics of Egypt, there is no equivalent of the Rosetta stone, the slab of granite-like rock discovered in 1799 that contained Egyptian and Greek text. In the 1950s, academic interest in Mayan hieroglyphics intensified when experts began to study modern spoken Mayan, but for the Indus scholars there is no agreement on which, if any, modern language is the successor to their script.

In 2004, the debate was jolted into a war of words after three American scholars claimed the Indus symbols were not a language at all. In a paper provocatively subtitled The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilisation, they said there was insufficient evidence that the symbols constituted a proper language. They pointed to various factors: that there was no single long piece of text; that there was disagreement over the number of actual symbols and that other well-organised societies had been illiterate. The symbols, they argued, may well contain information in the same way that an image of a knife and fork together might represent a roadside eatery but they were not a language that could record speech.

The ensuing uproar came mainly from south Asians. One of the American scholars, Steve Farmer claimed people would approach him in tears after he gave talks and that he had even had death threats. Comments on internet discussion boards accuse him and his colleagues of trying to prove that “non-Western cultures were less advanced”. Mr Farmer, who lives in California, said he believed much of the anger was driven by those wishing to promote pet theories about Dravidians, indigenous Aryan Hindus or “the general man in the street who wants to think ancient India was of the same order as Egypt or Mesopotamia. It’s total rubbish”. He added: “I have never seen anything like the passion that there is in India. There is not that sort of passion in the Middle East about ancient things.”

More recently, the Indus controversy has been joined by a team of Indian scientists who ran computer programmes which led them to conclude the symbols almost certainly constitute a language. Central to their claims, published last year in Science, was the theory of “conditional entropy”, or the measure of randomness in any sequence. Because of linguistic rules – such as in English the letter Q is almost always followed by a U – in natural languages the degree of randomness is less than in artificial languages.

One of the authors, Rajesh Rao, who was born in Hyderabad but is now based at the University of Washington, became fascinated by the Indus culture after studying it at school. His team measured the randomness with which the individual Indus symbols appeared on seals and compared that to the randomness of several natural and artificial languages. Mr Rao said it was closest to a natural language. “The Indus civilisation was larger than the ancient Egyptian, Chinese, and Mesopotamian civilisations and the most advanced in terms of urban planning and trade,” he said. “Yet we know little about their leaders, their beliefs, their way of life, and the way their society was organised. Many of us hope that decoding the script will provide a new voice to the Indus people.”

Yet as soon as Mr Rao’s team published its findings, Mr Farmer and his colleagues hit back, denouncing their conclusions and methodology. Mr Rao, whose team has since issued a detailed defence of their theory, said he was surprised at the level of contention, within south Asia and beyond, but also at some of the comments he claims Mr Farmer’s group levelled at him.

So whether the Indus is a script with hidden meanings may never be deciphered. Naveed Ahmed, a 24-year-old part-time guide, whose family has lived “forever” in a village on the edge of the ruins speaks Punjabi, an Indo-Aryan language from the same family as Sanskrit. Was it possible a linguistic thread connected the language he used with what had been spoken – and possibly written – by the people who once occupied the ruined city? “I don’t know if it is the same,” he said. “But it’s a possibility that our language came from them. It is always a possibility.”



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A Dravidian solution to the Indus script problem!

June 25, 2010

A Dravidian solution to  the Indus script problem

aruvar payanta … perum peyar muruka
ninn ati y-ulli vantanen
(Tirumurukârruppatai 255, 269, 279)
The Indus Civilization and its forgotten script
Stone seals inscribed with an unknown script were obtained from Harappa in the upper Indus Valley in the 1870s
and 1880s. In the early 1920s, curiosity about their origin initiated excavations at Harappa and 750 km away at
.
. ..
.
Figure 1. Discovery sites of Indus seals and inscriptions. (After CISI 2: 448.)

Mohenjo-daro in Sindh. Immediately more seals of the same kind were found. The publication of these discoveries
turned attention to a few seals of the Harappan type that had come to light in Mesopotamia. They dated the newly
found Harappan or Indus Civilization to the third millennium BCE. Radiocarbon dating has fixed the duration of the
Mature Harappan phase, during which the Indus script was used, to 2600-1900 BCE. About 30 Harappan seals
come from the Gulf and Mesopotamia, left there by sea-faring Indus merchants.
Since the 1920s, ceaseless archaeological research has revealed some 1500 Harappan sites in Pakistan and
western India. The Harappan realm in the Greater Indus Valley is one of the earliest cradles of civilization. Its urban
culture is among the first four in the world to possess a script of its own. Some 5000 short Indus texts from more
than 50 sites are known today, and much other data as well has accumulated. But the decipherment of the Indus
script has remained the most intriguing problem pertaining to this impressive city culture that initiates Indian civilization.
The Indus script vanished together with the Indus Civilization, which collapsed many centuries before hymns composed
in Vedic Sanskrit begin the historical period in South Asia around 1000 BCE.
The numerous unsuccessful attempts to understand the Indus script include a recent claim that it is not a writing
system based on language, but consists of non-linguistic symbols. Similar misconceptions prevailed about the
Mesopotamian cuneiform script
and the Egyptian hieroglyphs
before their decipherments.
Extreme shortness of texts and
their restriction to seals, small
tablets and pottery graffiti have
been adduced as proofs for this
thesis, but all these features
characterize also the Egyptian
hieroglyphic script during the first
600 years of its existence. Yet this
early form of Egyptian script was
real writing, and can be partially
read on the basis of later texts.
The high degree of sign
standardization, the arrangementof texts into regular rows, and the presence of hundreds of recurring sign sequences from different sites all indicate
that the Indus script is real writing.
Most attempts to read the Indus script apply the unsuited method of comparing the Indus signs with similarlooking
signs of other scripts and transferring their phonetic values to the Indus signs. This general error is often
coupled with the mistake of deriving Brahmi from the Indus script, though it is based on the Semitic consonant
alphabet.
Preparatory work
How then can the Indus script be deciphered? We may turn to successful decipherments and to the history of writing
for guidance. Most ancient scripts have been deciphered with the help of translations into known scripts and languages.
But here no such help is available. Historical information of the kind that opened up the cuneiform script is virtually
missing. Later Indian texts tell us nothing about the Indus Civilization. Contemporary cuneiform sources speak of the
most distant land called Meluhha, widely understood to denote Greater Indus Valley, but they offer little further
information. There is no related writing system to help with the phonetic values of the signs. Nor is there any fair
certainty of the underlying language, which was a great advantage in unraveling the Ugaritic and Mayan scripts. All
surviving texts are very short and probably not complete sentences but just noun phrases. This naturally hampers
grammatical analysis, as does the absence of word dividers.
In spite of all the difficulties, there are some positive circumstances. One is the relatively high number of preserved
inscriptions. Collecting and publishing all available evidence reliably and legibly belongs to the fundamental preparatory
tasks that have proved useful in all decipherments. This aim is being realized partly in the photographic Corpus of
Indus Seals and Inscriptions; its third volume has just come out.
Several versions of a standardized text edition in machine-readable form have been completed, and a thorough
revision is again being done. Computerization has enabled the compilation of concordances that systematically
record all occurrences of individual signs and their sequences, and various other indexes and statistics. Among the
things to be standardized is the direction of writing, normally from right to left and in seal stamps carved in mirror
image from left to right. Other routine tasks are location of word boundaries and search for possible grammatical
markers. One way to segment longer texts is to see if their component parts occur elsewhere as complete texts.
A crucial but difficult task is the compilation of a reliable sign list, which distinguishes between graphemes and
allographs. The allographic variation constitutes one important basis for interpreting the pictorial meaning of the
Indus signs. Signs may represent the same grapheme if their shapes are reasonably similar and they in addition occur

in very similar contexts. Based on these criteria, my sign list has very nearly 400 graphemes.

to be contd



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A Dravidian solution to the Indus script problem!-2

It is difficult to construct even parts of the Indus grammar on the basis of textual analysis. The positional sequences
of signs can be exploited to analyse the Indus texts syntactically, to define textual junctures, and to classify the signs
into phonetically or semantically similar groups. Such analyses have been carried out with automated methods. Data
accumulated in this way will certainly be useful in decipherment once a decisive breakthrough has been achieved —
in other words when the language has been identified and some signs have been read phonetically in a convincing
manner. But such analyses alone are unlikely to provide that breakthrough.
The language underlying the Indus script
In the decipherment of any ancient script, there are two principal unknowns to be clarified, namely the underlying
language or languages and the type of the script.
The language problem is most crucial. If the language of the Indus script belonged to a language family not
known from other sources, the Indus script can never be deciphered. This is clear from the case of Etruscan, an
isolated language written in an easily read alphabetic script. Etruscan can be read phonetically, but in spite of this is
not much understood beyond the texts covered by copious translations. But as the Harappan population numbered
around one million, there is a fair chance that linguistic relatives have survived and that traces of the Harappan
language can be found in the extensive Vedic texts composed in the Indus Valley less than a thousand years after the
collapse of the Indus Civilization.
While it is likely that various minority languages were spoken in the Greater Indus Valley, only one language was
written. The sign sequences are namely uniform throughout South Asia. This argument is reinforced by the Indus
seals found in the Near East. Some of them have native Harappan and some non-Harappan sign sequences.
One would expect that the most frequently attested Indus sign would very often occur next to itself, but this is
never the case in the Indus Valley. The combination is however attested on a round Gulf-type seal coming from the
Near East. The seal contains five frequently occurring Indus signs but in unique sequences. This suggests that
Harappan trade agents who resided in the Gulf and in Mesopotamia became bilingual and adopted local names, but
wrote their foreign names in the Indus script for the Harappans to read. The cuneiform texts in fact speak not only of
a distant country called Meluhha, but also of a village in southern Mesopotamia called Meluhha whose inhabitants
had purely Sumerian names.
According to its inscription, one Old Akkadian cylinder seal belonged to “Su-ilishu, interpreter of the Meluhhan

language”. This implies that the Meluhhan language differed from the languages commonly spoken and understood
in ancient Near East, above all Sumerian, Akkadian and Elamite. Near Eastern languages appear historically much
less likely to have been spoken in the Indus Valley than languages known to have existed in South Asia.
Because the origin of the Aryan languages is such a controversial issue, especially in India, it is necessary to trace
these languages back to their source, the Proto-Indo-European. The location and dating of Proto-Indo-European
too have been long debated, but a fair consensus concerning this problem is in sight. When the Proto-Indo-
European-speaking community dispersed, its language had a dozen terms related to wheeled vehicles. Wheeled
vehicles were invented shortly before 3500 BCE in south-eastern Europe, from where they quickly spread to areas
where the principal Indo-European languages were later spoken.
Greek and Armenian are the closest linguistic relatives of Indo-Iranian, and the protoforms of these languages
are likely to have been spoken in the Pit Grave or Yamnaya cultures which between 3300 and 3000 BCE spread
with ox carts from North Pontic steppes eastwards to the Ural mountains. The Eurasian steppes are the native

habitat of the horse. It was there that the horse was first yoked to pull a light-wheeled chariot, at the end of the third
millennium BCE. Early Aryan loanwords in Finno-Ugric languages spoken in north-eastern Europe locates Proto-
Aryan to the Volga-Ural steppes.
From the Volga-Ural steppes the horse-drawn chariot spread southwards to the Bronze Age culture in southern
Central Asia, the “Bactria and Margiana Archaeological Complex” or BMAC, which flourished about 2300-1500
BCE. BMAC people started moving to Iran and to the Indus Valley in the Late Harappan period, around 1900-
1600 BCE. At the same time, the BMAC sites were surrounded by nomadic peoples from the Eurasian steppes,
who probably spoke early forms of Indo-Iranian. On their way to Iran and India, these migrants took over the rule
and culture of the BMAC. Alexander Lubotsky (2001) has listed all words shared by Iranian and Indo-Aryan
which do not have an acceptable Indo-European origin. In structure, these words largely agree with the 383 foreign
loanwords in the language of the Rigveda listed by Frans Kuiper (1991). Lubotsky has suggested that most words
in both lists come from the language of the BMAC. This justified conclusion implies that these foreign words of an
unknown language were borrowed by Rigvedic Aryans before they entered the Indus Valley, or from the language of
the Daasas, an earlier come wave of Indo-Iranian speakers with a BMAC substratum. Hence these words do not
represent the Harappan language. Their use for the decipherment of the Indus script would in any case not be
feasible for the simple reason that the exact meaning of so many of them is unclear.
Although Indo-Iranian languages have been spoken in the Indus Valley since the second millennium BCE, they
were hardly spoken by Harappan people in the third millennium. The domesticated horse played an important role
in the culture of the Indo-Iranian speakers, but according to faunal remains the horse came to South Asia only after
2000 BCE and it is not depicted in Harappan art. The first appearance of the horse is in Swat, in the BMACderived
Gandhara Grave culture; its characteristic “face urns” seem to be connected with the cult of Aoevins, the
Vedic gods of chariotry.
Burushaski spoken in northernmost Pakistan is a linguistic isolate, but possibly related with the Ketic languages
of Siberia. There is little trace of Burushaski further south. Burushaski’s arrival from the north was probably preceded
by the Himalayan group of Tibeto-Burman languages, which may be connected with the Northern Neolithic of the
Swat Valley and Kashmir. The Northern Neolithic had some contact with the Early Harappans but only in its own
northern area.
In general the Sino-Tibetan languages always restricted to the Himalayan regions in South Asia are unlikely
candidates for a genetic relationship with the Harappan language.
The Austro-Asiatic languages known from Central and Eastern India, with linguistic relatives in South-East Asia

and minor participation in the linguistic convergence in South Asia, are also unlikely to have descended from the
Harappan language.
The only remaining alternative among the well-known potential linguistic relatives of the Harappan language is
the Dravidian language family. The 26 Dravidian languages are now mainly spoken in Central and South India.
Figure 4. The Dravidian languages and their subgroups. (After Krishnamurti 2003: 18.)
However, one Dravidian language, Brahui, has been spoken in Baluchistan in the northwest for at least a thousand
years, as far as the historical sources go. In contrast to Burushaski, Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic languages,
which are very small minority languages in South Asia, the Dravidian speakers until recently constituted one fourth of
India’s population.
Loanwords from Dravidian have been identified from Indo-Aryan texts composed in northwestern India around
1100-600 BCE. These six examples are from the earliest text, the Rigveda (the capital letters are retroflex consonants,

