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Panaji, Feb 07: Renowned German Indologist and scientist of religion, Egbert Richter Ushanas today claimed that he has unravelled the mystery of Indus Valley scripts by decoding major seals and tablets found during various archaeological excavations. "Already 1,000-odd seals are decoded and of them, 300-odd are printed in monography -- the message of Indus seals and tablets," stated Richter, who has also decoded tablets from Easter Island in Pacific Ocean and disc of Phaistos on Island of Crete in Meditarrenean Sea. "All the seals are based on Vedas -- Rig Veda and Atharva Veda," Richter told a news agency here....

A 5,000-year-old Semitic text dealing with magical spells and snakes has been deciphered from an ancient Egyptian pyramid inscription, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced Monday. The texts, which were first discovered a century ago in a 24th Century BCE Egyptian pyramid, are the earliest continuous Semitic texts ever to have been deciphered, said Semitic languages Prof. Richard Steiner of New York's Yeshiva University in a premiere presentation at the Hebrew University. The passages, serpent spells written in hieroglyphic characters, are estimated to have been written between the 25th to the 30th centuries BCE. Steiner, a former fellow of the...

Cambridge has finally closed the door on Sanskrit as a hallowed subject of undergraduate study, nearly one-and-a-half centuries after it first established a chair in the 3,000-year-old language. The Times of India sought -- and received -- confirmation of the university's decision within hours of Cambridge honouring Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with a doctor of law degree, in what some scholars believe to be the most cynical form of "tactless academic marketing"... Dr John Smith, reader in Sanskrit at Cambridge, told TOI that it is "not a trivial decision...this is a decision about letting the subject wither on the vine....

Literacy in the Time of Jesus Could His Words Have Been Recorded in His Lifetime? Sidebar: Writing Tablets Sidebar: Priceless Garbage How likely is it that someone would have written down and collected Jesus’ sayings into a book in Jesus’ lifetime? Several lines of evidence converge to suggest it is quite probable. The first factor to consider is how prevalent literacy was in Jesus’ time. Full literacy means being able to read and write proficiently, but degrees of literacy vary; people who can read, for example, may not be able to write. A common view is that of W.H....

Eventually the more than two dozen Native American carvings, which may be thousands of years old, will be put on display. The carvings are called the Bald Friar Petroglyphs. They are older than those of the Aztecs and include concentric circles, fishlike designs and shapes that appear to depict the sun and humans... On Thursday, state archaeologists used chisels and crowbars to dislodge the carvings... The petroglyphs arrived in Baltimore in 1926 after preservationists removed them from the lower Susquehanna Valley to avoid their being inundated by Conowingo Dam. The stones were found in the Bald Friar area of Pennsylvania....

Kensington Rune Stone This subject used to fascinate me when I was 9 or 11. I read everything the late Hjalmar Holand ever wrote. It has fascinated many others, unfortunately mainly “professional Scandinavians” who have made their lives out of their ethnicity, especially as professors of that language or culture. Most have used it only as a way to get a cheap Ph.D. thesis by demolishing it once again, or by using its possible validity to back up some ulterior theory or hobby-horse they may have. Few if any mainstream observers of American antiquities have been willing to touch it. ...

Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, scriptologist and Egyptologist amateur, has been able to identify the names of the Hyksos kings like pertaining to the group of languages and proto-Greek or Mycenaean's dialects. The true ethnic origin of the mysterious Hyksos that were able to take control of the power of a considerable part of Old Egypt, during centuries XVII to the XVI before Christ, has been always a true challenge for the Egyptologists. However, the generalized opinion more for a long time has been that the Hyksos would be Semitic towns, fundamentally coastal inhabitants of the strip Syrian-Palestine, that is, Canaanites or proto-Phoenicians....

First Elamite inscription discovered near Bandar Abbas Tehran Times Culture Desk TEHRAN -- The archaeologists working at an ancient site near Bandar Abbas recently discovered a fragment of an inscription which seems to be written in Elamite cuneiform, the Persian service of CHN reported on Tuesday. The director of the team said that the discovery was made in a cemetery from the Qajar era near Sarkhun village, adding that the archaeologists estimate that it dates back to about 1500 BC, which was the middle Elamite era. The inscription is one of the most important and rare artifacts discovered in Hormozgan...

