பாபிலோனிய எண்ணுருக்கள்

450px|thumb|பாபிலோனிய எண்குறிகள்
 பாபிலோனிய எண்குறிகள் (Babylonian numerals)  அல்லது பபிலோனிய எண்ணுருக்கள் ஆப்புவடிவத்தில் ஆப்புநுனி எழுத்துளியால் மென்மையாக பொறித்து களிமண் இலச்சினைகள் செய்து அவற்றை வெயிலில் உலர்த்தி நிலையான ஆவணங்களாக உருவாகீயன ஆகும்.

வானியல் நோக்கீடுகளிலும் கணக்கீடுகளிலும் பெற்றிருந்த வல்லமைக்காக பாராட்டப்படும் பாபிலோனியர்கள், (மணிச்சட்ட உதவியால்) அறுபதின்ம இலக்க எண்குறிகளைப் பயன்படுத்தினர். இந்த எண்மானம் சுமேரிய அல்லது எபிலாவைட்டு நாகரிகங்களில் இருந்து பெறப்பட்ட்தாக கருதப்படுகிறது.  என்றாலும் இந்த இரு முந்தைய நாகரிக எண்குறிகளும் இலக்கமுறை அடிமானம் எதையும் அலகுகளாக, அதாவது பதின்ம்ம், இருமம் போன்ற அடிமானம் எதையும், பெற்றிருக்கவில்லை.

தோற்றம்
இந்த எண்குறி முறை கிமு 2000 கால அளவில் தோன்றியுள்ளது; இதன் கட்டமைப்பு செமித்திய மொழிகளின் அகரமுதலி எண்குறிகளைப் போல அமைந்துள்லதே தவிர சுமேரிய அகரமுதலி எண்களைப் போல அமையவில்லை.  என்றாலும், 60 என்ற எண்ணுக்கான குறி சுமேரியச் சிறப்புக் குறியில் இருந்து (இதற்கு இரண்டு செமித்தியக் குறிகள் உள்ளன) பெறப்பட்டுள்ளது attests to a relation with the Sumerian system.

எண்குறி முறைமை

 எண் உருக்கள்
பாபிலோனிய முறை தான் முதலில் தோன்றிய இலக்க எண்குறி முறையாகும் எனக் கருதப்படுகிறது. இம்முறையில் குறிப்பிட்ட இலக்கத்தின் மதிப்பு, அது அமைந்த எண்ணின் எண்மதிப்போடு அதன் இருப்பையும் சார்ந்துள்ளது. இது மிகவும் அரிய வளர்ச்சியாகும். ஏனெனில், பத்து, நூறு, ஆயிரம் போன்ற ஒவ்வொரு அடிமான அடுக்குகளுக்குத் தனிக் குறியுள்ள இலக்க முறையற்ற எண்மானங்களில் கணக்கீடுகள் செய்வது அரிதாகும்.

இந்த எண்மான முறையில் 59 சுழியல்லாத தனி எண்களைக் குறிப்பதற்காக, 20px என்பதை ஒற்றை எண்களைக் குறிக்கவும் 20px 20px என்பதைப் பத்துகளைக் குறிக்கவும் என இரு குறியீடுகள் மட்டும் பயன்பட்டுள்ளன. இந்தக் குறியீடுகளையும் அவற்றின் இட மதிப்புகளையும் இணைத்து (உரோம எண்குறி முறைபோல) ஓர் எண்ணை உருவாக்கியுள்ளனர்; எடுத்துகாட்டாக, 23 என்ற எண்ணைக் குறிக்க, 20px20px என்பதைப் பயன்படுத்தியுள்ளனர் (கீழுள்ள பட்டியலைப் பார்க்கவும்). தற்காலச் சுழியைக் குறிக்க ஒரு வெற்று இடைவெளியைப் பயன்படுத்தியுள்ளனர். பாபிலோனியர்கள் பின்னர் சுழியைக் குறிக்க இந்த வெற்று இடைவெளிக்கு மாற்றாக,புதிய குறியை உருவாக்கியுள்ளனர். .  பாபிலோனிய எண்மானத்தில் தற்காலப் பதின்மப் புள்ளியைப் போன்ற பகவுப் (பின்னப்) புள்ளி இல்லாததால், ஒற்றை என்களின் இட மதிப்பைக் குறிப்பிட்ட சூழலைச் சார்ந்தே உய்த்தறிதல் வேண்டும்: 20px20px என்பது 23 அல்லது 23×60 அல்லது 23×60×60 அல்லது 23/60, போன்றவற்றைக் குறிக்கலாம்.