which did not exist in Proto-Indo-Iranian):
mukham ‘face, front, mouth’ < PD *mukam ‘id.’
khalam ‘threshing floor’ < PD *kaLam ‘id.’
phalam ‘fruit’ < PD *paZam ‘ripe fruit’
kuNDam ‘pit’ < PD *kuNTam ‘pit’
kaaNa- ‘blind in one eye’ < PD *kaaNa ‘not seeing’
kiyaambu- ‘watery plant’ < PD *kiyampu ‘taro, aroid, Colocasia’.
The retroflex consonants, a diagnostic feature of the South Asian linguistic area, can be divided into two main
groups. One of them is distributed over the Indus Valley and the Dravidian-speaking areas.
In addition to the retroflex consonants, Indo-Aryan has several other structural features that have long been
interpreted as borrowings from Dravidian. Some of them exist at the earliest level. Historical linguistics thus suggests
that the Harappans probably spoke a Dravidian language. With this conclusion we turn to the problem of script type.
The type of writing system represented by the Indus script
Recent American-Pakistani excavations at Harappa with meticulous stratigraphy have produced new evidence on
the evolution of the Indus script. Pottery has scratched symbols since 3300 BCE. Some of these pot-marks became
signs of the Indus script, which was created during the final phase of the Early Harappan period, between 2800-
2500 BCE. It is possible and indeed even probable that the Early Harappans got the idea of writing through stimulus
diffusion from the Proto-Elamites of the Iranian Plateau, but they did not copy the signs of the Proto-Elamite script.
Only few specimens from this formative period are presently available. During the Mature Harappan period, the fully
developed script was used without much change at all major sites. The script disappeared fairly soon after the
collapse of the Indus Civilization.
Archaic Sumerian, the oldest logo-syllabic writing, mainly consists of iconic word signs or logograms occasionally
complemented with rebus-based syllabic signs which also initially expressed “words”. Grammatical markers were
at first ignored in writing, but were gradually introduced with the growing familiarity with phonetic signs and better
ability to analyze language.
The logo-syllabic system demanded hundreds of signs. Devising the first syllabic scripts became possible around
2300 BCE, when many syllabograms were already in use in the cuneiform script. Logograms could now largely be
eliminated. The Egyptian variant of logo-syllabic writing, whose rebus puns ignore vowels altogether, enabled an
even more drastic reduction of graphemes. Around 1600 BCE, Semitic scribes in Egyptian-occupied Levant started
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Asko Parpola
writing their own language with just those phonograms of the Egyptian script that comprised a single consonant.
Logo-syllabic scripts have hundreds of graphemes, syllabic scripts manage with less than 100 and most alphabetic
scripts with less than 40.
The number of known Indus signs is around 400, which agrees well with the logo-syllabic type but is too high for
the script to be syllabic or alphabetic. Word divisions are not marked, but many inscriptions comprise only one, two
or three signs, and longer texts can be segmented into comparable units. This is a typical word length in Sumeriantype
logo-syllabic script, while in syllabic and alphabetic scripts many words require more signs. The Indus script
was created before any syllabic or alphabetic script existed, so all main criteria agree in suggesting that the Indus
script is a logo-syllabic writing system.
Methodology: the basic decipherment formula and initial clues
The prospects and methods of deciphering a logo-syllabic script without translations differ in some essential respects
from those of syllabic and alphabetic scripts. The syllabaries and alphabets form closed systems that cover the entire
phonology of the language, and can be decoded as a systemic whole. In logo-syllabic scripts, there are many more
signs, and the phonetic bond between the signs is weaker. There is no chance of building such phonetic grids as in the
decipherment of Linear B, and a complete decipherment of the Indus script is certainly not possible with presently
available materials.
Most signs of early logo-syllabic scripts were originally pictures denoting the objects or ideas they represented.
But abstract concepts such as ‘life’ would be difficult to express pictorially. Therefore the meaning of a pictogram
was extended from the word for the depicted object to comprise all its homophones. In the Sumerian script the
drawing of an arrow meant ‘arrow’, but in addition ‘life’ and ‘rib’, because all three words were pronounced alike
in the Sumerian language, namely ti. Homophony is usually language-specific, and rebuses thus enable language
identification and phonetic decipherment.
Individual signs of logo-syllabic scripts may be deciphered if four conditions can simultaneously be fulfilled: (1)
the object depicted in a given pictogram can be recognized; (2) the said pictogram has been used as a rebus; (3) the
intended rebus meaning can be deduced from the context(s); and (4) acceptably homophonous words corresponding
to the pictorial and rebus meanings exist in a historically likely known language. (Method demands strictness with
homophony; in the case of Proto-Dravidian, variation in the length of vowels and consonants is allowed, but not
much else.)
The iconic shape of the Indus signs thus constitutes one of the chief keys to their interpretation. Unfortunately the
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A Dravidian solution to the Indus script problem
pictorial meaning of most Indus signs is not clear. In some rare cases an iconographic motif added to an Indus
inscription can suggest the intended meaning of a sign. The scene at the right end of one tablet from Mohenjo-daro
(M-478) shows a human being who kneels in front of a tree and extends a V-shaped object towards it. The person
apparently presents offerings to a sacred tree in what may be a pot shown in cross-section. If so, the intended and
iconic meanings of the V-shaped sign in the text coincide, and it can be understood directly from the pictogram. We
need not know what the Harappan word for the depicted object was.
Figure 5. Pot of offerings in the text and iconography of the tablet M-478
from Mohenjo-daro. (After CISI 1: 115.)
Figure 6. (Offering of) “four pots of fish” on the tablet H-902 from Harappa. (After CISI 2: 339.)
The plain ‘fish’ sign probably has the intended meaning ‘fish’ on Indus tablets such as H-902 B which seems to
mention offering of four pots of fish. In Mesopotamia fish offerings were made in temples, in India fish and meat and
strong drinks were offered to godlings inhabiting sacred trees. That the signs looking like a ‘fish’ really have this
pictorial meaning is certified by the Indus iconography, in which it is placed in the mouth of a fish-eating crocodile.
But if phonetic decipherment is possible only in cases where the rebus principle has been employed, how can we
locate such cases, and how can we deduce the intended rebus meanings? These are certainly among the most
difficult tasks. Contextual clues include the function of inscribed artifacts. The vast majority of Indus texts are seal
stamps and seal impressions. As with iconographic clues, we can use for their interpretation parallels from elsewhere,
Western Asia and historical South Asia being most relevant.
A clay tag stamped with cloth impression on the reverse and with a square Indus seal on the obverse comes from
Umma in Mesopotamia. The Harappans’ contact with the Near East makes it highly probable that the Indus seal
15
Asko Parpola
inscriptions chiefly contain proper names of persons with or without their occupational or official titles and descent,
as do the contemporaneous Mesopotamian seal inscriptions.
Starting point: the ‘fish’ signs of the Indus script
In Mesopotamian and later Indian onomastics, names of gods are used to form personal names. We can expect to
have theophoric components of proper names and of priestly titles in some fairly large and uniformly distributed
group of signs in the Indus seals.
Although Mesopotamian ECONOMIC texts often record rations of fish, fish is NEVER mentioned in
Mesopotamian SEAL inscriptions. Yet the ‘fish’ sign, both plain and modified with various diacritic additions, occurs
so frequently on Indus seals that almost every tenth sign belongs to this group. This suggests that at least in the Indus
SEAL inscriptions, the ‘fish’ signs denote something else than ‘fish’ and are used as rebuses.
The most commonly used word for ‘fish’ in Dravidian languages is miin, and has the homophone miin meaning
‘star’. Both words may be derivatives of the root min ‘to glitter’.
Of course, one must check that the words in assumed readings are represented in more than one subgroup and
can be reconstructed for Proto-Dravidian. In addition, the hypotheses must be checked against script-external
evidence. Do the proposed interpretations make sense in the Harappan context, and with regard to the later South
Asian tradition, and the Mesopotamian contacts?
Figure 7. The fish-eating crocodilian ghariyal with the ‘fish’ sign of the Indus script on the seal M-410 from Mohenjo-daro. (After CISI 1: 98.)
16
A Dravidian solution to the Indus script problem
There is some external evidence supporting the proposed Dravidian rebus reading of the ‘fish’ sign. The motifs
fish and star co-occur on Mature Harappan painted pottery. Tamil speakers, who call these two things with the same
word, have imagined the stars to be fish swimming in the ocean of night sky.
Additional support for reading the ‘fish’ sign as a rebus for ‘star’ is the absence of a sign depicting ‘star’ from the
Indus script, although the ‘star’ symbol is painted and incised on Early Harappan pottery. The omission of a ‘star’
pictogram from the script is understandable as an economic measure, as the ‘fish’ sign covers the meaning ‘star’ as
well.
The rebus meaning ‘star’ suits the expected meaning ‘god’ as a component of proper names in seal inscriptions.
Whenever a god or goddess is mentioned in cuneiform texts, the pictogram of ‘star’ is prefixed to the name as its
determinative, to indicate that what follows is divine. In the Sumerian script, the ‘star’ pictogram means not only
‘god’ but also ‘sky’. ‘Star’ is thought to have originally been an attribute of the sky-god An. With An as the leading
divinity of the Sumerian pantheon, his symbol would then have started to mean ‘god’ in general. Astronomy, including
the use of a star calendar, played an important role in ancient Mesopotamia, and deeply influenced the religion: all the
main gods were symbolized by particular stars or planets.
In the Near East, the ‘star’ symbol
distinguished divinities even in pictorial representations.
Significantly, a seal from Mohenjo-daro depicts an Indus
deity with a star on either side of his head in this Near
Eastern fashion.
The ‘fish’ signs could well have been
parts of Harappan proper names, for ever since Vedic
times people in India have had astral names derived
from their birth stars. There are indications that this kind
of name-giving is of non-Aryan origin.
Methodology: Checking and verifying
The hypotheses can and must be subjected to scriptinternal
checking in the manner of cross-word puzzles.
One cannot overemphasize the importance of this
Figure 8. A seated deity with stars on either side of the head on the seal operation. If we apply exactly the same assumptions
M-305 from Mohenjo-daro. (After CISI 1: 383.)
17
Asko Parpola
and methods of interpretation to signs associated with an interpreted sign in a compound sign or in a recurring sign
sequence, do we get sensible results? If yes, these provisional results must be subjected to further external checking:
Are the posited compound words actually attested in Dravidian languages and not mere imagination? Particularly
important is Old Tamil literature, the only ancient Dravidian source not much contaminated by Indo-Aryan languages
and traditions. Interlocking of consistent readings with each other and with external linguistic data and clues constitutes
the essence of all decipherments.
Compounds formed with ‘fish’ signs and Indian mythology
The numerals belong to those few Indus signs whose function and meaning can be deduced with fair certainty, partly
from the fact that they consist of groups of vertical strokes, which is the way numerals are represented in many
ancient scripts, partly from their mutual interchangeability before specific signs, including the plain ‘fish’. Reading the
sequence ‘6’ + ‘fish’ in Dravidian yields the Old Tamil name of the Pleiades, aru-miin, literally ‘6 stars’. Note that
the numeral attribute precedes its headword in the Indus script as it did in Proto-Dravidian, but by no means in every
language of the world.
‘7’ + ‘fish’ corresponds to the Old Tamil name of Ursa Major, eZu-miin. This sequence forms the entire
inscription on one big seal from Harappa (H-9).



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A Dravidian solution to the Indus script problem!-3

In Mesopotamia big dedicatory seals were
sometimes presented to divinities. The stars of Ursa
Major have since Vedic times been identified with the
ancient “Seven Sages”. These mythical ancestors of
priestly clans play an important role in early Indian
mythology.
Because the Pleiades constitute the first
constellation of the Vedic star calendar, its heliacal rise
at the vernal equinox is thought to have marked the
beginning of the New Year. This and the position of the
marking stars in the sky dates the calendar to the twentythird
century BCE and suggests its Harappan origin.
The Vedic people did not inherit the calendar from the
Indo-Iranian tradition but adopted it in India.
Figure 9. The sequence of signs depicting ‘seven’ and ‘fish’; these
two signs form the whole inscription of the large seal H-9 from
Harappa. (After CISI 1: 166.)
18
A Dravidian solution to the Indus script problem
Vedic texts prescribe the kindling of sacred fires under the Pleiades, because the Pleiades now have the Fire-
God Agni as their mate. We are told that the Pleiades were the wives of the Seven Sages, but are now precluded
from intercourse with their husbands, who divorced them. Therefore the Pleiades now rise in the east, while the
Seven Sages (that is, the stars of Ursa Major) are in the north. The Fire God Agni mentioned as the mate of the
Pleiades apparently represents the young vernal sun, whose conjunction with the Pleiades started the New Year.
Later Sanskrit texts tell the myth in more detail and in several variant forms. According to them, the Fire God
Agni (or the great ascetic god OEiva) seduced the Pleiades in the absence of their husbands, the Seven Sages. They
were divorced. Only Arundhatii, the faithful wife of Sage VasiSTha, could not be seduced. She could remain as the
star Alcor with her husband, the star Mizar of Ursa Major (see fig. 13).
This is really one of the central myths of the Hindu religion. In a Puranic version, God OEiva seduced six of the
wives of the absent Seven Sages in their Himalayan hermitage. The Sages cursed OEiva’s phallus to fall down. The
phallus started to burn the world and stopped only when the Sages placed it on a vulva-shaped platform and
worshipped it with cooling water-libations. This is how the cult of OEiva’s linga or phallus originated. OEiva, one of the
greatest gods of Hinduism, has mostly the phallus as his cult icon since the earliest historical times. OEiva’s Vedic
predecessor Rudra is thought to be of non-Aryan origin. In Vedic texts, Rudra is euphemistically called oeiva
‘benign’, and equated with the Fire god Agni as is OEiva in the Pleiades myth.
Banyan fig and the pole star
One recurring sign sequence with the plain ‘fish’ sign as its latter member begins with a sign whose iconic meaning
seems to be ‘fig tree’. Can we here too have a Dravidian astral term?
Figure 10. The seal M-414
from Mohenjo-Daro. The normal
direction of writing, from right to
left, is that of the impression; in
this original seal stamp, the text
has been carved in mirror
image. (After CISI 3.1: 409.)
19
Asko Parpola
The iconic interpretation as ’fig’ is based on a comparison with Harappan painted pottery. In the script, the fig
tree is shown as three-branched, just as on the painted pottery, except when another sign is placed inside it; then the
central ‘branch’ is omitted. In the combined sign, the branches end in fig leaves as they do on the painted pottery,
but in the basic sign with less space the fig leaves are simplified, and one or two down-going lines are sometimes
added beneath the leaves on either side; in some variants
three or four such lines replace the leaves altogether.
The ‘three-branched fig tree’ motif occurs on
Harappan pottery from the Early through the Mature
to the Late phase. In one variant from the time when
the Indus script was created, four strokes are attached
to either side of the middle stem. They are similar to the
strokes of the Indus sign, except for their upward
direction, which may be due to the direction of the two
lower stems. The strokes seem to represent the airroots
of the banyan fig.
The rope-like air-roots are characteristic of the
banyan fig, Ficus bengalensis or Ficus indica. This
mighty tree is native to South Asia and does not grow
in the parts where the Indo-Aryan speakers came from.
A post-Vedic Sanskrit name for the banyan fig is vaTa.
This is a Dravidian loanword, ultimately derived from
Figure 11. Allographs of the Indus sign (no. 123) representing a three-branched ‘fig tree’ and of its ligature with the ‘crab’ sign (no. 124), where the
middlemost branch has been omitted to accommodate the inserted ‘crab’ sign. (After Parpola 1994: 235.)
Figure 12. A painted goblet with the ‘three-branched fig tree’ motif from
Nausharo ID, transitional phase between the Early and Mature Harappan
periods (c. 2600-2550 BCE). (After Samzun 1992: 250, fig. 29.4 no. 2.)