It is a mystery in the desert hills near Los Lunas, New Mexico. It has puzzled experts for more than 50 years. It has been referred to by many different names -- Ten Commandments Rock, Mystery Rock, The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone. It is most commonly known as the Mystery Stone. Mystery Stone is located at the base of Hidden Mountain, on New Mexico state trust land, about 16 miles west of Los Lunas. It is a boulder weighing an estimated 80 to 100 tons and is about eight meters in length. Nine rows of 216 characters were chiseled at...

"Five Elamit professional linguists from different countries have studied the brick inscription discovered in Jiroft. According to the studies, they have concluded that this discovered inscription is 300 years older than that found in Susa; and most probably the written language went to Susa from this region. However, more studies are still needed to give a final approval to this thesis," said Yousof Majid Zadeh, head of archeological excavation team in Jiroft... Elamit language is only partly understood by scholars. It had no relationship to Sumerian, Semitic or Indo-European languages, and there are no modern descendants of it. After 3000...

ANTIGUA, Guatemala (Reuters) - Archeologists excavating a pyramid complex in the Guatemalan jungle have uncovered the earliest example of Mayan writing ever found, 10 bold hieroglyphs painted on plaster and stone. The 2,300-year-old glyphs were excavated last April in San Bartolo and suggest the ancient Mayas developed an advanced writing system centuries earlier than previously believed, according to an article published on Thursday in the journal Science. The glyphs date from between 200 BC and 300 BC and come from the same site in the Peten jungle of northern Guatemala where archeologist William Saturno found the oldest murals in the...

It took Iranian Jews in the United States nearly three decades in exile from the land their ancestors called home for 2,700 years to appreciate the rich history and culture preserved in their literature. Considered one of the oldest but least- studied Jewish writings in the world, Judeo-Persian writings consist of the Persian language written in Hebrew characters by Jews living in what today are Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and some parts of India during the last 1,000 years. “In Iran the Jewish community was not aware of the value of Judeo-Persian writings, but now that they are away from their...

[T]he finds were excavated at a long-abandoned site on a hill overlooking the port of Chania in Western Crete, which has been identified with the Minoan city of Kydonia. Among the discoveries was an amphora containing an intact text written in linear B, the language of the court at Mycenae where the legendary Agamemnon ruled. Also found were two terracotta tablets containing texts in Linear A, an even older alphabet - used around 1700 years before the common era - which has not yet been deciphered. The ministry said the archaeologists found evidence of a violent fire believed to have...

Few birthdays are cause for a global scholars' conference at Harvard, but they're raising a metaphorical glass in Cambridge to toast the Armenian alphabet. It's not just that at 1,600 years old the alphabet makes Methuselah look like a youngster. These three dozen letters gave a written language of faith to a pivotal country in Christian history. Years before the Roman emperor Constantine's famous conversion, Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity as its state religion, in the year 301. At the time, Armenian was a spoken tongue only, meaning worshipers relied on translators during services to interpret a...

The Kanaga Sign is very common in Indus Rock Art

HISTORY OF PERSIAN OR PAARSI LANGUAGE May 24, 2005 Fariborz Rahnamoon ORIGIN Paarsi or Persian was the language of the Paarsa people who ruled Iran between 550 - 330 BCE. It belongs to what scholars call the Indo-Iranian group of languages. It became the language of the Persian Empire and was widely spoken in the ancient days ranging from the borders of India in the east, Russian in the north, the southern shores of the Persian Gulf to Egypt and the Mediterranean in the west. Over the centuries Paarsi has changed to its modern form and today Persian is spoken...

Kensington, Minn. (WCCO) Researchers have found new evidence of a secret code concealed on the Kensington Runestone, one of the most controversial pieces of Minnesota history. The rock was found near Alexandria, Minn. a century ago. It bears an inscription that places Norwegians here in 1362. Were Vikings exploring our land more than 100 years before Columbus? Or is the Kensington Runestone an elaborate hoax? New research suggests the rune stone is genuine, and a hidden code can prove it. "Eight Goths and 22 Norwegians on an exploration journey ... 10 men red with blood and dead ... 14 days...

The social status of a language is the most accurate way of predicting whether it will survive, argue researchers in a paper appearing today in the journal, Nature... "Thousands of the world's languages are vanishing at an alarming rate, with 90% of them being expected to disappear with the current generation," warned Dr Daniel Abrams and Professor Steven Strogatz, both of Cornell University in New York... The model is based on data they collected on the number of speakers of endangered languages - in 42 regions of Peru, Scotland, Wales, Bolivia, Ireland and Alsaçe-Lorraine - over time. All have been...