பாபிலோனிய முறை எண்களைக் குறிக்க அகப் பதின்மத்தைப் பயன்படுத்தியுள்ளன; என்றாலும், இது பதின்மான, அறுமானக் கலப்புப் பகுப்பு முறையைப் பின்பற்றவில்லை. பத்து அடிமானம் பெரிய எண்களைக் குறிக்கும் தேவைக்கான ஏந்தாக மட்டுமே பயன்பட்டுள்ளது. இதன் பதின்ம எண்சரம்தெளிவாக அறுபதின்ம அடிமான முறையையே இடமதிப்பாகப் பெற்றிருந்தது. இந்த எண்சரக் கணக்கீடுகளும் அறுபதின்ம முறை சார்ந்தே அமைந்தன.

இந்த அறுபதின்ம முறை கோணங்களை அளக்க இன்றும் பயன்பாட்டில் உள்ளது. வட்டத்துக்கு 360 கோணப் பாகைகளையும் சமபக்க முக்கோணத்துக்கு 60 கோணப் பாகைகளையும் முக்கோண அளவியலில் பாகை, பாகைத்துளி, பாகைநொடிகளையும் பயன்படுத்துகிறோம். காலம் அளக்கவும் இம்முறை பயன்படுகிறது. என்றாலும், இவையிரண்டும் கலப்புப் பகுப்பு முறையையே பின்பற்றுகின்றன என்பது குறிப்பிட்த்தக்கது. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-time-division-days-hours-minutes/

 மேலும் காண்க
 பாபிலோன்
 பாபிலோனியா
 சுழியின் வரலாறு
 எண்குறி முறைமை
 அராபிய எண்ணுருக்கள்
 ஆர்மீனிய எண்ணுருக்கள்
 சீன எண்குறிகள்
 கிரேக்க எண்குறிகள்
 எபிரேய எண்ணுருக்கள்
 இந்திய எண்குறிகள்
 மாயர் எண்ணுருக்கள்
 உரோம எண்குறிகள்

குறிப்புகள்

நூல்தொகை

 வெளி இணைப்புகள்

 Babylonian numerals
 Cuneiform numbers
 Babylonian Mathematics
 High resolution photographs, descriptions, and analysis of the root(2) tablet (YBC 7289) from the Yale Babylonian Collection
 Photograph, illustration, and description of the root(2) tablet from the Yale Babylonian Collection
 Babylonian Numerals by Michael Schreiber, Wolfram Demonstrations Project.

 CESCNC - a handy and easy-to use numeral converter

பகுப்பு:பாபிலோனியக் கணிதவியல்
பகுப்பு:செந்தரமற்ற இலக்க எண்குறி முறைமைகள்
பகுப்பு:எண்குறி முறைமைகள்
பகுப்பு:எண்ணுருக்கள்

Those who were in the heavens, and those who were in the heavens, and those who were in the heavens, and those who were in the heavens, and those who were in the heavens, and those who were in the heavens, and those who were in the heavens, and those who were in the heavens.

Thus, there is no such thing as a two-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds-thirds.

This is the time for the use of these cells. We use 360 cups and 60 cups and 60 cups and 60 cups and 60 cups and 60 cups and 60 cups and 60 cups and 60 cups and 60 cups.

Cuneiform numbers were written using a combination of just two signs: a vertical wedge for '1' and a corner wedge for '10'. Handwriting varied as much in Old Babylonian times as it does now but the basic system of numbers is illustrated below.
|1||2||3||4|
|5||6||7||8|
|9||10||11||12|
|13||14||15||16|
|17||18||19||20|
|30||40||50||60|
Some common variants are
|for 4|
|for 7|
|for 8.|
Occasionally, 19 was written as something like
, meaning 20 - 1, although there are a huge number of minor variations in
the way this sign is written.
Additionally, there were special signs for some common fractions.
These were used when the numbers stood for metrological quantities, such
as 1/2 gin.
|1/2|
|1/3|
|2/3|
|5/6|
To find out how Mesopotamian scribes wrote numbers larger than 60, go
to the larger
numbers page.
If you want to know the Sumerian and Akkadian words for numbers, go here.
For practice in writing and reading cuneiform numbers, try a worksheet, or a different one.
Last modified: 23 September 2003
Duncan J. Melville
Comments to dmelville@stlawu.edu