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Why Michael Witzels, Steve Farmers, Karunanidhis are so worried about IVC?

April 20, 2010

Why Michael Witzels, Steve Farmers, Karunanidhis are so worried about IVC?

If the scholars are genuinely interested in researching and presenting facts without any bias, such type of presentation could be understood by even common man by going through.

But when a certain pattern with bias, prejudice, pre-determined attack on one particular linguistic or religious group counched under the so-called not following racism, racialism etc., then there is a reason to doubt their credentials whether they are Indian, Indian born or non-Indan, European or American categories.

Therefore, the changing stands of the scholars also worry common men, as their views are picked up by the ideologically biased journalists and politicians to interprete and propagate according to their viewpoint. Here only Karunanidhi comes. He never bothered when Asko Parpola visited Madras / Chennai about 100 times. It is not known as to whether he has ever met him and discussed. In 1990s, he said that the whole affairs of fighting with each other etc., were Aryan issues! Rama and Krishna were black and Kshtriyas……………and so on! Or his friend Iravatham Mahadevan used his good offices to make him meet.

However, now he has been chosen for the award!

In deed, it should have been given to Michael wizel or Steve Farmer appropriately, as they have done excellent work. not only that, Michael could come right inside the so-called “Aryan-bastion”, the much hated “Parppaniya den” – Sanskrit College and declared that he had developed some skills to read and understand Rifvedic verses. However, he could not pronouce “Indrasul, Mitrasil,Nasatya…….”, as his tingue was not co-operating!

However, his humour has been phenomenal and epigenetic!

Kindly have more fun, dear friends cheers!

With due acknowledgments to Sanskrit Professor!

Steve wrote:

 

>>It is tedious to keep going over these materials, but if it’s one
thing
we’ve learned over the years, it is that these people *only* win if you
don’t stand up to them. When you do, ignoring the smears and just
giving the facts, their plans crumble.

>> Michael will have more on Rajaram’s Hindutva Love Fest at U. Mass
Dartmouth later today or tomorrow, I believe.

Indeed, I went down to Dartmouth, MA, to take a look at the
“Symposium on Aryan/Non-Aryan Origin of Indian Civilization.”

The Aryan invasion of India is a 19th c. theory that no serious
scholar today takes seriously, but that plays a great role in current
Indian and NRI (Indian immigrant) politics in the US (as we have seen
in California recently).

Scholarly speaking, what is to be explained is the introduction into
South Asia of an Indo-European language (Vedic Sanskrit), of
Indo-Iranian poetry, poetics and religion, as well as some of the Vedic
material culture (horses, chariots, etc.) This is fervently denied by
Hindutvavadins as the cannot allow that a central part of their culture
that continues until today has come from the outside. In their eyes,
this would threaten the supposedly indigenous character of the (North)
Indian Vedic civilization, and thus, much of the roots of later
Hinduism.

I went to Dartmouth as to take a stand in what promised to be a
Hindutva-centered meeting that was to propound the victory against the
so-called “Aryan invasion theory”.
Also, as not to leave our archeologist and geneticist colleagues alone,
exposed to severe doses of Hindutva and being unwittingly co-opted, as
has happened before (such as in the Long Beach conference some 3 years
ago).

People were flown in from as far as Europe and India to attend the
“symposium”. Clearly, some major funding is behind this effort “to
settle the theory of an Aryan Invasion” at c. 1500 BCE.

This so-called symposium was fun, if you can savor the nutty “theories”
these people propound. There were just a few exceptions among the
speakers from the Hindutva mindset (see list below):

* P. Eltsov, a young archeologist (PhD Harvard, now at Berlin) who gave
a grand view of indian civilization based on indigenous ideas of the
development of culture, from texts such as the Puranas (that have never
been used for that purpose).

* P. Underhill, well known Stanford geneticist, gave an overview of Y
chromosome studies relating to India (see below for details).

* V. K. Kashyap, of the National Institute of Biologicals at New Delhi,
gave a serious genetic paper (overview of recent mtDNA and NRY
studies related to India), but unfortunately his conclusions were again
quite Hindutva-like (see below)

* Makarand Paranjpe, (JL Nehru U., Delhi) gave a macro-civilizational,
post-colonialist speech, clearly inspired by measured nationalism . It
was a plea for the decolonizing of the Indian mind (now 50 years after
independence!), but he is not of a Hindutva mindset.

* Dr. Asiananda, Intercultural Open University, Netherlands, gave a
Blavatsky-inspired talk, free from Hindutva. Instead, he actually
quoted Parpola and Witzel with approval (what a combination!). He
proposed a grand scheme of ‘megacycles’ in history: the pre-vedic,
postvedic and transvedic civilization, into which we enter now,
supposedly: the beginning of a new Axial Age: a great Asian peace zone
expanding world wide. Sure. Just ask the emerging new powers in Asia
and South America.

As the last few cases show, the meeting was as nutty as expected. A few
characterizations about the hard core Hindutva characters and their
camp followers.

N. S. RAJARAM
was stuck, as is usual with him, in the 19th century (Max Mueller),
though now (after having posed a historian Indologist for the past 15
years) he wants to be a scientist again, using modern science to
explain the Vedic age.

He gave his usual erroneous overview of the word aarya in the Rigveda,
underlining that aarya does not mean a ‘race’ but just is cultural term
(as long explained, unbeknownst to him, by Kuiper, 1955), that and
means ‘noble’ (which is wrong as Thieme has shown long ago). He also
denies that the Aarya distinguished themselves from others in the RV
(again untrue) and maintained that seeing Arya a “race” was a product
of European thought and was necessary for German nationalism in the
19th c. and unification in 1870/71. (Well, ask Bismarck whether he ever
read the Vedas or studied comparative linguistics).

Of course, Dr. R. is unaware of the fact that arya, aarya – he
mentions only aarya– in the RV means something else, (probably
‘hospitable’, i.e. “us’) and he is unaware of the seminal study of the
term by Thieme ( Der Fremdling im Rigveda. Leipzig 1938; Mitra and
Aryaman. New Haven 1957; JAOS 80, 1960, 301-17 the latter two in
English).

Once again, he expressed his nonacceptance of comparative historical
linguistics, which “would not exist without Sanskrit”. A typical
Indo-centric view, that neglects that other language families were
discovered earlier than the Indo-European one, and that the
establishment of IE ling. could have proceeded without the knowledge
of Sanskrit: it merely was facilitated by Skt as the constituent
elements of words (root, stem suffix, endings) are a little clearer
their than, say in Greek or Latin.

In short, historical and technical ignorance, which characterized all
of his writings of the past 15 years. (He cannot even get the
intellectual history of the 19th c., right as he depends on secondary
and tertiary sources).

Then, he cherry-picked from other sciences, such as genetics (“which
shows that there was no recent immigration into India!” — see below),
archaeology, etc. Again, without clear understanding of the procedure
of these sciences and the way some of their “results’ are arrived at,
by speculation. Thus, when he talks about the connection between the
Harappan civilization and the Veda (“by one group of people”), he
cherry-picks some similarities and neglects the fundamental differences
between the city civilization of the Harappans and the (largely)
pastoral, semi-nomadic Rgvedic culture.

All of this as to show that a “paradigm change” in understanding early
Indian history is underway. Well, just in his own mind and that of his
camp followers. (I will not go into details here. I have discussed all
of this madness of alleged paradigm change in along and tedious
fashion in EJVS 2001)

Instead, as he has now noticed that the Rigveda represents a maritime
civilization (see below, BB Lal’s talk), he wants to move on and study
the connections between Harappan and Rgvedic civilization on the one
hand, and the S.E. Asian (such as Cambodia) ones on the other. He is
clearly inspired by the popular books of S. Oppenheimer, and his failed
“paradise in the east”, based on the Toba explosion of c. 75,000 BCE
(ironically when Homo Sap., sap. had not yet left Africa).

Focusing, like Oppenheimer, on SE Asia Rajaram attributes, against
recent botanical data, the origin of rice agriculture to the Cambodian
Tonle Sap area some 12 kya ago, thus at 10,000 BCE. But we know that
domesticated oryza japonica originated in S. China and oryza indica in
the eastern parts of N. Indian plains, all quite a few millennia later
than 12 Kya.

Obviously I opposed these points in the discussion period (as mentioned
above) and ironically encouraged him to get all departments of
linguistics abolished world wide….

(By the way, no words by Rajaram about his proposed 2nd vol. of
“translations” of the Indus signs. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask him
about it. What a pity!)

S. BAJPAI

This former, rather unproductive Prof. of history at the CA State
University (Northridge) was very active in the long ranging CA
schoolbook debate that he “won” — of course, only in his mind. He
wanted to show that the theory of an “Aryan” invasion or even influx
into India was just a myth, and that the Vedic and Harappan (Indus)
civilizations were connected: by identifying the area of the Seven
Rivers (Sapta Sindhavah), the Sarasvati River, and the epicenter of
Rgvedic culture.

In doing so, he did not repeat what specialists have known for long,
that the 7 rivers define the greater Panjab area, but he propounded the
strange idea that the western Panjab rivers (Jhelum, Indus etc.) were
excluded… Note that this “result” excludes much of Pakistan and E.
Afghanistan (whose rivers are of course clearly mentioned in the text)

As for the Sarasvati, he tried to show that this is a “mighty” river in
Haryana State (northwest of Delhi), again something well known to
specialists. He propounded the typical Hindutva theory that this river
flowed from the mountains (Himalaya) to the ocean (samudra), neglecting
the studies of K. Klaus (in the Eighties) that showed that samudra
means many things in the Veda, including lakes. Thus, he overlooked the
point that the Sarasvati (Sarsuti)-Ghaggar-Hakra river ended in a delta
and in terminal lakes in the Cholistan/Ft.Derawar area in Pakistan,
well east of the Indus. He also overlooked the recent studies by two
Indian and two German geologists who have pointed out (Current science
2004) that the “great river” of the Harappan and Vedic period could
not have been so large anymore as its area does not show mineral
deposits of Himalayan glaciers. This renders a perennial glacier-fed
river into a smaller, monsoon fed one that could not fill the 10 km
wide river bed of former times.

Hindutvavadins need the big river, that they say dried up in c. 2000
BCE, as they want to make it the center of the Harappan Civilization,
that they call the Sindhu (Indus) –Sarasvati civilization. (But, it
has been shown by R. Mughal in 1977 that this drying up happened in
stages, with several reversals. Not mentioned of course).

Bajpai had the great idea (not substantiated by historical leveling of
the RV) that the original Sapta Sindhu region was in the Sarasvati
area, (called “the best place on earth” in RV 3 ) and that the concept
was later expanded to include areas west and east of it. Strange that
the Avesta also has it (Videvdad), but Avestan was never mentioned by
this Indocentric person (who told me during a CA meeting that he is not
interested in materials from outside India). Nor was any attention
paid to the fact that RV 3 is a book that deals with the victorious
Bharata tribe, who settled in the Sarasvati area and naturally praised
this river to the skies… Such is the lack of background and scholarly
sense of this great historian.

His conclusion was that the Rigvedic civilization and the Harappan one
overlapped in one geographical area and also in time, as the RV “must
be older than 2000 BCE” since it still mentions the great Sarasvati
flowing to the ocean.

In sum, he now wants to reconstitute the history of the Harappan and
Vedic times: “the myth and baggage” of the Aryans as coming from the
outside must be given up. In the question period, BB. Lal (see below)
honed in on this erroneous idea that must be discarded, and Rajaram
added that scholars now need to take one more step: join archeological
and literary evidence (as if we and others had not done that, for
example at Toronto 1990 (Erdosy 1995) and in the yearly Harvard Round
Tables (since 1999).

Again, it became clear how narrow, Indocentric and uniformed the
Hindutva proponents are and how much they lack proper information on
past studies. P. Eltsov and I criticized some of the points mentioned
above. Time however always was too short during the meeting to go into
any detailed discussion of the many points mentioned, so I had to pick
and choose among some obviously inane proposals and the lack of
information and vision.

B.B. Lal

Lal is the former Dir. Gen. of the Indian archaeological service. At
that time, he has done some very good work, though he has published
little of it and is doing so only now, after severe public criticism in
India some 2 years ago.

However, after his retirement he became religious and Hindutva-like. I
still must make a streaming video of interviews he gave in 1985 to a
Japanese TV crew about his digs that were meant to follow the footsteps
of the (god!) Rama , from Ayodhya southwards across the Ganges and
beyond… Maybe I can do so this summer.
Lal too propounds the identity of the Vedic and Harappan civilizations.

Anyhow, he also billed himself as a Sanskritist this time — but he
has never heard that Vedic Sanskrit is as different from the commonly
taught Classical one as Homeric Greek is different from Classical
Greek. Consequently, he made serious mistakes in his long discussion
of Rgvedic culture.

