Posted on 02/17/2007 6:31:24 AM PST by aculeus
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.
He is here to attend the International Indology Conference, beginning from February 7.
Richter, who began decoding the mysteries behind the seals way back in 1988, feels that after decoding 1,000-odd seals, there is no need to decode the rest.
"You need not eat all apples of world to understand the apple. Few apples are enough," he quipped.
The path-breaking decoding by Richter is based on the Sumerian and Brahmi script wherein he has detected the lost meaning of the seals which can be traced to Vedic era.
A Vedic scholar himself, Richter during the course of unravelling the Indus Valley mysteries, has translated all the important Vedic hymns and is a Sanskrit exponent too.
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Rongo-rongo are the inscribed tablets from Easter Island.
Appreciated.
D-R-I-N-K-Y-O-U-R-O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E
Has an almost mythic significance to those of us who got the Lone Ranger's secret decoder ring and waited breathlessly for the secret message over the radio.
ROTFLMAO
"All the seals are based on Vedas -- Rig Veda and Atharva Veda," Richter told a news agency here.
Hey, what about Darth Veda?
"The Indus Valley script cannot be Vedic since they predate the arrival of the Aryan invaders of India."
Was thinking the same thing - I went looking for dates on this story.
As far as I understand it, I don't believe there was an 'Aryan Invasion', either. I think the lost civilization were the refugees from the last round of 'global warming'. And I believe the folks that say the 'Rig Veda', the oldest of the Vedas, in part tells that story.
I believe there was civilization in the Indian subcontinent during the last ice age. When the ice melted, it did so unevenly. There were sudden periods of rapid sea-level rise that wiped out many miles of low-lying lands.
The best telling of the theory I've read about it was in the book Underworld.
I highly reccommend it.
Disk of Phaistos has been decoded by everybody in every way imaginable.
There is a band of related languages from western Europe to India which have similarities (in grammar and vocabulary) which can only be explained by descent from a common ancestor, or at least from a group of similar dialects, in the remote past. The Indo-European languages of India and those of Iran are particularly closely related. Unless the language family began in India and spread outward from there, which seems highly unlikely, then someone had to have brought it to India, whether Aryans or Berlitzers.
D-R-I-N-K-Y-O-U-R-O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E
Has an almost mythic significance to those of us who got the Lone Ranger's secret decoder ring and waited breathlessly for the secret message over the radio.
Yeah, but it was no match for the real Captain Midnight secret decoder ring.
;^D
Superb. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Deciphering the Phaistos Disc is the way linguistics crackpots ante up. It's like the way physics crackpots start by disproving Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
Way cool!
" I believe there was civilization in the Indian subcontinent during the last ice age. When the ice melted, it did so unevenly. There were sudden periods of rapid sea-level rise that wiped out many miles of low-lying lands."
Agree 100%
I believe that the earliest human civilizations are off shore, under water.
Sea levels are higher than when those civilizations existed. Humans have always lived near coastlines, it's just that the coastlines slowly move...
In other words, Atlantis was everywhere.
"So how did the Indo-European languages show up in India? Did Berlitz send a team of instructors and teach the proto-Sanskrit language to millions of people?"
I don't know, and neither do you. They might have originated on the subcontinent and moved outward via trade etc.
THere is no archaelogical evidence of a mass invasion in that timeframe, that I know of.
Disagree with this statement. Christianity at least references this world along with that not of this world. As for religion and science, they are not any more mutually exclusive than history is from art--they are two topics that at times converge.
There are those who consider the Aryans as indigenous to India. That there is a connection between Indo-European languages is not being contested. Simply these people have the opinion that proto-Indo-European spread from India, rather than from Central Asia (the main hypothesized origin area for the original Indo-Europeans) or southwestern Asia (Mesopotamia after Babel when one of the splinter groups had the ancestor language of the Indo-European languages--in a Creationist model).
Why do the French speak a language related to Latin, and not a Celtic tongue? Why do the Irish speak English, and not Gaelic? How did the Egyptians stop speaking Coptic and start speaking Arabic? How did the Anatolians first move to speaking Greek, and then to Turkish? What about the Prussians moving from speaking a Baltic tongue to German?
The Indians taking up a language related to the nearby Iranians, Tocharians, and Afghans is hardly a revolutionary process in the history of the world never seen before. Its not as though the Iranians/Afghans never ruled the Indus Valley and north Indian plain.
The Indo-Iranian languages form one branch of the Indo-European family, part of the satem group (from the Avestan word for 100), whereas most of the European languages are in the centum group (from the Latin word for 100--pronounced with a hard "c"). The Slavic languages are satem: Russian sto = 100. This is a widespread pattern where an s in the one group shows up as a k sound in the other (which becomes an h in Germanic, as in English "hundred"). Tocharian is a centum language despite being geographically much closer to India and the Iranian languages than to the other centum languages.
There is disagreement about the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-European speakers, but most theories have it somewhere in the vicinity of the Black Sea. If it was in India, it would be hard to explain how the languages spread to Europe, or the great diversity of the Indo-European groups in Europe (Greek, Italic, Albanian, Thracian, Germanic, Celtic), if they had to cross deserts and steppes to get to Europe.
Most of the early Indo-Europeans are warlike and patriarchal, and that may have had a lot to do with their success in spreading over such a huge area, so it makes sense to suppose they came into India as invaders. But maybe they arrived as an early version of the Peace Corps.
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