Question: who created the yale babylonian numerals

Question: what is the name of the handy and easy-to-use numeral converter for

Question: what is the name of the tablet in the yale babylonian collection

Question: where was the tablet that contained the root of the babylonian numerals found

Question: what is cescnc

handy and easy - to use numeral converter

Question: what type of numbers are derived from babylonian numerals

Question: where did the tablet with the root(2) tablet come from

External links Babylonian numerals Cuneiform numbers Babylonian Mathematics High resolution photographs , descriptions , and analysis of the root(2 ) tablet ( YBC 7289 ) from the Yale Babylonian Collection Photograph , illustration , and description of the root(2 ) tablet from the Yale Babylonian Collection Babylonian Numerals by Michael Schreiber , Wolfram Demonstrations Project .

CESCNC - a handy and easy - to - use numeral converter

External links Babylonian numerals Cuneiform numbers Babylonian Mathematics High resolution photographs, descriptions, and analysis of the root(2) tablet (YBC 7289) from the Yale Babylonian Collection Photograph, illustration, and description of the root(2) tablet from the Yale Babylonian Collection Babylonian Numerals by Michael Schreiber, Wolfram Demonstrations Project. CESCNC - a handy and easy-to-use numeral converter

This tablet is a round school tablet of unknown provenance from the Old Babylonian period. It has a picture of a square with both diagonals drawn in. On one side of the square is written the number 30, along one of the diagonals is the number 1,24,51,10 and below it is 42,25,35.
It is easy to see that 30 times 1,24,51,10 is 42,25,35 (or, recalling that the reciprocal of 30 is 2, that 42,25,35 times 2 is 1,24,51,10). From the positioning of the numbers, the natural interpretation to make is that a square with side of length 30 (or 1/2) has diagonal of length 42,25,35. This means that the number 1,24,51,10 must be the 'coefficient of the diagonal of a square' and, indeed we do have an Old Babylonian coefficient list that has this number (see MCT text Ue (YBC 7243)).
We know that the ratio of the side to diagonal in a square is 1 to the square root of 2. Since root(2) is irrational, it cannot be expressed as a finite sexagesimal number, so 1,24,51,10 can only be approximate. In fact, the square of 1,24,51,10 is 1,59,59,59,38,1,40, a remarkably good approximation to 2
Why choose a side of 30 in a school exercise on diagonals? Because it is the only choice that makes the diagonal of the square (42,25,35) equal to the reciprocal of the coefficient (1,24,51,10) That is, 1,24,51,10 is root(2) and 42,25,35 is 1/root(2). Given the importance the Babylonians attached to reciprocals, this can hardly be a coincidence. It is a nice exercise in algebra to see why you want a square of side 1/2 rather than 1.
For a recent analysis of how Mesopotamian scribes might have
determined
the approximation used, see Fowler, D.H. and Robson, E.R. (1998).
'Square
root approximations in Old Babylonian mathematics: YBC 7289 in
context.'
Historia Mathematica 25, 366-378.
Some excellent large-size photographs of the tablet
along with some commentary and analysis are available on Bill
Casselman's website. I encourage you to visit there.
Go to Mesopotamian
Mathematics.
Last modified: 18 September 2006Duncan J. Melville