After blaming Max Mueller and M. Wheeler as originators of the Aryan
theory, and rejecting the old explanation that the invading Aryans had
driven the Dravidians southwards, he stressed the continuity of the
Harappan and Vedic cultures, and went on a textual spree:

If the Aryan Invasion theory was right, then how come that among
Rigvedic place names there are no Dravidian ones? (He never mentioned
the fact that many words have a third language origin, loans from a
prefixing, Austro-Asiatic like language). He then talked about plants
and animals as typical Indian (forgetting about temperate climate IE
words such as those for the wolf, otter, beaver, willow, oak, etc.),
and merely mentioned that the birch tree (another IE word) is not
found in the RV (it of course occurs prominently in post-RV texts, with
derivates to this day…)

Next came M. Witzel’s “abortive attempt” to find the immigration in a
Sutra text. The passage in question (BS’S 18) has found various
interpretations, and Lal, as a non-specialist, was of course not aware
of the fact that the Brahmana-like texts play with popular etymologies:
in case that of “going, moving” (I, ay) and staying at home (amaa vas),
which is found in the tribal names involved (Ayu, Amavasu), which I
had to point out to him. His summary, predicable again, was: no Aryan
invasion.

Next a discussion some terracotta “spoked wheels” in Harappan layers:
remember we need horses and chariots in pre-RV times! (An Indian
archaeologist had described them to me recently as spindle whirls,
confirming my own interpretation).

As expected he also found horses in archeology (figurines and the
Surkotada skeleton). I had to point out to him that the horse is a
steppe animal that was introduced into the near East and S. Asia only
around 2000 BCE, and that only by finding the phalanges of equids one
can decide whether we deal with a donkey, a horse or a half-ass
(onager, hemione) skeleton. Onagers still are found in the Rann of
Cutch.

Further a discussion of pur ”fort”, and sea trade with 100-oared boats.
As an archeologist, he had never heard that 100, 1000 are commonly used
as ‘many’ in Vedic texts and anyhow, the boat in question is a
mythological one, not one of human traders.

He also saw great rulers in the RV, just because samraat means
‘emperor’, in post-Vedic texts., Again philological failure. And so on
and so forth.

Finally, the Sarasvati again, drying up at 2000 BCE. Thus the RV must
be dated before that event. Indeed, Haryana settlements (the center of
RV culture, see above) go back to excavations showing a date of 6431
BCE (!) And genetics were thrown in for good measure (Sahoo 2006)

In sum, though the RV occupied only the northwest of the subcontinent,
it “overlaps in time and area with the Harappan civilianization”.

It is surprising how an established archaeologist can be so naïve, in
his old age, about facts from outside his field (palaeontology,
genetics, texts, linguistics) and still loudly proclaim his
‘revolutionary’ result (also in his latest book “The Sarasvati flows
on”.) I felt sorry for him that I had to point this out, but since he
is a well respected authority, it had to be done.

N. KAZANAS

Kazanas is the head of a new age-like institution in Athens (Greece).
He has studied some Sanskrit way back in Britain, and has joined the
anti-Migration bandwagon in recent years.

Interestingly, his talk put the RV not at 2000 BCE but at 3000 BCE and
earlier, but he still made the same assertion of a link between the
Harappan and Vedic civilization.

No problem: he has spoked wheels in an Indus sign where a man stands
above to ‘spoked’ circles; he has “plenty” horses in India, since
17,000 BCE (but, the Sivalik horse disappeared, like its American
relatives, in the megafaunal extinction around 10,000 BCE), all of
which fits the RV evidence of horses and chariots.

However, as indicated, he has the RV well before the Indus civ. : thus,
istaka ‘brick” is not found in the RV (never mind that it also is found
in Avestan and Tocharian, an old BMAC loan); pur does not mean fort or
town (W. Rau has shown in the Seventies that it means exactly that:
‘fort’); Rgvedic people were oceangoing; the RV has no fixed, built up
altars like the (supposed) Harappan ones at Kalibangan (well, what
about, e.g., RV 2.3.7 with 3 ‘ backs/hills’ for the 3 sacred fires?);
and echoing Sethna, the word for cotton is found only in the late Vedic
Sutra, while it has been found in the Indus civ.

His simpl(istic) summary: the RV must be older than the Harappan civ.

He also believes that many ideas and myths of the RV have been
forgotten after 3000 BCE, that the genealogies (which ALWAYS are
subject to expansion and contraction) found in the Brhadaranyaka
Upanishad add up to a Vedic period of some 900 years; that Achar’s
calculation of the date of the Mahabharata at 3067 (see below) shows
the age of Indian civ..

Then, that the mighty Sarasvati (see above) leads to a period of 3200
or 3800 BCE, his time of the RV (never mind the other Hindutva dates
given above). Additionally, saras in Saras-vati does not mean a lake
but the root sr means to ‘rush’. Well, Mayrhofer’s etymological
dictionary (which he quoted!) lists saras itself and links it with a
different root, as seen in Greek helos ‘swamp,’ which he –as a Greek–
did not mention. (See my discussion of his ideas in JIES 31, (2003),
107-185).

Finally, the “full agreement of “all archeologist’’ in not accepting an
Aryan invasion as there “never can be any peaceful immigration” Huh?
Which was “possible only thorough conquest by nomadic horse riding
barbarians.”

In sum, the usual omnium gatherum of disjointed elements that all can
be disputed (as I did of course), point by point.

Simply put: horses and chariots in South Asia at 3500 BCE (before they
actually appear, after 2000 BCE)?

N. ACHAR

N. Achar gave another version of his paper (already widely distributed
on the net) that dates the Mahabharata tale to 3067 BCE, based on
the description of the movement of some planets, some eclipses, etc.
If we were to take these descriptions (found in post-Vedic,
non-standard Epic Sanskrit) as a given, the (unanswered) question would
arise: how this knowledge would have been transmitted, from its form in
the Harappan language, to Vedic and post-Vedic Sanskrit, in an ever
changing medium like the epic.

Anyhow: what would the Mahabharata be without horses and chariots (at
3067 BCE??)

In discussion, he maintained his belief that the astronomical data are
based on actual observation and somehow made it into our present
version of the Mahabharata (compiled probably only around 100 BCE.!)

Y. “Rani” ROSSER

She was, in a certain way, the most amusing highlight of the meeting.
Talking at high volume, shouting at times, she complained about the
state of schoolbooks with regard to the ‘debunked Aryan Invasion
Theory’ and that the ‘paradigm shift’ away from it does not appear in
American schoolbooks or in Summer school-like meetings that inform US
high school teachers. She has started a project collecting statements
about various scholars about the theory.

More amusingly, she took pot shots at me three or four times, laced
with faulty memory and confabulation as well as plainly wrong
information, and including even personal items. As it turned out later
she was confusing my website (where she does not figure) with that of
a second generation India group on the web (IPAC). I had to tell her “
first read, then speak…” several times.

Not satisfied with this, she accosted me in the break period, loudly
calling me, quote, “an *******” (twice) . So much spiritualism for this
sari-clad, self-professed Ganesha worshipper.

(Others had contended themselves with complaints that I had not
answered their email (Kazanas), etc., or that I had not taken up their
invitation to speak at the meeting. Why should I legitimize them in
doing so? — After all his slander & libeling, Rajaram did not say
anything about me, of course not about his role in CA, but I
confronted him, and told him what I think of his defamation and
libeling since December. And too bad that Harvard did not buy his
libeling. No answer.).

Some such amusement apart, Rani Rosser clearly is very angry that I
disturbed her nicely planned scheme to saffronize CA schoolbooks (she
was involved in the planning and writing of the edits), and that I had
shown her ignorance on another list some 5 years ago. Another
Rajaram-like “forget me not” case.

Finally coming to some actual science:

P. UNDERHILL

Is a geneticist at Stanford U., and participant in our yearly Round
Tables. He gave an overview of the genetic data presently known for
India. It was loaded with caveats about what genetics can say about
ancient populations and how limited our knowledge actually is at this
moment. (Interestingly, Rajaram often interrupted and asked follow up
questions, as he now fancies himself as budding population geneticist).

Underhill stressed the fact that we have little ancient DNA, and use
modern one as proxy material that is supposed to indicate actual
historical events. Second, that there is no direct connection between
genes, language and archaeology. Third, that different population
histories can create the same genetic landscape, that certain
demographic events may be hidden, and that late arrivals [such as the
Aryans] may not be easily detectable.
Fourth, that there always is the possibility that results of genetics
are cherry-picked to suit political desires (a clear hint of Hindutva
efforts), but that good science always is self-correcting.

He then proceeded to give some details of the Y chromosome landscape of
South Asia, pointing out some haplogroups that arose in India and
others that came for the outside.

Of special interest is R1a1-M17 (which he discovered in 1995) and that
has often been attributed to the spread of Indo-European (while
Hindutvavadins let it originate in India). That is a gross
simplification. According to him, it probably arose in the area around
the Hindukush around 10,000 BC (+/- 3000 years), and spread eastwards
and westwards. It has the largest impact on S. Asia (some 25%), but is
found from E. Europe to India.
However, its resolution, that means as subgroups of M17, still are too
inadequate, so that nothing specific can be said about a possible
(re-)introduction of a variety of M17 into S. Asia [along with the
Aryans].

He re-asserted this in the discussion, when BB Lal wanted to know more
about the chronology of this haplogroup. I also brought up the lack of
genetic resolution for any recent movements of people such as Aryans,
Turkic Muslims and British, as the error bar still is 3000 years for
events around 1000 BCE and later. He affirmed this, taking the wind
out of the sails of those who had used the Sengupta/Sahoo papers
(2005,2006) that dealt with events around 10,000 kya, as to refute an
Aryan invasion. I also brought up the Kivisild paper of 1999 that has
been used in the CA debate to show that “genetics had refuted an Aryan
migration” — well, at 60,000 BCE, not at the likely date of 1500 BCE.

One can only hope that this and other ridiculous statements will now
disappear. Not easily, though, see the following:

V. K. KASHYAP

Kashyap is a DNA specialist at a national institute in Delhi. He gave
an even more detailed, valuable overview of the Indian genetic
landscape based on his project of studying 415 Indian populations.
However, some strange features appeared in his talk:
Dravidian at 50,700 kya
Austroasiatic at “??”
Tibeto-Burmese at 8-10 kya
Aryan at 3.5 to 5,.5 kya.
Dravidian at 50, 000? At that time, not even the hypothetical Nostratic
ancestor language had developed, not to speak of its daughter families,
such as IE, Dravidian, etc,

He then quoted some genetic papers with pro and contra for an Aryan
migration from Central Asia, and proceeded to Sahoo (2006) and his own
study: with similar results as those in Underhill’s. So far so good.

However the local atmosphere must have shaped his actual interpretation
of the data. For, he used them to show that there are [currently, I
add] no data for an Aryan Immigration and that the Aryan gene pool is
a myth.

In the discussion, Underhill intervened and stressed again that his
agrees with Kashyap’s genetic data. But that he hesitated to put a
specific origin on some of them, such as M17-R1a1 [which Hindutvavadins
have used for an Out of India theory of IE – at 10 kya ! ]. M17
could just as easily have arisen on the Iranian plateau and then have
moved into India, just as other lineages did. The lack of informative
sub-haplogroups makes it impossible to say anything more.

In sum: genetics has nothing to say yet about the Aryan migration. Too
bad for the Rajaram’s of this world.

(Kak did not come; nor was our old favorite, Dr. K, present nor his
buddy, the budding self-appointed linguist Kelkar who lives close by in
the Boston area).

(I skipped the other sessions, such as the one on the Indian family
system — which, I hear, was just as nutty, apparently inspired by the
fear of loosing the joint family system and the Indian “racial”
identity when NRI children are intermarrying with Non-NRIs left and
right. And I skipped the “Workshop on Indian Civilization”, apparently
used for planning Hindutva style college text books,– which would have
been even a greater loss of time and energy).

In the summary session, I stressed again that the “Aryan Invasion
Theory” is dead and gone, it is a 19th c. theory. But, not to be
misquoted, that they still have to explain how a temperate climate
Indo-European language got into the subcontinent (and Iran), along with
its poetics, religion and rituals. That they finally must learn some
linguistics and philology, and explain their facts. Just to cherry-pick
and cut and paste the interpretations of the various sciences does not
do.

In sum, as expected, another event that brought out Hindutva goals and
methods. A loss of time, sure, but these guys had to be confronted…

Cheers, M.W.

PS:
Here the official list which does not quite reflect the actual list of
speakers, as give above.
————————————————————————
———-
Symposium on Aryan/Non-Aryan Origin of Indian Civilization

Session I Chair: Vanita Shastri

4:00 PM – Dr. Petr Eltsov, Deutches Archaeologische Institut, Germany-
From Harappa to Hastinapura: A study of the earliest South City and
civilization from the point of view of archaeology and ancient Indian
literature
4:45 PM – Dr. N. S. Rajaram, Indologist – The Aryan Myth In Perspective
-History, Science and Politics
5:30 PM – Dr. Asiananda, Intercultural Open University, Netherlands -
Situating Aryan/Non-Aryan Origins of Indian Civilization within a
Mega-cyclical View of Indian History
6:15 PM – Dr. Shiva Bajpai, California State University, Northridge -
Epicenter and Ecumene of the Rigvedic Aryans

Saturday June 24, 2006

Session II Chair: S. S. Chakravarti

7:30 AM – Registration and continental breakfast

8:30 AM – Dr. B. B. Lal, former Director General, Archeological Survey
of India – An Ostrich-Like Attitude Is Perpetuating -The ‘Aryan
Invasion’ Myth?
9:15 AM – Dr. Nicholas Kazanas, Omilos Meleton, Athens – Dating the
Rigveda and Indigenism
10:00 AM – Dr. Subhash Kak, Louisiana State University – Vedic
Astronomy and the Aryan Problem

10:45 AM – Break

Session III Chair: C. M. Bhandari

11: 00 AM – Dr. Yvette Rosser, UMass Dartmouth – Aryans and Ancestral
Angst.
11:45 AM – Dr. Peter Underhill, Stanford University – Patterns of
Y-chromosome diversity in the contemporary South Asian gene pool
12:30 PM – Dr. V. K. Kashyap, National Institute of Biologicals, New
Delhi, India – Aryan Gene Pool in India- Reality or Myth; Evidences
Revisited

1:15 PM – Lunch

2:15 PM – Dr. Makarand Paranjape, Jawaharlal Nehru University -
Symposium Roundup
3:00 PM – Break

==============

Michael Witzel
Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University
1 Bow Street , 3rd floor, Cambridge MA 02138
1-617-495 3295 Fax: 496 8571
direct line: 496 2990
<http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm>
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/>
http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/>



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Asko Parpola gets award from the controversial Karunanidhi!

