Free Republic

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the most advanced in the world for over 500 years. More than 1000 settlements sprawled across 250,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan and northwest India from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. It had several large, well-planned cities like Mohenjo-daro, common iconography, and a script no one has been able to understand. Linguists studying the Indus script don't know anything about the underlying language and there's no multilingual Rosetta Stone, but scholars have analyzed its structure for clues and compared it to other scripts. Most Indologists think it's “logo-syllabic” script like Sumerian...

Whatever their differences, all Indus researchers agree that there is no consensus on the meaning of the script. There are three main problems. First, no firm information is available about its underlying language. Was this an ancestor of Sanskrit or Dravidian, or of some other Indian language family, such as Munda, or was it a language that has disappeared? Linear B was deciphered because the tablets turned out to be in an archaic form of Greek; Mayan glyphs because Mayan languages are still spoken. Second, no names of Indus rulers or personages are known from myths or historical records: no...

Skeletal collections with trauma found from the Neolithic period in Anatolia suggest that injury was caused by daily activities and lifestyle, rather than systematic violence. However, shortly after this period there is an increase in trauma associated with violence that may suggest an increase in stress within and between populations in this area... The human remains come from the site of Titris Hoyuk, dating to 2900-2100 BCE. The site grew very quickly in this period from a small farming community to an urban centre within a large mud-brick fortification wall built over a stone foundation. Within one of the house...

Scientists have used a computer program to decipher a written language that is more than three thousand years old. The program automatically translated the ancient written language of Ugaritic within just a few hours. Scientists hope the breakthrough could help them decipher the few ancient languages that they have been unable to translate so far. Ugaritic was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria and consists of dots on clay tablets. It was first discovered in 1920 but was not deciphered until 1932. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the program that the language was related to...

Jerome Eisenberg, a specialist in faked ancient art, is claiming that the disc and its indecipherable text is not a relic dating from 1,700BC, but a forgery that has duped scholars since Luigi Pernier, an Italian archaeologist, "discovered" it in 1908 in the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete. Pernier was desperate to impress his colleagues with a find of his own, according to Dr Eisenberg, and needed to unearth something that could outdo the discoveries made by Sir Arthur Evans, the renowned English archaeologist, and Federico Halbherr, a fellow Italian... Dr Eisenberg, who has conducted appraisals for the US...

[Q:] There are periodic reports of Indus script being deciphered. Are there standard methods to test the validity of claimed decipherments? [A:] The best summary and evaluation of the work done so far is Gregory Possehl’s book, The Indus Age: Its writing. I myself have reviewed five claims to decipherment – two based on Sanskrit, two on Tamil and one claiming that the script is merely a collection of numbers. My conclusion is negative – that none of the decipherments has been successful... There is very little interest in the Indus script in the West – there are very few...

The first character is the sampi, as it was used (briefly) in the Ionic alphabet as a sibilant. The first question to answer is whether it should be separated from the numerical sampi at all... The second question is what the phonetic value of sampi was... Jeffery (1990:39)... also suspects that sampi was originally borrowed from Carian, and used to express the Carian sibilant in loanwords... In the pre-Hellenic language of Lemnos (possibly related to Etruscan), it is used, but Jeffery has no idea what it sounded like. In the older inscriptions of the non-Hellenic language of Phrygia (related...