The hidden indus valley's fish sign
proto-shiva and fish sign across the various Indus sites
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/bce_500back/indusvalley/protoshiva/protoshiva.jpg
Description seal discovered during excavation of the Mohenjodaro archaeological site in the Indus Valley has drawn attention as a possible representation of a "yogi" or "proto-siva" figure. This "Pashupati" (Lord of Animals, Sanskrit paśupati seal shows a seated figure, possibly it hyphallic, surrounded by animals. There are three faces to this figure 1 each on the side and this could be that of the four headed Brahma with the fourth head hiding behind. One can see clearly the long nose and mouth wide lips on the two sides.
Iravatham Mahadevan is a National Fellow of the Indian Council of Historical Research, and has been working on the Indus script for over 40 years. His publications include The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables (1977).
A Tamil speaker, he has used historical linguistics and statistical studies to examine the Dravidian components in Vedic Sanskrit, and how these might point to interpretations of the Indus Valley script.
Author: Iravatham Mahadevan
OCLC: 4503628
Buy: Amazon US
The first real collection of Indus signs upon which attempts at decipherments could start to be made.
Computer Programmes: Mythili Rangarao
Composition Software: N. Soundarajan
Research Assisstant: T. Rajeswari
Graphic Arts: Amarnath Sharma
The Director General Archaeological Survey of India (1977)
Dr. Gregory Possehl calls Mahadevan a "careful, methodical worker, taking care to spell out his assumptions and methods. . . 'Tentative conclusions' and 'working hypotheses' are more his style than set ideas and fait accompli" (Indus Age: The Writing System, p. 130).
The following paper by Mahadevan, An Encylopaedia of the Indus Script, is a review of Asko Parpola's Deciphering the Indus Script, and was published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics (Trivandrum, Jan. 1997, reprinted by permission of the author). Mahadevan uses this opportunity to summarize and review the full breadth of Parpola's work, from evidence from the often misunderstood question of "Aryans" in the subcontinent to specific interpretations of various signs. An easily printed text-only version of the 14 sections that follow is also available.
There is also an ancient Indus script dictionary comparing Mahadevan's and Parpola's key seal sign interpretations.
The Indus Seals with FISH SIGN or MATSYA SIGN
Mahadevan's original article was not illustrated, except for drawings of Indus signs. The pages that follow include a number of images, mainly of sealings from Harappa, courtesy of the Harappa Archaeological Project (HARP). Iravatham MahadevanThe Indus ScriptWriting
The
"unicorn" is the most common motif on Indus seals and appears to
represent a mythical animal that Greek and Roman sources trace back to
the Indian subcontinent. Two different fish signs are visible.
Discovered in Mohenjo-daro in 1931.
Submitted by Richard Sproat
The 'Fish' Signs
The 'fish' sign: Starting Point
As the starting point for his linguistic decipherment Parpola accepts the famous rebus (Fig. I a) first suggested by Father Heras half a century ago. In almost all Dravidian languages the word for 'fish' is meen.
Many Dravidian languages have also the homophone meen meaning 'star' (derived, in this case, from the root meen, 'to shine'). It can be reasonably inferred from the widespread occurrence of the homopones that they must have been present in Proto-Dravidian with similar meanings. This is the linguistic basis for reading the 'fish' sign as meen, but interpreting it as 'star'. This interpretation has gained popularity among the Dravidianist scholars .
More detail on his work and proposed decipherments can be found at Deciphering the Indus Script.
'Number + fish' signs: Asterisms
This hypothesis is seemingly corroborated by the occurrence of 'number + fish' sequences (Fig. I b-d) interpreted as asterisms first by Heras and further elaborated by the Soviet scholars and Parpola. It is interesting to note that the numerical names for the three asterisms are actually attested in Old Tamil. There is however no proof that these interpretations are the only correct ones. There are, in the Indus texts, several sets of 'number + sign' sequences. The interpretation of 'number + fish' signs as asterisms would make this set unique among such sequences.
Full Text Version of The Indus Script
The Coming of the Aryans
Parpola proposes a new theory about when, from where and how the Aryans came into the Indian sub-continent and the identity of the Dasas (Dasyus) who were their traditional enemies. According to this theory, the Rigvedic Aryans were preceded by another wave of Indo-European speaking invaders who called themselves the Dasas and who penetrated further to the east than did the Rigvedic Aryans.