April 4, 2010

Asko Parpola gets award from the controversial Karunanidhi!

Karunanidhi has been modern day racist Dravidian leader, who runs government in the name of “Dravidian race superiority” against the imaginary “Aryans”.

Just like Hitler, he believes that “Aryans” were responsible for the “downfall” of “Dravidians” and therefore, he has been waging perpetual war against those “Aryans”.

Now, the racist Karunanidhi has recognized that asko Parola has been responsible for indetifying the undeichiphered IVC script as “DRavidian” and therefore, he is awarded by that Dravidian racist leader!

Let us see the response of the academicians.

Already, his controversial “Tamil conference” is infested with various problems. The original Tamil Body had refused to participate in the conference.

Classical Tamil Award for Asko Parpola

 

Asko Parpola. Photo : N. Sridharan
THE HINDU Asko Parpola. Photo : N. Sridharan

Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Award: For his work on Dravidian hypothesis in interpreting Indus script, Asko Parpola gets the award in the name of controversial racist leader. Asko Parpola, leading authority on the Indus script and Professor Emeritus of Indology in the University of Helsinki, Finland, has been chosen for the Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Award for 2009. He was selected for his work on the Dravidian hypothesis in interpreting the Indus script because the Dravidian, as described by him, was very close to Old Tamil, an official release issued on Saturday said. Professor Parpola will receive a cash prize of Rs. 10 lakh, a citation and a memento during the World Classical Tamil Conference to be held in Coimbatore in June.

Selection appears to be more political than academic: His selection was made at a meeting chaired by Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, who is also chairman of the Central Institute of Classical Tamil. Two hundred and thirty nominations were received from different countries, including Australia, U.S., the United Kingdom, Sri Lanka and Finland besides India. Administered by the Institute, the award was established out of a donation of Rs.1 crore made by Mr. Karunanidhi in July 2008. The amount is being deposited in the name of Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi Classical Language Trust.

Asko Parpola: Born in July 1941, Professor Parpola has devoted his life to the task of solving the Indus script. Since 1968, he has been stressing that the Indus civilisation and its writing are Dravidian. His research and teaching interests include Indus Civilisation, Samaveda, Vedic rituals, South Asian religions and pre-historic archaeology of South and Central Asia. His magnum opus “Deciphering the Indus Script” proposing Dravidian as the language of the Indus script has been hailed a classic in the field. His ‘Concordance to the Indus Texts’ has been serving as a valuable source for researchers. The two volumes of ‘The Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions,’ reproduced the original seals and their impressions.



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A Review of “Deciphering Indus Script” by Asko Parpola

June 26, 2010

A Review of “Deciphering Indus Script” by Asko Parpola

 

K. V. Ramakrishna Rao

 

A paper presented at the “National Seminar on Indus Valley Civilization: A Review in Recent Research” held at the Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture, Pondicherry, on September 28th, 2003

 

 

Introduction: In recent research on Indus Valley Civilization, particularly in “Deciphering Indus script”, Asko Parpola’s book of the same name is talked about much1. Initially published in 1994 and it has appeared in paperback in 2000. The present review is about the 2000 edition printed in India but exported and sold from outside India. Ironically, according to ISBN, it is classified as follows: 1. Indus script. 2. Indus Civilization. 3. Harappan site (Pakistan). 4. Pakistan – Antiquities. I. Title.

The book contains four parts:

  1. Introduction.
  2. The Indus script.
  3. The Linguistic context.
  4. Interpretations of Indus pictograms.

For convenience the chapter headings themselves are taken in the order for review as follows. In the first paragraph, the findings, conclusions or certain statements made are reproduced or summarized and in the second paragraph they are for commented critically or refuted in the context. Only important points in the context are taken up for discussion.

1. The Indus Civilization and its historical context. The Indus (or Harappan) Civilization, now dated to c.2550-1900 BCE, collapsed before the composition of the hymns collected in the Rigveda Samhita, the oldest historical document in India.

There had been two “Aryan invasions” – 1. The Rigvedic Aryans and 2. Indo-European-speaking invaders – these Aryans called themselvesDasa.

Rigveda was compiled in 1200 BCE and historical period begins.

Discussing about the rise and fall of Harappan / Indus culture, he gives the periods archaeologically and chronologically as follows:

The archaeological levelsSiteDated to period approximatelyThough the approximate dated periods are taken archaeologically, interpretation is given historically having bearing on the historical processes of India. Indian archaeological evidences themselves dated to different dates of various sites. But why they have different cultures with wide difference is not explained.
The earliest levelMehrgarh- IAc.7000-6000 BCE
The next major phaseMehrgarh- IIB-IIIc.5000-3600 BCE
The next phaseMehrgarh- IV-Vc.3600-3200 BCE
Lower layersMehrgarh- VI-VII

 

Nausharo I

Amri II

Kot Diji

c.3200-2600 BCE
CultureApproximate dateIf historical period starts with c.1200 BCE with the compilation of Rigveda, why then history of India starts with the invasion of Alexander? Therefore, the history of India should be written starting with 1200 BCE. Again another problem is the gap between the IVC and the Mauryan period. Therefore, the gap has to be filled up historically without mincing words.
Pottery neolithicc.6000-5000 BCE
Chalcolithicc.5000-3600 BCE
Early Harappanc.3600-2550
Mature Harappanc.2550-1900
Early Mature Harappanc.2550-2300 BCE
Intermediate Mature Harappanc.2300-1900 BCE
Late Harappanc.1900-1800/1400 BCE
Post Harappanc.1800/1400-110 BCE
Iron Agec.1000 BCE
Mauryanc.322-183 BCE

If one group of “Aryans’ called themselves “Dasas”, then, where is the question of the “conflicts” between them depicted as that of between “Aryans” and “Dasas/Dravidians” is to be analyzed here2.

  1. Early writing systems. The development of the alphabet is traced to different cultures and dated as follows:
CultureTypePeriod datedRemarks by the reviewer
EgyptianHieroglyphc.1600 BCEHow the dates have been determined is not given. The sources point to reliance placed on biblical and other Puranic type narratives. Not less than a great scientist like Sir Isaac Newton has questioned the chronology of the Egyptians and Greeks and pointed out that the chronology of the former had been expanded by 3000 years and the later by 300 years. Therefore, Indian scholars have to question the placing of Brahmi script in the bracketed period c.250 BCE and c.150 CE.
West Semitic

 

Sinai

Canaan and Phonecian

Hieroglyph

 

Hieroglyph

Alphabet in the development stages

c.1600-1300 BCE

 

c.1300-900 BCE

c.900-600 BCE

c.600-300 BCE

GreekAlphabetc.600-500 BCE
BrahmiAlphabetc.250 BCE

 

c.150 CE

He traces Semitic origins to the Indian alphabet and the Brahmi script.

According to the existing hypotheses and theories “Aryans” came from Central Asia. If the Indus Civilization collapsed by c.1900 BCE before the composition of the hymns collected in the Rigveda Samhita, the oldest historical document in India, why they were not writing even upto c.250 BCE to 150 CE period? Were they waiting for the collapse and then to compose? Actually, how the hymns were compiled? Is any compilation possible without written documents? Moreover, scholars again and again confuse the concepts of language and script, though they are separate entities. That the Sanskrit is the oldest language of “Aryan languages” / “Indo-Europeans languages”/ “Indo-Aryan languages” etc., has been accepted. How then they should wait for writing in Sanskrit? The writing of a language is not a pre-requisite for composing hymns in that language. Good and natural poets do not write to produce poems like the modern ones but produce spontaneously oozing out of their minds and hearts in consonance with nature. Moreover, the recital of Vedic hymns is related to time keeping and reckoning. This aspect is appreciated by westerners one side and ignored at another side. For that matter, even we do not have the original mss written by the poets Paranar, Mangudi Marudhanar, Mosi Kiranar, Kapilar etc. Does it mean that they composed or sang poems without the knowledge of writing?

  1. Deciphering the unknown script. Discussing Egyptian / Hittite hieroglyph, cuneiform, etc, analyzing theories of decipherment and considering the peculiarities of the Indus script, he considers a scheme as follows:
TypeScriptLanguageExample(s)
1unknownKnownEgyptian hieroglyph
2KnownUnknownEtrusian
3UnknownUnknownLinear B; Indus script

Whatever method is perceived, conceived, proposed and applied, the way is only to go from “known” to “unknown”, whether one openly agrees or not. As the people who wrote the Indus script are Indians, though it is now in Pakistan, as the scholars very fond of mentioning it in their writings, and they are in India, of course some may be in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and other middle-eastern countries, the background of Indians have to be considered for decipherment. How the Egyptian and other cultural backgrounds would exactly fit into Indus script is questionable. To what extent the thinking processes of Egyptians/Sumerians/Akkadians and Harappans could be equated or the subjective and objective symbolism match to produce similar signs/ideograms etc., so that they can be compared with each other. The thinking of Egyptians and the Indus people would not have been in the same way to produce symbols, signs, pictograms to represent their ideas exactly as has been imagined by the deciphers. That he perceives, conceives and reads the symbolas ‘fish’, whereas William Fairservis3 does it as a combination of a loom twist and a human sign, and form a honorific title pertaining to rulership proves the fact.

  1. Approaches to Indus script. The potter’s marks on the ceramics of Neolithic societies may be considered as forerunners of writing, but only in the sense that they trained people to incised or painted symbols may have been models for the signs of real writing system when such a system was devised.

The Indus people though incised and painted their pottery, they do not posses any historical record of their activities. Significantly, here he himself accepts the fact that had they written on the perishable palm leaf or cotton cloth, they would have been lost.

He acknowledges that some opposed the hypothesis of origin of Brahmi script from the Semites, however telling that Brahmins under Asoka might have invented it.

Drawing attention to maze-like closed pattern, called ‘Brahma’s knot’ and Indian folk custom of drawing auspicious designs (kolams) in courtyards, he gives a photo of Kurava woman drawing a kolam (23/19/17 dots) and traces the origin of knot to third-millenium Mesopatomia.

After discussing some attempts, he admits in summary, that none of the attempts at deciphering the Indus script made so far (including that of our Finnish team) has gained wide acceptance.

Then he explains the computer method of arranging the symbols and confirms that the way of writing is from right to left.

As the writings of Indus people could have been lost, so also that of “Aryans” who composed Rigvedic hymns just after c.1900 BCE. This places the writing of “Aryans” ahead of the Egyptians and that is why perhaps the westerners do not want to take cognizance of such a fact. In the Old Tamil literature, the vedas are referred to as “ezhudhak karpin” (Inguru.156.5) meaning that the vedas are not written, but can be learnt.

As for as the kolams is concerned, it is not that only folk people or Kurava women alone draw but all Indian women not only on auspicious occasion but everyday morning to do so4. In fact, if such auspicious kolams are not drawn in from of any house, it might be construed otherwise even today.

The fuss made about computer analysis is nothing fascinating or realistic, because, programmers

know very well that computer is going to arrange the symbols/signs input according to the pre-conditions incorporated in the program. That is why the so called “computer decipherment of script” also differs from scholar to scholar or group to group. Therefore, in computer analysis also, scholars should be free from professional bias, racial prejudice and linguistic exclusivism.

Jews and Arabs still write their scripts from right to left. Had the Tamils inherited their culture from the Harappans/Indus people, who spoke Dravidian language, from which Tamil originated around 300BCE to 400 CE, they should continue to write from right to left, but they do otherwise.

It is not necessary that Brahmins should invent everything always, others have also invented many scientific principles in Indian civilization.

  1. Internal evidence for the type of script used in the Indus valley. Single signs and multiple signs are arranged according to their similarities or commonness exhibited in the pictographs and their possible conveyance of meaning is analyzed.

Thus according to graphemic (pertaining to sign) / structural analysis of signs / symbols, he concludes that Indus script is a logo-syllabic script (word sign).

  1. Internal evidence for the structure of the Indus language. Structure of Indus language is analyzed to find out its consistent with grammatical rules. Taking combination of symbols or group symbols formation of words and expressions, phrases and sentences are studied.

 

The attempted examples themselves clearly show that the method has been highly speculative and no definite reading could be possible.

  1. External clues to the Indus script. The signs / symbols like palm squirrel, bull, and other animals and their association with the script and language are analyzed comparing with other civilizations.

The method is highly speculative.

  1. In search of Indus language. After discussing about the languages of the cultural areas surrounding Indus, he delves much on “The coming of Aryans” and “the horse argument”.

Horse has never depicted in the Harappan seals, amulets or statuettes and therefore, “Aryans” never came to Indus valley in the third millenium and therefore the rulers were “non-Aryans”.

Here, it may be noted that in search of Indus language only “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” are searched and researched.

Whether “Dravidians” used horses or not? If they did not use, why? Being courageous, chivalrous and adventurous, they should have used horses and chariots and hence Iron also, because the chariots had to run with iron axles. Why then “Dravidians” did not use?

If “Dasa-Aryans” and “non-Dasa Aryans” only were fighting with each other, why then Indian Dravidologists make hue and cry about “Aryans” driving away “Dravidians” from Indus valley down south to Tamizhahgam?

Recently, there has been a discussion about the “stirrup” being an old Indian invention. Actually, scholars are unwittingly arguing and fighting with each other about the horse in Indus seal and so on coolly, forgetting the stirrup, because, without stirrup, no horse could be controlled and driven properly. And funnily our great Alexander and other warriors were riding horses without stirrups winning battles all the way hanging their legs! Varieties of horseman’s equipment including stirrup have been found in Megalithic sites in South India. As Gordon and Haimendrof opined that people using iron came from the Mediterranean to South India between 1100 and 700 BCE, it is taken as historical truth and hypotheses and theories built on it.

It may be noted that “Dravidians” should be black and “Aryans” white based on racial interpretation. But, we find references in Old Tamil literature that Tamil ladies were with gold colour – Nat.10.2; Kurun.101.4, 319.6; Inguru.230.4; Agam.212.1-2 and at other places, they were depicted with the colour of tender mango leaves.

J. M. Konoyer5 notes that Harappans maintained no armies and this goes against the warlike nature of “Dravidians” as has been depicted in the Old Tamil literature.