சிந்துவெளி வரிவடிவம்

thumb|250px|சிந்துவெளியின் ஒற்றைக்கொம்பன் முத்திரை, இந்திய அருங்காட்சியகம்
thumb|250px|ஐந்து எழுத்துக்களோடு கூடிய சிந்துவெளி முத்திரை ஒன்று
thumb|250px|ஒரு தொகுதி முத்திரைகள்
சிந்துவெளி/ஹரப்பா வரிவடிவம் என்பது, சிந்துவெளி நாகரிக அழிபாடுகளிடையே கிடைத்த ஆயிரக்கணக்கான முத்திரை குத்துவதற்கான அச்சுக்களிலும், அவற்றின்மூலம் முத்திரை குத்தப்பட்ட பல களிமண் வில்லைகளிலும் காணப்படுகின்ற வரிவடிவங்கள் ஆகும். இவை அக்காலத்தில் சிந்துவெளி மக்களால் பேசப்பட்ட மொழிக்கான வரிவடிவங்களாகக் கருதப்படுகின்றன. கிடைத்த சான்றுகளின்படி இவ்வரிவடிவங்கள் கி.மு 2,500 அளவில் பயன்பாட்டில் இருந்திருக்கக்கூடும் எனக் கருதப்படுகிறது. சுமார் 450 வெவ்வேறான குறியீடுகள் அடையாளம் காணப்பட்டுள்ளன. இவ் வரிவடிவங்கள் இன்னும் வாசித்துப் புரிந்துகொள்ளப்படவில்லை. 1920ல் இவ் வரிவடிவங்கள் வெளிக்கொணரப்பட்ட பின்னர் இந்தியாவிலும் வெளிநாடுகளிலுமுள்ள அறிஞர்கள் பலர் இவ்வரிவடிவங்களை வாசித்தறிய முயன்றுவருகின்றார்கள். எனினும் 1960 களுக்கு முன்னர் இவ்வாராய்ச்சி முறையாக மேற்கொள்ளப்படவில்லை என்றே தெரிகிறது.

 குறியீடுகள்
குறியீடுகளின் தொடக்ககால எடுத்துக்காட்டுக்கள் தொடக்ககால அரப்பா, சிந்துவெளி நாகரிகச் சூழலில் கிடைக்கின்றன. இவை கி.மு 35 நூற்றாண்டுகளுக்கு முந்தியவையாக இருக்கலாம்.  கி.மு 2600 முதல் கி.மு 1900க்கு இடைப்பட்ட முதிர் அரப்பாக் காலத்தில் தட்டையான சதுரவடிவ முத்திரைகளிலும் கருவிகள், அணிகள், மட்பாண்டங்கள் போன்ற பிற பொருட்களிலும், இவ்வாறான குறியீடுகளின் தொடர்கள் காணப்படுகின்றன. இக்குறியீடுகள் வெட்டுதல், செதுக்குதல், பூசுதல், அழுத்திப் பதித்தல் போன்ற பல்வேறு உத்திகளைப் பயன்படுத்திக் குறித்த பொருட்களில் பொறிக்கப்பட்டுள்ளன. குறியீடுகள் பொறிக்கப்பட்ட பொருட்களும், மாவுக்கல், எலும்பு, ஓடுகள், சுடுமண், மணற்கல், செப்பு, வெள்ளி, பொன் போன்ற பல வகைகளாகக் காணப்படுகின்றன.

 பிந்திய அரப்பாக்காலம்
கி.மு 1900க்குப் பின்னர், அதாவது முதிர் அரப்பாக் காலத்தின் கடைசிக் கட்டத்துக்குப் பின்னர், குறியீடுகளின் முறைப்படியான பயன்பாடு முடிவுற்றதாகக் காணப்படுகிறது. சில அரப்பாக் குறியீடுகள், கி.மு 1100 (இந்திய இரும்புக் காலத்தின் தொடக்கம்) வரை காணப்படுவதாகச் சொல்லப்படுகிறது. குசராத்தில் உள்ள வெட் துவாரகைக்கு அருகில் கரையோரத்தில் மேற்கொள்ளப்பட்ட ஆய்வுகள் மூன்றுதலை விலங்குடன் கூடிய பிற்காலச் சிந்துவெளி முத்திரைகளை வெளிப்படுத்தியுள்ளன. பிந்திய அரப்பாக் குறியீடுகள் பொறிக்கப்பட்ட மட்பாண்டங்கள், மினுக்கமுள்ள சிவப்புப்பாண்டக் கிண்ணங்கள், தட்டுகள், கால் பொருத்திய கிண்ணம், துளைகள் உள்ள சாடிகள் போன்ற கி.மு 16 ஆம் நூற்றாண்டுகளைச் சேர்ந்த ஏராளமான மட்பாண்டப் பொருட்கள் துவாரகை, ரங்பூர், பிரபாசு ஆகிய இடங்களில் கிடைத்துள்ளன. வெப்பவொளிர்வுக் காலக்கணிப்பு வெட் துவாரகையின் மட்பாண்டங்கள் கி.மு 1528ஐச் சேர்ந்தவையாகக் காட்டுகின்றன. இது, அரப்பாக் குறியீடுகள் கி.மு 1500 வரையாவது பயன்பாட்டில் இருந்ததற்கான சான்றாகக் கொள்ளப்படுகிறது.Sullivan, S. M. (2011) Indus Script Dictionary, page viii

 சிந்துவெளி வரிவடிவத்தின் தன்மை

கிடைக்ககூடிய சான்றுகளின்படி இவ்வரிவடிவத்தின் தன்மைகள் குறித்துச் சில தகவல்கள் தெரியவந்துள்ளன.