The new theory is based on textual-linguistic re-interpretation of the Vedic evidence in the light of the recent remarkable discoveries made by Soviet archaeologists of a previously unknown Bronze Age civilization in Bactria (North Afghanistan) and Margiana (in Turkmenistan). The Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) had two distinct cultural periods, the first between 1900 and 1700 BCE and the second between 1700 and 1500 BCE.
According to Parpola a small wave of Aryan-speaking nomads from the northern steppes arrived in this region in BMAC-I period and adopted the local non-Aryan culture while retaining their own Aryan language. Parpola identifies their name as Dasa from Old Persian inscriptions and Greek and Latin sources. The presence of the horse and evidence for the practice of chariot warfare by the ruling elite appearing at this time in Bactria confirm the Indo-European origin of the Dasas. The fortified palace at Dashly-3 with three concentric circular walls belonging to this period is identified by Parpola typologically as tripura, 'triple fort' of the Dasas in Vedic mythology.
Parpola suggests that the Dasa-Aryans from BMAC arrived in South Asia via Baluchistan during the time of the Late Harappan cultures, as evidenced by the typically BMAC graves and cenotaphs at Mehrgarh and other sites on the Kachi plain near the Bolan Pass. According to him these early 'Indian Dasas' are likely to have become the ruling elite in the Late Harappan cultures: the Cemetery-H culture of the Punjab, the Jhukar culture of Sind, and the Ochre Coloured Pottery culture of the Ganga-Yamuna Doab.
Parpola also proposes that a second wave of Indo-European speakers from the northern steppes swept over the Bactria-Margiana region in about 1700 BC. Evidence for this comes from the distinct break between the cultures of BMAC I and II at this time. Parpola identifies the newcomers as 'Sauma-Aryans' from their ritual of Soma drinking which the 'Dasa-Aryans' did not practice. Evidence for Ephedra (identified as the Soma plant) has been discovered in the residues of liquid in ritual vessels found in the temple-forts of Togolok-21 and Gonur-I in Margiana dating from the BMAC-II phase.
The Sauma-Aryans too would have largely adopted the local culture, but also transforming the cult of the Asura-worshiping Dasas into the Deva-worshiping cult involving the Soma ritual.
After the fusion of the two peoples, one group of the unified Proto-Indo-Aryans migrated eastwards into the Swat valley founding the Proto-Rigvedic culture.
Parpola's new hypothesis will have to be examined in detail by specialists in South Asian history and Indo-European linguistics. So far as the Indus Civilization is concerned the main implication of the new theory seems to be that the Aryan-Dasa conflict recorded in the earliest portions of the Rigveda is the story of the hostilities and eventual fusion of two Aryan tribes, which took place before their entry into the Indian sub-continent and has thus no relevance to the demise of the mature phase of the Indus Civilization.
*dhundhari language and dhundhar ancient rajasthan and city of meena kings check post for details
Decipherment attempts of the Indus Script
by MrABlair23 (Public Domain)
Slightly over 400 basic signs have been identified as part of the
Indus Script. Only 31 of these signs occur over 100 times, while the
rest were not used regularly. This leads researchers to believe that a
large amount of the Indus Script was actually written on perishable
materials, such as palm leaves or birch, which did not survive the
destruction of time. This is hardly surprising considering that palm
leaves, birch and bamboo tubes were widely used as writing surfaces in
south and south east Asia. Some researchers have argued that the roughly
400 symbols can actually be reduced to 39 elementary signs, the rest
being merely variations of styles and differences between scribes.
There are a number of factors preventing scholars from unlocking the mystery of the Indus Script. To begin with, some of the languages of ancient times, such as Egyptian, were deciphered thanks to the recovery of bilingual inscriptions, that is by comparing an unknown script with a known one. Unfortunately, no bilingual inscriptions have yet been found to allow the Indus Script to be compared to a known writing system.
Another obstacle for its decipherment relates to the fact that all of the inscriptions found so far are relatively short, fewer than 30 signs. This means that analysing recurring sign patterns, another technique that can help to unlock the meaning of a writing system, cannot be successfully performed for the Indus Script.
The last important reason why the Indus Script remains undeciphered, and possibly the most debated of all, is that the language (or languages) that the script represents is still unknown. Scholars have suggested a number of possibilities: Indo-European and Dravidian are the two language families most commonly favoured, but other options have been proposed as well, such as Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, or perhaps a language family that has been lost. On the basis of the material culture associated with the Indus Valley Civilization, a number of scholars have suggested that this civilization was not Indo-European.
references :-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_languages
https://www.harappa.com/script/maha15.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhundari_language
https://www.harappa.com/content/indus-script-5
https://www.harappa.com/indus4/5.html
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