  1. Dravidian languages and the Harappan culture. Considering the “Brahui” problem, it is said that as “Brahui” does not connect with central or south Dravidian languages, it might belong to north Dravidian languages.

 

His discussion about “Meluhha” is interesting. Scholars identify meluhha = the Indo-Iranian and the Indus Civilization, because it is mentioned in the cuneiform sources dated to 2400-2200 BCE. Also in the Indian context, they say that “mleccha” in Sanskrit means non-Aryans. But, it means “people living in far lands”. Thus, “mleccha” might refer to Harappan people.

In his “South Dravidian and the archaeology of peninsular India” he gives his following conclusions:

The poems (Sangam literature) were composed and collected between about the first century BC and sixth century AD.

 

The Dravidian languages came to India from the west through Iran about 700 BCE with the carriers of the Megalithic culture, which is distributed all over South India including Tamilnadu and which persisted well into the first centuries of the Christian era.

The last phase of the Megalithic culture (c.300-100 BCE) does overlap the period of Old Tamil Culture (c.100 BCE – 600 CE), which in its militaristic idealization of warfare (including such elements as the horse and iron weapons) closely resembles the martial character of the Megalithic culture (in which weapons were regular grave goods).

The Dravidians could not have arrived in India as late as the Megalithic culture is clear from the fact that there is evidence in the Vedic texts for the presence of Dravidian languages in the Punjab already in the second millennium BCE.

It is indeed very probable that during, the last few centuries BC, the carriers of the Megalithic culture spoke Dravidian, at least in the extreme south.

But, this does not necessarily imply that the people who brought the Megalithic culture to South Asia also introduced the Dravidian languages there.

The earliest Iron Age in South India, c.1100-800 BC, is essentially a continuation of the preceding Chalcolithic culture.

The Indus script was probably of the logo-syllabic types and the Harappan language is most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family.

He points out that Cuneiform owners and Aryans called Harappans / Dravidians as Meluhha / mleccha. Mullaippattu (65-66) mentions about “mlecchar” – whose bodies speak but not their tongues – act as bodyguards of Kings. Later, Tamil Nihantus compiled by Jains dub “Aryans” as mlecchar. Had the ancient Tamils considered “mlecchar” as in sense of “Ariyar”, they would not have appointed them as their bodyguards. Therefore, when Sangam literature do not consider “Ariyar” as “mlecchar” vice versa, how the nigandus dub so is subjected to research in the context.

He says that The Dravidian languages came to India from the west through Iran about 700 BCE with the carriers of the Megalithic culture, however in the context of Iron and chalcolithic cultures, he syas that the earliest Iron Age in South India, c.1100-800 BC, is essentially a continuation of the preceding Chalcolithic culture. How the Chalcolithic was native to South India?

Indian scholars should note these contradictions.

10.  The ‘fish’ signs of the Indus script. First he discusses about the word denoting fish I different languages. He suggests that fish is used as an emblem to denote Siva.

 

About fish symbol, I. Mahadevan comments6:

 

“Like all Dravidian scholars, I too began with Father Heras. Father Heras was a Spanish Jesuit priest who worked in India and was a celebrated Professor of History in Bombay. It was his brilliant idea that the fish sign in the Indus script represented the word for fish in all the Dravidian languages, which is “meen,” and he pointed out that the word “min” also represented a star or planet in all the Dravidian languages. He said that perhaps the Harappans used the fish sign to represent a star or a planet. This is really the starting point for decipherment for all the Dravidian scholars who followed him, the Russians, the Finnish and myself. Only Fairservis broke away from the tradition, but his identification of the fish sign as a loop or a knot in rope is very unconvincing. I have seen far too many seals and sealings with realistic, life-like fish symbols, there is no doubt at all that the sign represents the fish.

But another and more valid objection is, why wouldn’t they pictorialize the star as a star? Draw five or six lines and add an asterisk mark – that’s how the Sumerians, the Akkadians and the Chinese represented a star. The theory behind pictorial writing is that you use pictures to represent the sound of objects that are difficult to draw. In an example given by Parpola himself, “can” in the noun form is a container, in the verb, I “can” do it – that cannot be written as a picture. But in the case of a star it is much easier and it occupies much less space to draw the picture of a star than a fish. Parpola has given a reply to this, not perhaps wholly convincing, but I still think that the fish-meen-star homophony is a good one, although I readily admit that it has not been proved. That could only come if the word “meen” was written elsewhere syllabically or if you have a bilingual.

For example we have proved the direction of the Indus script. It is no longer open to debate. Those who read the Indus script from the left, their work is condemned to failure right at the beginning. The fish hypothesis is not that conclusively proved, but it still is a very attractive one.

There are some corroborative details. The numbers three, six and seven before the fish correspond to the well known asterisms, three-fish in the warrior constellation, six-fish for Pleades, seven-fish the Great Bear and so on, but then when you come to the diacritical marks over the fish symbol which Parpola reads as the names of several planets, it is much more open to question. Diacritical marks are very tiny little tick marks and they are not inherently pictorial so any hypothesis about them is only arbitrary”.

J. M. Kenoyer7 has also pointed out that these interpretations (of min) do not represent decipherment for the following reasons:

  1. Logosyllabic Indus script cannot be deciphered as an alphabetic or syllable script.
  2. At present no modern language can be directly traced back to the Indus script.
  3. Though there have been 25 Dravidian languages and these are spoken in the southern peninsular India and northern Sri Lanka, these parts were never part of Indus culture.
  4. Not all scholars agree with the Dravidian identification, as other languages may have been written using the Indus script.
  5. In fact, Walter A. Fairsevis, Jr and Franklin C. Southworth propose a mysterious language “X” from which the words that could be read in Indus script might belong.
  6. Suggesting that the language might be a Sumerian, Akkadian or Sanskrit, consequently if the writing on the seals does represent more than one language or dialect, we cannot decipher it until a bilingual text or a dictionary has been discovered.
  7. The rebus approach, as being used by Dravidologists, can only be usful when there is some way to check and confirm the meaning or the grammatical sequence of words.
  8. No longer texts to test all the aspects of script and language are available.

Though he gives few literary evidences for “min”, he does not take all the words of “min” and its forms. Therefore, his study has been only selective and exclusive.

11.  The astronomical and astrological background. According to the Vaikhanasa-Grhyasutra (4,13), written in Sanskrit influenced by Tamil in South India in the first centuries of the Christian era, the ‘propiation of the nine planets’ (navagraha santi) should precede all religious rites.

Under astronomical and astrological background, he discusses about a Vedic naskshatra calendar dated to 2250 BCE

Vaiguru min = the star appearing in the early morning (Agam.17.21, Natrinai.48.4, Perum.318).

Then taking these examples, he concludes that there is substantial evidence to the effect that the Vedic nakshatra calendar was devised by the Harappans or even Early Harappans, and its original language was Dravidian.

Here, perhaps the confusion of “Aryans” and “Dravidans” is open and complete. If the 4450 YBP nakshatra calendar Vedic, how it was devised by the Harappans or even Early Harappans, and that too in Dravidian language. Then, how that “Dravidian language” happens to be “Sanskrit” instead of “Tamil”. Had the Harappans / Dravidians have been well versed in astronomy, why then they could not produce any astronomer worth in South like Aryabhata?

12.  The trefoil motif: further evidence for astral religion. Taking cue from the three rounds joined together (like baseless “club”), he identifies it with “bharani” star.

What is intriguing is that he quotes much from Sanskrit literature, draw examples from Puranas uses all Vedic symbols, but finally tries to conclude that all these are from the Old Tamil literature. The chronological idiosyncrasy is that Vedas are dated by him to 1200 BCE and Tamil literature to “first century BC and sixth century AD”.

13.  Evidence for Harappan worship of the god Muruku. Dravidian word muruku, which means both ‘bangle’ and ‘son, boy child’, and is also the proper name of the child-granting divinity and divine child. The symbol   ||         in sequence represents muruku in the Indus inscriptions.

He refers to Naigamesa, the Goat head God, in connection with the worship of Muruka, but, it was pointed out by P. K. Agrawala. He has produced only part of the sculpture (J626) without mentioning Agrawala (he has listed his books). In fact, Agrawala, book contains three more sculptures with goat head god and goddess (Plate XII). Here too, he depends on Sanskrit literature to drive his point, without resorting to Sangam literature or Old Tamil literature (as he used to mention).

For Muruku and bangles, I. Mahadevan comments as follows8:

 

“Parpola has pointed out that the bangles are inscribed, and among the signs the sign of the interlocking circle or ovals are very common and they occur with greater frequency on these bangles. …….But when you try to give a phonetic value for it, it becomes very difficult. Parpola has chosen a word which means twisted wire bangle, or twisted wire amulet or a twisted wire earring or nose ring, where the operative word is twisting, the root there is murugu, which means in old Dravidian “to twist.” But the stoneware, the polished vitrified stoneware bangles have no twists on them, so that is very unlikely. There are other words for bangles but he doesn’t choose them because they are not homophonous with the word for Murukan that he is looking for”.

However, taking clue from this, but interpreting a skeletal god / pey, he9 concludes that “muruku” descended from the “Harappan Sketal Deity”. He also mentions the survival of the basic Indus ideogram as a religious symbol in later times suggests that the cult of the Harappan deity spread to Eastern and Southern India along with the migration of the descendants of the Harappans to these regions after the demise of the Mature Harappan Civilization.

Here, too, the crucial chronological aspect has been elegantly avoided. The Harappan i.e, the Mature Harappan Civilization disappeared by c.1900 BCE. Then, only these Harappans must have spread to India. But, Asko Parpola, Haimendrof, Gordon and otyhers have persistently asserted that the Dravidian languages came to India from the west through Iran about 700 BCE with the carriers of the Megalithic culture, which has been distributed all over South India. Parpola specifically says that the last phase of the Megalithic culture (c.300-100 BCE) overlaps the period of Old Tamil culture (c.100 BCE-600 CE). Then, how these “Dravidians” are different from the “Dravidians(Harappans)” as visualized by I. Mahadevan. Then, there must have been two “Dravidian migrations” like “Two Aryan ones”. In any case, the Sangam literature gives a different picture altogether about the issue, as has been discussed elsewhere.

Scholars use the words “muruku” and “murugu” inbterchangeably, but in Sangam Tamil, they different and specific meanings. The word Murugu has the following meanings in the Sangam / Old Tamil literature:

Murugu = disease / that one which inflicts / attacks (Inguru.245.3, 247.3, 249.2, 308.4;  Pari.8.65).

Murugu = Murugan (Natri.34.11, 48.10, 82.4, 225.1; Kuru.362.2; Agam.118; Puram.56.14, 259.5 – here it might imply a goddess also).

Pattuppattu has different meanings for “Murugu”:

Murugu (v) = to worship (Tirumurugu.243)

Murugu = Tirumurugatruppadai (Tirumurugu.244).

Murugu = Godliness/divinity (Tirumurugu.273; Madurai.611)

Murugu = produced of Murugu (Madurai.724)

Murugu = smell (Pattina.37)

Murugu = Velvi / yagna

Muruku = munmurungai = mul murukka maram, erythrina indica.

Can these meanings be read in such script?

Moreover, the worship of Murugan in the Tamil context is the Kandu worship, which has been the most ancient form. Kandu is nothing but “Pillar form” and no evidence has been adduced from the Indus valley to that effect, by him.

14.  Evidence Harappan worship of the Goddess. Just like Frazer, H. P. Blavatsky, bringing parallel symbolism from different civilizations, he tries to show the existence of Goddess worship in the Indus valley. Drawing attention to some seals / figurines, he argues that Indus women wore vermillion / kumkum on their forehead just like Tamil women.

 

However, Old Tamil literature never gives any reference to this effect, but Sanskrit literature, specifically mentions about parting of hair by husband and application of kumkum at the time of marriage.

In Old Tamil literature, there have been different goddesses mentioned – Anangu, Sur, Surara Magalir, Vanara Magalir, Kollippavai, Salini, Pazhaiyol, which are later equated with Murugu and then Murugan.

All these Goddesses with their characteristics cannot be fit into the reading of Indus script or his interpretation.

15.  Epilogue. He gives a table, where he reads+Min+min; ||| = mummin = Mrigashirisha;  = arumin = Pleidas; | = ezhumin = Saptarishi and so on.

Thus, in part IV (Interpretations of Indus pictograms), some suggested readings of a few signs have been given.

| orumin? || erumin?  ||| mummin?……………………..

But all scholars have not accepted the “fish” reading. William Fairservis saw it as a combination of a loom twist and a human sign, and form a honorific title pertaining to rulership (Fairservis, 1983). I. Mahadevan too doubts his reading mentioning that it has not been proved. His reading of several planets from the symbols is also open to question, he adds. Moreover, here it may be noted that he could not read | + min, || + min, ||| + min, |||| + min etc. Therefore, such reading is only speculative and not confirmative to read all such sign combinations.

Conclusion: Asko Parpola, in spite of the representation of hundreds of diagrams and seals on and connected with Indus script and civilization, gives most of the interpretation on the culture of the Indus people relating to “Dravidians”. Many times taking support and evidences from Vedas and other Sanskrit literature, he tries to connect everything to “Dravidian”. Though, he relies upon Old Tamil Literature, he dates it to “first century BC to fourth century AD”. He argues “Aryans” entered Indus valley twice separately. And Dravidians entered India around 700-600 BCE. Thus, if both “Aryans” and “Dravidians” are outsiders, who were the people of India since time immemorial is not ansdwered. Claiming repeatedly that they research about linguistic “Aryans” and “Dravidians” always end with racial ones perpetuating political dissension and controversies. As for as the the reading of the script, the ground realities involved are not dealt with, instead, he and other scholars proceed on a pre-determined premises and the script could only be read in a particular language.

The issues / problems in the reading of the Indus script may be reviewed as follows:

  1. The odd 4000 signs cannot be assumed as alphabets, as they cannot be separated and identified as vowels and consonants.
  2. The signs are surrounding or grouped with the “animal symbols” and they are occupying the major portion of the seals. Therefore, ignoring such animals, only signs alone cannot be subjected to “reading” or “decipherment” with any language.
  3. No rosette / bilingual inscription is available and therefore, there cannot be any final decipherment.
  4. Structure, form and function of the signs read are explained.
  5. Though, repeatedly talked about a “Proto-Dravidian language”, no such language and its grammar has been compiled so far. The DED itself is not complete and it contains about 2000 Indo-Aryan words.
  6. Nearly 2000 seals / inscriptions have only one sign. The deciphers tactfully avoid the reading of them.
  7. About 50 to 60 seals, no signs are there. How to account for such seals?
  8. 50 to 60 seals have only one symbol “Swastika”. Deciphers tactfully avoid these seals also.
  9. O, a round with a dot at centre – this symbol is also not explained.