 இது வலமிருந்து இடமாக எழுதப்பட்டது.
 இது படஎழுத்து வகையைச் சார்ந்தது.

 வாசித்தறிய இயலுமை குறித்த கருத்துக்கள்
ஒரு புறத்தில் பல ஆய்வாளர்கள் சிந்துவெளிக் குறியீடுகளை வாசித்தறிய முயற்சிகளை மேற்கொண்டிருக்கும்போது, மைக்கேல் விட்செல், இசுட்டீவ் ஃபாமர் ஆகியோர் இக்குறியீடுகள் மொழிகளுக்கானவை அல்ல என்றும் இவை குடும்பங்கள், இனக்குழுக்கள், கடவுள்கள், மதக் கருத்துருக்கள் போன்றவற்றுக்கான குறியீடுகளே என்றும் ஒரு எடுகோளை முன்வைத்தனர்.Farmer et al. (2004) 2004 ஆம் ஆண்டில் தாம் எழுதிய கட்டுரையொன்றில், ஃபாமர், இசுப்புரோட், விட்செல் ஆகியோர் இக்குறியீடுகள் மொழிக்கானவை அல்ல என்ற தமது கருத்தை நிறுவப் பல வாதங்களை முன்வைத்தனர். பொறிப்புக்கள் மிகமிகச் சுருக்கமாக இருத்தல், அரிதாகக் காணப்படும் குறியீடுகள் பெருமளவில் இருத்தல், மொழிகளுக்குப் பொதுவான, குறியீடுகள் திரும்ப வருதல் ஒழுங்கற்ற முறையில் அமையும் தன்மை குறைவாக இருத்தல் என்பன இவர்களது வாதங்களுள் முக்கியமானவை.

2005 ஆம் ஆண்டில், விட்செல் முதலானோரின் கருத்தை மறுத்த ஆஸ்கோ பர்ப்போலா, முன் குறித்த வாதங்கள் இலகுவாகப் பிழையென நிறுவப்படக்கூடியவை என்றார்.(Parpola, 2005, p. 37) சீன மொழியில், பெருமளவில் அரிதாக வரும் குறியீடுகள் இருப்பதை எடுத்துக்காட்டிய பர்ப்போலா, தொடக்ககால படவெழுத்து முறையில் எழுதப்பட்ட குறைந்த நீளப் பொறிப்புக்களில் குறியீடுகள் திரும்ப வருவதற்கான காரணங்கள் கிடையாது என்றார். 2007ம் ஆண்டில் விரிவுரை(Parpola, 2008). ஒன்றில் மீண்டும் இது குறித்துக் கருத்துத் தெரிவித்த அவர், ஃபாமர் முதலானோரின் முக்கியமான 10 வாதங்கள் ஒவ்வொன்றுக்கும் பதிலளித்தார். ஒரு எழுத்துமுறை, சில குறியீடுகளை ஒலிக்கக்கூடிய வகையில் "ரீபசு" (rebus) கோட்பாட்டைப் பயன்படுத்துமானால், சிறு பெயர்ச்சொல் தொடர்களும், முழுமையற்ற வாக்கியங்களும்கூட, முழுமையான ஒரு மொழிக்குரிய எழுத்து முறையாகக் கொள்ளப்படலாம் என்று அவர் சுட்டிக்காட்டினார்.

 வாசித்தறிவதற்கான முயற்சிகள்
இவ்வாராய்ச்சியில் ஈடுபட்டுள்ளவர்களுக்குச் சவாலாக அமைந்துள்ள விடயங்களுள் பின்வருவனவும் அடங்கும்.
 இவ் வரிவடிவங்களைப் பயன்படுத்திய மொழியைப்பற்றி எதுவும் தெரியாது.
 கிடைத்த முத்திரைகளில் எழுதப்பட்டிருப்பவை பெரும்பாலும் 5 அல்லது 6 குறியீடுகளைக் கொண்டவையாகவே உள்ளன. நீளமான விவரணங்கள் எதுவும் இல்லை.
 அறியப்பட்ட வேறு வரிவடிவங்களைக் கொண்ட இருமொழிக் குறிப்புக்கள் எதுவும் கிடைக்கவில்லை.

