A Millennium Conundrum [Indus Valley Script]

Asian Age ^ | 2010 | Latika Padgaonkar

[SunkenCiv]

In what appears to be a new ground-breaking study, Unsealing the Indus Script: Anatomy of Its Decipherment released in November last year, author Malati J. Shendge claims that the riddles of the Harappan graphs which have bedevilled archaeologists, palaeographers and linguistic and other scholars for nearly a century have been largely deciphered. Shendge has decoded many of the seals, and the field is now open for a further understanding of a civilisation that came to an end with the invasion by the Indo-European peoples... Scholars tried to read linguistic elements into it; at times, the script was regarded as proto-Dravidian or assumed to "represent Sanskrit". These assumptions "became a mental block for script-decipherers"... Shendge contends that the script (comprising a string of graphs) has, first and foremost, to be de-hyphenated from language. It is not language-oriented. Rather, it is entirely logographic. In other words, the graphs or signs contain no linguistic element, no grammar, no phonetic or syllabic values. But they do contain meaning. Each graph represents a word or words known only to the practitioners. The graphs on the seals were mainly abbreviated or stylised versions of what Shendge calls "iconic originals" (real-life things). Which is why they were unrecognisable: Decipherers neither knew the language spoken by the Harappans nor did they relate the graph to any material phenomena. What is found in the graphs are nouns and verbal nouns, and it is these, Shendge asserts, that needed to be understood.

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

There's no sign of her new book, but in 2003 (that's seven years ago) she appears to have been peddling the same line of goods -- "The Language of the Harappans: From Akkadian to Sanskrit.

[Little Bill]

I have been reading about this for the last five or six years, if the script is writing it is proto Dravidian. There are still people who speak a Dravidian off shoot in Afghanistan.

[Army Air Corps]

Correct.

[James C. Bennett]

That animal on the seal looks like an auroch.

Aurochs migrated from the Subcontinent, to Europe. Correct?

[bigheadfred]

This makes a certain bit of sense. A civilization that has an OC disorder for tallying. “Hey Mr. Tallyman, tally me (banana)” No diversity, no growth, stasis. Mind-numbingly boring. For a thousand years. They must have Jonestowned themselves into the annals of history.

As with all things so horrific they are driven deep within the subconscious of succeeding generations, yet remain in the mythos, we now have the fanatical, extremist, against anything that really COUNTS, TALLYBAN...