10.  All fish symbols and their combinations are not deciphered or explained.

11.  Repeated signs in the same seals are also not explained.

Therefore, at least scholars here after proceed without any bias, preconceived notions about the factors of culture and tradition, science and technology, language and literature, then a reading with consensus could be arrived at acceptable to all.

Notes and References

  1. Asko Parpola, Deciphering the Indus Script, Cambridge University Press, U.K, 2000.
  2. The entire “Aryan-Dravidian” hypothses and theories have been built upon the interpretation of the Rigvedic verses which describe the fight between the Indra and Dasas, Devas and Asuras and so on.
  3. Fish symbol Walter A. Fairservis, The Harappan Civilization and Its Writing: A Model for Decipherment of the Indus Script, New Delhi, 1992.
  4. Inclusion of such photograph is evidently shows the biased scholarship to confuse the readers.
  5. Jonathan Mark Konoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1998,
  6. The interview of I. Mahadevan fromhttp://www.harappa.com/script/mahadevantext.html
  7. J. M. Konoyer, opt.cit, pp. 78-79.
  8. I. Mahadevan’s interview.
  9. Iravatham Mahadevan, “Murukan” in the Indus Script, The Journal of the Institute of Asian Studies, Madras, March, 1999. Also available in www.muruga.org

The book review of Asko Parpola can be viewed under the following websites:

http://books.cambridge.org/0521430798.htm

http://www.ancientscripts.com/indus.html

Some of the recent attempts and the books / papers are as follows:

Anand M. Sharan, On the Deciphering of the Indus Valley Script and the Solution of the Brahui Problem,http://www.engr.mun.ca/~asharan/bihar/indus/indus~3.htm

Egbert Richer-Ushanas, Two Systems of Symbolic Writing – The Indus Script and the Rongorongo Script of Ester Island,http://alf.zfn.uni_bremen.de/~ushanas/

William C. West, Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Scripts, McGraw Hill, USA, 2002.

Tariq Rahman, Peoples and Languages in Pre-Islamic Indus Valley, at

http://asnic.utexas.edu/asnic/subject/peoplesandlanguages.html/

Natwar Jha, Vedic Glossary of Indus Seals, Varanasi, 1996.

Banka Behari Chakravorthy, Indus Script – The Artistic Version of Brahmi, Calcutta, 1991.



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Parpola and the Indus script by Iravatham Mahadevan

June 20, 2010

 
 

Parpola and the Indus script by Iravatham Mahadevan

June 17, 2010

http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article462079.ece

He richly deserves the honour of being the first recipient of the Classical Tamil Award instituted by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister.

In the recent interview with Asko Parpola published in The Hindu (April 15, 2010), readers were made aware of the lasting contributions by Professor Parpola to Indological studies, especially in the field of the Indus Civilisation and its script. Having known him personally for four decades and having closely watched his great contribution to the study of the Indus script, I am in a position to amplify the information provided in the interview.

Professor Parpola’s contributions to Harappan studies are truly monumental, and these are not confined merely to the study of the Indus script. He has published a long series of brilliant papers to establish the fact of Aryan immigration into South Asia after the decline of the Indus Civilisation. As a Vedic scholar-turned-Dravidianist, he has the best academic credentials to prove that the Indus Civilisation was pre-Aryan and that its writing encoded a Dravidian language. In addition to his linguistic skills and deep scholarship of Vedic Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages, he has harnessed the computer in one of the earliest scientific attempts to study the structure of the Indus texts through computational linguistic procedures. Professor Parpola has produced the first truly scientific concordance to the Indus inscriptions. His concordance is accurate and exhaustive and has become an indispensable tool for researchers in the field.

Equally impressive, and again truly monumental, are the publications inspired and co-authored by Professor Parpola, of two volumes of theCorpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions. These volumes reproduce in amazing clarity and detail all the Indus seals (and their newly-made impressions) and other inscriptions. I happen to know personally the enormous difficulties Professor Parpola faced in publishing these volumes, nudging and goading the slow-moving bureaucracy in India and Pakistan to make available the originals, most of which were photographed again by the expert whom Professor Parpola sent from Finland for the purpose.

He published his magnum opus in 1994, Deciphering the Indus Script. The book contains the best exposition of the Dravidian hypothesis relating to the Indus Civilisation and its writing. Even though the Indus script remains undeciphered, as Professor Parpola readily admits, his theoretical groundwork on the Dravidian character of the Indus Civilisation and the script, and the fact of Aryan immigration into India after the decline of the Indus Civilisation, have been accepted by most scholars in the world.

Most of the Early Dravidian speakers of North and Central India switched over to the dominant Indo-Aryan languages in Post-Harappan times. Speakers of Aryan languages have indistinguishably merged with speakers of Dravidian and Munda languages millennia ago, creating a composite Indian society containing elements inherited from every source. It is thus likely that the Indus art, religious motifs and craft editions survived and can be traced in Sanskrit literature from the days of the Rigveda, and also in Old Tamil traditions recorded in the Sangam poems. Professor Parpola is aware of the Harappan heritage of both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, the former culturally and the latter linguistically. His profound scholarship in both families of languages enables him to mine the Indian cultural heritage holistically in his search for clues to solve the mysteries of the Indus script.

It may be asked: What has Tamil to do with the Indus script that Professor Parpola should be honoured with the inaugural Classical Tamil Award? Tamil happens to be the oldest and the best-documented Dravidian language. It is mainly for this reason that theDravidian Etymological Dictionary of Burrow and Emeneau accords the head position to Tamil entries in the dictionary. That this distinction is well-deserved is also proved by the fact that Old Tamil contains the most archaic features of Dravidian phonology and morphology, like for example, the retention of the character aytam and the sound zh. Dravidian linguists have also established that most proto-Dravidian reconstructions are in close accord with words in Old Tamil. The earliest Tamil inscriptions date from the Mauryan Era. The earliest Tamil literature, the Sangam works, are from the early centuries of the Common Era, but record oral traditions from a much earlier time. It is for this reason that Professor Parpola and other Dravidian researchers consider Old Tamil to be a possible route to get at the language of the Indus inscriptions.

Professor Parpola speaks for himself in the following excerpt from his message of acceptance of the Classical Tamil Award. He says: “When the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu’s award is given to me for a Dravidian solution of the Indus enigma, this award will inevitably be interpreted by many people as politically motivated. Nevertheless, I am ready to fight for the truth, and in my opinion, the Tamils are entitled to some pride for having preserved so well the linguistic heritage of the Indus Civilisation. At the same time, it must not be forgotten that though their language has shifted in the course of millennia, people of North India too are to a large extent descended from the Harappan people, and have also preserved cultural heritage of the same civilisation.”

Professor Parpola’s work on the Indus script will prove to be as important and as long-lasting as U.Ve. Swaminathaiyar’s resurrection of the Tamil Classics from decaying palm leaves. He richly deserves the honour of being the first recipient of the Classical Tamil Award instituted by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister.

(Iravatham Mahadevan is a noted epigraphist and Tamil scholar.)

Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola have to answer many questions without mincing words, which are pointed out as follows:

1. The expression, “Vedic scholar-turned-Dravidianist” proves the change in ideology that is not good for any scholar of his stature. IM has already brought Michael Witzel, the Rig Vedic Pundit last year here in Chennai and he talked differently. Of course, IM prevented native Pundits to question nand test his Sanskrit capabilities. He was struggling to repeat few words mentioned by one of the audience.

2. That he has academic credentials “to prove that the Indus Civilisation was pre-Aryan and that its writing encoded a Dravidian language”, makes no credentials, as researchers have such qualifications and acumen in their steadfast work carried on for years. Scholars respect scholars till they are biased with other motives.

3. Even though the Indus script remains undeciphered, as Professor Parpola readily admits, his theoretical groundwork on the Dravidian character of the Indus Civilisation and the script, and the fact of Aryan immigration into India after the decline of the Indus Civilisation, have been accepted by most scholars in the world. Acceptance or non-acceptance of any hypothesis, theory etc., cannot be a criteria for coming to any final conclusion in a research plan, particularly, where the script remains undeciphered.

4.  “When the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu’s award is given to me for a Dravidian solution of the Indus enigma, this award will inevitably be interpreted by many people as politically motivated”. Definitely, because, he has been known for his extremist views, racist bias and linguistic fanaficism and all couched with anti-Hindu, anti-Sanskrit, anti-Hindi, anti-north, anti-Brahmin and so on. Moreover, award for Dravidian solution of the Indus enigma, reminds the the world war period, where the racists scholars used to be honoured in the same way by the racisr regimes, because any other solution means no award!

5. Nevertheless, I am ready to fight for the truth, and in my opinion, the Tamils are entitled to some pride for having preserved so well the linguistic heritage of the Indus Civilisation”. Why some pride, they have “full / more” pride, whether they preserve or not the linguistic heritage of the Indus civilization. In fact, the queation is whether the Indus cicilization had any preserved linguistic heritage f the Tamils conclusively, instead of taking few seals and giving convenient interpretation.

6. At the same time, it must not be forgotten that though their language has shifted in the course of millennia, people of North India too are to a large extent descended from the Harappan people, and have also preserved cultural heritage of the same civilisation.” Had both people descended from the same lineage, where is the question of linguistic heritage preserved by one group of people and cukltural heritage by other group? His theory that “Aryan immigration into India after the decline of the Indus Civilisation” shows after the decline of the Indus civilization, the Dravidians moved to north and then canme down to south. Aryans came thereafter and moved in the same way.

7. When Aryans immigrated after the decline of Indus-Dravidian civilization, there was no “Aryan invasion”. Karunanidhi would not accept such academic exercise.

8 . The time gap between the two historical processes has to be specified and explained. The peak period of IVC has been c.2250-1950 BCE. The Sangam period starts from c.300 BCE.  Why then, the “Dravidian speaking people” took nearly two millinea to shift from IVC to north and north to South?

9. Why they should have taken such a long period to compose Sangam literature only at Tamizhagam insyead of IVC or north India? It is also surprising that they could not develop any script during those 2000 years!

10.  The earliest Tamil inscriptions date from the Mauryan Era. That Asoka should copy from the Persians and start indscribing on the stones so that Indians could read at different paerts of India in the same language or in their languages! And the intelligent Dravidian speaking people / immigrant Tamils from the IVC should wait for Asoka and start cpying his script to write in Tamil only from that particular period!

11.  As the IV Dravidian speakers had been the expert makrers of the seals, why they should wait for 2000 years to copy script from Asoka?  Does it make sound?

12.  Asoka and even Kharavela, whose territories were threatened with the “confederation of Dravidian kings” could write many lines, how is that the Dravidian speaking people could leave only few-line inscriptions, broken ones etc?

Vedaprakash

20-06-2010



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Richard Meadow on Indus script!

February 20, 2010

Indus: The Unvoiced Civilization, Press Release , 02/02/2010

“Indus: The Unvoiced Civilization” – Video and Discussion at Harvard University, C. Gopinath and Thomas Burke

“Indus, The Unvoiced Civilization,” a video and following discussion, was presented in the Harvard Science Center on January 10. The lecture was sponsored by the Harvard Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies in its ongoing Outreach lecture series on “Indian Society through the Ages.” The session was introduced by Dr. Bijoy Misra of the Outreach Committee, who outlined the progress of the series and summarized the lectures of the past months.

Ms. Nalini Gopinath, who presented the video, first offered an overview of facts that have hitherto come to light about the long-forgotten Indus civilization. For a 900-year span from about 2600 BCE to 1700 BCE a sophisticated urban civilization flourished in the region of the Rivers Indus and Gagghar-Hakra, extending to south to modern Gujarat and east nearly to Delhi. The territory was rich in many kinds of flora and fauna, which are now extinct there. Crops such as wheat, barley, millets, sesame and cotton were cultivated.  This sophisticated urban civilization had trading ties to Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula. Seals bearing Indus characters have been found as far west as Abu Dhabi and Bahrain. These, together with a few Mesopotamian texts, point to a thriving trade between the Indus region and Western Asia.

The DVD Presentation titled “Indus:  The Unvoiced Civilization” lasted about one hour. It took the audience through the three most prominent sites – Harappa, Mohenja-Daro and Dholavira. It depicted the archeological finds, such as carnelian jewelry, pottery and seals. The urban centers of Harappa (Punjab), Mohenjo-Daro (Sindh), Dholavira (Gujarat), and Rakhigarhi (Haryana) as well as many smaller settlements reveal a concern for urban planning and sometimes include very sophisticated drainage and water storage systems. Mohenjo-daro, in particular, had many wells, while Dholavira was designed to channel rainwater into huge reservoirs. Harappa had both wells and tanks. It is speculated that as many as 40,000 people may lived in the city of Harappa and about 20,000 in Dholavira.

The presentation was followed by a lively question and answer session with Dr. Richard Meadow, who appeared in the film and participated in the excavations of Harappa. The questions pertained to the script and the extent of the civilization. Dr. Meadow explained that a total of 400-600 characters have been identified from the various Indus inscriptions. No single inscription contains more than 17 characters. We do not know which language or languages were spoken in the Indus region. None of the many attempts which have been made to decipher the script have gained general acceptance. Sites of the civilization have been found as far as  northern Afghanistan.  Gaps in the archeological record do not permit us to speak of cultural continuity from the Indus civilization to the modern day, but many undeniable similarities suggest possible survivals.

Question and Answers by Dr. Richard Meadow

Why is the script not deciphered as yet?
We do not know which language or languages were spoken in the Indus valley. We have no bilingual inscriptions, no known inscription of more than 17 characters, and no obvious successor script. There is a theory that the characters do not reflect spoken language but are non-linguistic symbols, although this is widely debated.

How many characters have been identified so far?
About 400-600, the larger number is arrived at by regarding some similar characters as being separate.

How come there is so much evidence of trade out of the Indus region but no evidence of imported goods?
It is speculated that imports were mainly perishable items like textiles, which have not survived.