 பேசப்பட்ட மொழி
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இந்த வரிவடிவம் தொடர்பான சர்ச்சையில் முக்கிய இடம்பெறுவது, இது எத்தகைய மொழிக்காகப் பயன்பட்டது என்பது தொடர்பிலேயாகும். பொதுவாக இரண்டு கொள்கைகள் ஆய்வாளர்களிடையே நிலவின. இது முதல்நிலைச் சமஸ்கிருத மொழிக்கானது (ப்ராகிருதம்) என்பது ஒரு கொள்கை. இல்லை இது தமிழிய மொழிக்கான (தமிழ்) எழுத்து வடிவமே யென்பது இரண்டாவது கொள்கை.

 தமிழிய மொழிக் கருதுகோள்
உருசிய அறிஞரான யூரி நோரோசோவ், சிந்துவெளிக் குறியீடுகள் படவெழுத்து முறைக்கானவை என்றும், கணினிப் பகுப்பாய்வுகளின்படி, இதற்கு அடிப்படையான மொழி ஒட்டுநிலைத் தமிழிய மொழியாக இருப்பதற்கு வாய்ப்புக்கள் இருப்பதாகவும் கருத்து வெளியிட்டார்.(Knorozov 1965) இவருடைய கருத்துக்கு முன்பே என்றி ஏராசு (Henry Heras) முந்து தமிழிய மொழி என்ற எடுகோளின் அடிப்படையில் சில குறியீடுகளுக்கான தனது வாசிப்புக்களை வெளியிட்டிருந்தார்.(Heras, 1953)

பின்லாந்தைச் சேர்ந்த அறிஞர் ஆஸ்கோ பர்ப்போலாவும், சிந்துவெளி எழுத்துக்களும், அரப்பா மொழியும் பெரும்பாலும் தமிழிய மொழிக்குடும்பத்தைச் சேர்ந்தாகவே இருக்கும் என்ற கருத்தைக் கொண்டிருந்தார். 1960'கள் முதல் 1980'கள் வரை இவரது தலைமையில் ஒரு பின்லாந்துக் குழுவினர் கணினிப் பகுப்பாய்வுகளின் மூலம் சிந்துவெளிக் குறியீடுகளை ஆய்வு செய்தனர். அரப்பா மொழி முந்து தமிழ் மொழி (கற்பனை மொழி) என்ற எடுகோளின் அடிப்படையில் பல குறிகளுக்கான தமது வாசிப்பை அவர்கள் முன்வைத்தனர். இவர்களது சில வாசிப்புக்கள் ஏராசு, நோரோசோவ் ஆகியோரது வாசிப்புக்களுடன் பொருந்தின ("மீன்" குறியீட்டைத் தமிழ்ச் சொல்லான "மீன்" என்னும் சொல்லாகவே வாசித்தமை), வேறு சில முரண்பட்டன. 1994 வரையான பர்ப்போலாவின் ஆய்வுகளின் விரிவான விளக்கங்கள் சிந்துவெளி எழுத்துக்களை வாசித்தறிதல் (Deciphering the Indus Script) என்னும் அவரது நூலில் தரப்பட்டுள்ளன.(Parpola, 1994) தமிழ்நாட்டில் அண்மையில், சிந்துவெளிக் குறியீடுகள் எனக் கருதப்படும் குறியீடுகளுடன் கூடிய புதியகற்காலக் (2 ஆயிரவாண்டுத் தொடக்கம். அரப்பாவின் வீழ்ச்சிக்கு முந்திய காலம்) கற்கோடரி ஒன்று கண்டுபிடிக்கப்பட்டமை தமிழிய மொழிக் கருதுகோளுக்கு வலிமை சேர்ப்பதாகச் சில அறிஞர்கள் கருதுகின்றனர்.(Subramanium 2006; see also A Note on the Muruku Sign of the Indus Script in light of the Mayiladuthurai Stone Axe Discovery  by I. Mahadevan (2006) 2007 மே மாதத்தில், தமிழ்நாடு தொல்லியல் பகுதியால் பூம்புகாருக்கு அண்மையில் உள்ள மேலப்பெரும்பள்ளம் என்னும் இடத்தில் மேற்கொள்ளப்பட்ட அகழ்வாய்வுகளில், அம்புத்தலைக் குறியீடுகளுடன்கூடிய பானைகள் கிடைத்தன. இந்தக் குறிகள், 1920ல் மொகெஞ்சதாரோவில் கண்டெடுக்கப்பட்ட முத்திரைகளிலுள்ள குறியீடுகளுடன் ஒத்திருப்பதாகச் சொல்லப்படுகிறது.