Why is there little evidence of tombs like those found in Mesopotamia and Western Asia?
Although few tombs are known, there are some sites at which have been found a large number of burials, for example at Harappa and at Farmana (Haryana). There seems to be no evidence so far that the Indus people had very rich graves of the kind known in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China. One must also remember that the long-lived Indus civilization left extensive remains, still largely unexplored. So far, excavations have in general uncovered only the topmost third of the many sites. “We still have only a hazy picture of the earlier phases of the culture,” as represented by the lower levels at the archaeological sites.

Why do archaeologists speak of a gap between the end of Indus culture and the beginning of the Vedic period, even though many of the Indus artifacts shown in the DVD are still in use today?
It is true that many cultural traits and artifacts may survive from an earlier into a later period. But it is methodologically problematic to speak of archeological continuity without some evidence of survival of artifacts in the interval between the two periods.

How far did the civilization extend?
Sites of the Indus civilization are found almost to the border of Central Asia in the northwest, east almost to Delhi, south almost to Mumbai, and west nearly to the Iranian border as well as to coastal Arabia.

Is it possible that some Indus people are buried in Western Asia in one of the 80,000 tombs found in Bahrain?
Evidence is still lacking.

Is it true that the British built the Indian Railway system using bricks from the Harappa site?
The sites were always known to the local people. The British first became aware of Indus sites in the early 1800s. In the 1850s the Archeological Survey of India began to scout them. When the British built the Northwest Railway in the 1860s they used vast quantities of ancient bricks from Harappa to prepare the roadbed for the tracks. All have probably disintegrated by now. The ancient people of Harappa themselves recycled bricks, reusing old ones in new structures.

What do the names Harappa and Mohenja-Daro mean?
These are the names used by the local people and they may possibly be very old. There is no convincing explanation of their meaning. We do not know what the Indus people called themselves. Mesopotamian texts seem to refer to the Indus region as Meluhha.

Where can we find the DVD?
It’s a Japanese production and can be procured on the internet. Harvard affiliates can borrow it from Tozzer Library.

The next lecture in the series will be “The Indus Civilization: Myth and Reality.” It will be presented by Dr. Richard Meadow of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Dr. Meadow will note that while the Indus civilization has often been characterized as highly structured, uniform, and unchanging, in fact it was a highly diverse, varied, and dynamic cultural phenomenon with many different kinds of sites with strong local and region characteristics that changed over time.  The lecture is scheduled for Sunday, 14 February in Hall A, Harvard Science Center, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, at 3.00 pm. Admission is free and all are invited.

http://www.lokvani. com/lokvani/ article.php? article_id= 6272

‘Earliest writing’ found

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/334517.stm


The fragments of pottery are about 5,500 years old

Exclusive by BBC News Online Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse

The first known examples of writing may have been unearthed at an archaeological dig in Pakistan.

So-called ‘plant-like’ and ‘trident-shaped’ markings have been found on fragments of pottery dating back 5500 years.

Dr Richard Meadow of Harvard University: “We may be able to follow the history of signs.”

They were found at a site called Harappa in the region where the great Harappan or Indus civilisation flourished four and a half thousand years ago.

Harappa was originally a small settlement in 3500 BC but by 2600 BC it had developed into a major urban centre.

[ image: Harappa was occupied until about 1900 BC]
Harappa was occupied until about 1900 BC

The earliest known writing was etched onto jars before and after firing. Experts believe they may have indicated the contents of the jar or be signs associated with a deity.

According to Dr Richard Meadow of Harvard University, the director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project, these primitive inscriptions found on pottery may pre-date all other known writing.

Last year it was suggested that the oldest writing might have come from Egypt.

Clay tablets containing primitive words were uncovered in southern Egypt at the tomb of a king named Scorpion.

They were carbon-dated to 3300-3200 BC. This is about the same time, or slightly earlier, to the primitive writing developed by the Sumerians of the Mesopotamian civilisation around 3100 BC.

“It’s a big question as to if we can call what we have found true writing,” he told BBC News Online, “but we have found symbols that have similarities to what became Indus script.

[ image: Work at Harappa is likely to fuel the debate on early writing]
Work at Harappa is likely to fuel the debate on early writing

“One of our research aims is to find more examples of these ancient symbols and follow them as they changed and became a writing system,” he added.

One major problem in determining what the symbols mean is that no one understands the Indus language. It was unique and is now dead.

Dr Meadow points out that nothing similar to the ‘Rosetta Stone’ exists for the Harappan text.

The Rosetta Stone, housed in the British museum since 1802, is a large slab of black basalt uniquely inscribed with the same text in both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek.

Its discovery allowed researchers to decipher the ancient Egyptian script for the first time.

The Harappan language died out and did not form the basis of other languages.

Dr Meadow: “The earliest inscriptions date back to 3500 BC.”

“So probably we will never know what the symbols mean,” Dr Meadow told BBC News Online from Harappa.

What historians know of the Harappan civilisation makes them unique. Their society did not like great differences between social classes or the display of wealth by rulers. They did not leave behind large monuments or rich graves.

They appear to be a peaceful people who displayed their art in smaller works of stone.

Their society seems to have petered out. Around 1900 BC Harappa and other urban centres started to decline as people left them to move east to what is now India and the Ganges.

This discovery will add to the debate about the origins of the written word.

It probably suggests that writing developed independently in at least three places – Egypt, Mesopotamia and Harappa between 3500 BC and 3100 BC.



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Indus civilisation reveals its volumetric system!

November 15, 2009

Indus civilisation reveals its volumetric system byT. S. Subramanian

 

Appearing in “The Hindu” dated 15-11-2009

http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article48883.eceNote: This is posted here for critical discussion and further research, as the involved media and persons many times do not provide opportunity for the views of others.

Dr. Bryan Well (unseen), an expert on Indus Valley Civilisation, holding a tablet at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Taramani, Chennai. Photo: M. Karunakaran

The Hindu Dr. Bryan Well (unseen), an expert on Indus Valley Civilisation, holding a tablet at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Taramani, Chennai. Photo: M. Karunakaran

Combination of `V’ signs and linear strokes were used to indicate volumes

The Indus civilisation had a volumetric system with inscriptions on ceramic vessels (glazed pots from Harappa) indicating that the sign ‘V’ stood for a measure, a long linear stroke equalled 10, two long strokes stood for 20 and a short stroke represented one, according to Bryan Wells, who has been researching the Indus script for more than 20 years.

These markings on the pots are identical to those found on the incised tablets and bas-relief tablets also found in Harappa, said Dr. Wells, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University for his thesis on “The Epigraphic Approaches to Indus Writing.” It is to be published as a book in 2010.

Besides, a ceramic vessel from Mohenjo-Daro, which had fragments of blue-coloured bangles inside, had one long stroke and seven short strokes inscribed on it. When these broken pieces were reconstructed with a computer, they turned out to be 17 bangles. This again established that one long stroke equalled 10 and each short stroke one, Dr. Wells said. He described the findings as “an important discovery” and “very interesting.”

Dr. Wells has proposed that “these sign sequences [sign ‘V’ plus numerals] are various values in the Indus volumetric system. The bas-relief tablets might have been used as ration chits or a form of pseudo-money with the repetitive use of ‘V’ paired with ||, |||, |||| relating to various values in the Indus volumetric system. The larger the ceramic vessel, the more strokes it has. This postulation can be tested by detailed measurements of whole ceramic vessels with clear inscriptions.”

For instance, he recently measured the volume of the three pots from Harappa, which are now with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) at Purana Quila in New Delhi. While the smallest of them had three long strokes and a ‘V’ sign, the bigger one had six long strokes and a ‘V’ sign and the biggest seven long strokes and a scale inscribed below it. When he measured their volumes, Dr. Wells found that the pot with three long strokes had an estimated volume of 27.30 litres, the vessel with six long strokes 55.56 litres and the one with seven 65.89 litres. Thus, the calculated value of one long stroke was 9.24 or approximately 10 litres.

Dr. Wells (58), who is now a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Taramani here, has also focussed on creating an adequate sign list and corpus for the Indus script and the structural analysis of the Indus texts.

He said he first saw the pictures of these pots with markings in the “Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions,” edited by Asko Parpola and his colleagues. When he learnt that the pots were with the ASI at Purana Quila, Dr. Wells travelled there to measure their volumes.

No coincidence

It was Michael Jansen, another researcher on Indus civilisation, who discovered the pot with broken bangles at Mohenjo-Daro in 1987. What intrigued Dr. Wells was the text of one long stroke and seven short strokes inscribed on it. When he reconstructed these broken pieces, using their internal circumferences, with a computer, he found that 17 bangles must have remained intact inside. Besides, the rake sign in the Indus script had a value of hundred and the double rake sign, 200. “This is completely regular” and “not a result of coincidence,” he said. When the ‘V’ sign with linear strokes that occurred on the Harappan tablets were found repeated on a number of ceramic vessels, “it gave me the idea that the ‘V’ sign is probably a measure,” Dr. Wells explained.

It was possible that wages were paid in grain (from these vessels) dispersed from a centralised storage facility, or in the case of incised tablets, material for construction projects and other short-term projects was distributed. He asserted that “there is archaeological evidence bearing on this issue in the form of standardised ceramics with texts describing their contents.”

“Fish” for weights

Dr. Wells agreed with another Indus scholar Steve Bonta’s (Pennsylvania State University) theory that the “fish” sign in the script stood for weights. According to Dr. Bonta, the fish sign occurred frequently with numbers in the script and in clusters too. He later found that the Akkadian Sargonic texts referred to the weight systems of Dilmun (Bahrain) as “minus.” The system of weights from Dilmun was exactly the same as that of the Indus system. Dr. Bonta, who speaks Tamil, realised that “min” in Tamil meant fish. “So our theory is that the term “minus” is derived from the Indus and that the fish are weights,” Dr. Wells said. There were fish signs with one long stroke, two long strokes, a single rake or a double rake. “So the sign graph is doubling and the value is doubling. I think this is too much of a coincidence. But I am aware that a lot of people will disagree with me on the fish sign,” he added.

Indus civilisation reveals its volumetric system T.S. Subramanian

http://www.hindu.com/2009/11/15/stories/2009111556932200.htm

Combination of ‘V’ signs and linear strokes were used to indicate volumes

— Photo credits: Bryan Wells 

(Above) The three pots from Harappa with volumetric inscriptions on them. Calculations indicate that the Indus volumetric system is based on multiples of 9.24 litres. (Below) A reconstruction of broken bangles from the Moneer area of Mohenjo-Daro. The number of reconstructed bangles (17) matches the number from the sealing text on the pot that had the broken bangles inside. The other photo shows Indus fish signs.

CHENNAI: The Indus civilisation had a volumetric system with inscriptions on ceramic vessels (glazed pots from Harappa) indicating that the sign ‘V’ stood for a measure, a long linear stroke equalled 10, two long strokes stood for 20 and a short stroke represented one, according to Bryan Wells, who has been researching the Indus script for more than 20 years.

These markings on the pots are identical to those found on the incised tablets and bas-relief tablets also found in Harappa, said Dr. Wells, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University for his thesis on “The Epigraphic Approaches to Indus Writing.” It is to be published as a book in 2010.

Besides, a ceramic vessel from Mohenjo-Daro, which had fragments of blue-coloured bangles inside, had one long stroke and seven short strokes inscribed on it. When these broken pieces were reconstructed with a computer, they turned out to be 17 bangles. This again established that one long stroke equalled 10 and each short stroke one, Dr. Wells said. He described the findings as “an important discovery” and “very interesting.”

Dr. Wells has proposed that “these sign sequences [sign ‘V’ plus numerals] are various values in the Indus volumetric system. The bas-relief tablets might have been used as ration chits or a form of pseudo-money with the repetitive use of ‘V’ paired with ||, |||, |||| relating to various values in the Indus volumetric system. The larger the ceramic vessel, the more strokes it has. This postulation can be tested by detailed measurements of whole ceramic vessels with clear inscriptions.”

For instance, he recently measured the volume of the three pots from Harappa, which are now with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) at Purana Quila in New Delhi. While the smallest of them had three long strokes and a ‘V’ sign, the bigger one had six long strokes and a ‘V’ sign and the biggest seven long strokes and a scale inscribed below it. When he measured their volumes, Dr. Wells found that the pot with three long strokes had an estimated volume of 27.30 litres, the vessel with six long strokes 55.56 litres and the one with seven 65.89 litres. Thus, the calculated value of one long stroke was 9.24 or approximately 10 litres.


Dr. Wells (58), who is now a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Taramani here, has also focussed on creating an adequate sign list and corpus for the Indus script and the structural analysis of the Indus texts.

He said he first saw the pictures of these pots with markings in the “Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions,” edited by Asko Parpola and his colleagues. When he learnt that the pots were with the ASI at Purana Quila, Dr. Wells travelled there to measure their volumes.

No coincidence

It was Michael Jansen, another researcher on Indus civilisation, who discovered the pot with broken bangles at Mohenjo-Daro in 1987. What intrigued Dr. Wells was the text of one long stroke and seven short strokes inscribed on it. When he reconstructed these broken pieces, using their internal circumferences, with a computer, he found that 17 bangles must have remained intact inside. Besides, the rake sign in the Indus script had a value of hundred and the double rake sign, 200. “This is completely regular” and “not a result of coincidence,” he said. When the ‘V’ sign with linear strokes that occurred on the Harappan tablets were found repeated on a number of ceramic vessels, “it gave me the idea that the ‘V’ sign is probably a measure,” Dr. Wells explained.

It was possible that wages were paid in grain (from these vessels) dispersed from a centralised storage facility, or in the case of incised tablets, material for construction projects and other short-term projects was distributed. He asserted that “there is archaeological evidence bearing on this issue in the form of standardised ceramics with texts describing their contents.”

“Fish” for weights 

Dr. Wells agreed with another Indus scholar Steve Bonta’s (Pennsylvania State University) theory that the “fish” sign in the script stood for weights. According to Dr. Bonta, the fish sign occurred frequently with numbers in the script and in clusters too. He later found that the Akkadian Sargonic texts referred to the weight systems of Dilmun (Bahrain) as “minus.” The system of weights from Dilmun was exactly the same as that of the Indus system. Dr. Bonta, who speaks Tamil, realised that “min” in Tamil meant fish. “So our theory is that the term “minus” is derived from the Indus and that the fish are weights,” Dr. Wells said. There were fish signs with one long stroke, two long strokes, a single rake or a double rake. “So the sign graph is doubling and the value is doubling. I think this is too much of a coincidence. But I am aware that a lot of people will disagree with me on the fish sign,” he added.



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