ஆஸ்கோ பர்போலா, ஐராவதம் மகாதேவன் போன்ற ஆராய்ச்சி யாளர்கள் சமஸ்கிருதம், கி.மு 1500 க்குப் பின்னர் இந்தியாவுக்குள் நுழைந்த ஆரியர்களுடனேயே கொண்டுவரப்பட்டதென்றும், கி.மு 2500 க்கு முற்பட்ட சிந்துவெளி வரிவடிவங்களோடு அதற்குத் தொடர்பு இருக்கமுடியாது என்றும் வாதிக்கிறார்கள். அதற்கான தொல்லியல் சான்றுகளையும் நிறுவி உள்ளனர். அத்துடன் ஆரியப் பண்பாட்டை விளக்குவதாகக் கருதப்படும் மிகப் பழைய நூலான ரிக் வேதம் நூறுவீதக் கிராமப் பண்பாட்டுக்குரியது என்றும் சிந்துவெளிப் பண்பாடு போன்ற நகரப் பண்பாடு ரிக் வேதத்தில் எங்கும் குறிப்பிடப்படவில்லை என்றும் எடுத்துக்காட்டுகிறார்கள். ஆரியப் பண்பாட்டின் இன்னொரு அம்சமான குதிரை, சிந்துவெளி முத்திரைகளிற் சித்தரிக்கப்படாமையும் அவர்களுடைய சான்றுகளில் ஒன்றாகும்.

சிந்து எழுத்தாய்வு, தொல்லியல் ஆய்வாளர் நா. ப. பூரணச்சந்திர ஜீவா என்பவர் 2004 இல் வெளியிட்ட "சிந்து வெளியில் முந்து தமிழ்" என்ற நூலில் சிந்து சமவெளி நாகரிகத்திற்கு உரியவர்கள்

(தமிழே ள்) என்று சான்றுகளுடன் விளக்குகிறார்.. அந்நூலில் அனைத்து எழுத்துகளும் சான்றுகளுடன் விளக்கப்பட்டுள்ளன.
கடந்த 25 வருட  ஆய்வுகள்  மூலம் மேற்கொள்ளப்பட்டு தயாரிக்கபட்டது அந்நூல்.

 சமசுக்கிருத எடுகோள்
இந்தியத் தொல்லியலாளர் சிக்காரிபுர ரங்கநாத ராவ், தான் சிந்துவெளி எழுத்துக்களை வாசித்துவிட்டதாக அறிவித்தார். சிந்துவெளி நாகரிகத்தின் முழுப்பரப்பிலும் ஒருசீரான எழுத்துக்களே பயன்பாட்டில் இருந்தன என்ற எடுகோளுடன், அவ்வெழுத்துக்களை அவர் பினீசிய எழுத்துக்களுடன் ஒப்பிட்டு ஆய்வு செய்தார். இந்த ஒப்பீட்டின் அடிப்படையில் சிந்துவெளிக் குறியீடுகளுக்கு ஒலிப் பெறுமானங்களை வழங்கினார். இவ்வாறான இவரது வாசிப்பு ஒரு சமசுக்கிருத வாசிப்பாக அமைந்தது. 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, 100 போன்ற எண்களுக்கும், ஏக்க, ட்ரா, சத்துஸ், பன்ட்டா, ஹப்தா/சப்தா, தசா, த்வாதசா, சத்தா என சமசுக்கிருத ஒலிப்புக்களாகவே வாசித்தார். பிந்திய அரப்பா வரிவடிவங்களுக்கும், பினீசிய எழுத்துக்களுக்கும் இடையே குறிப்பிடத்தக்க வடிவ ஒற்றுமைகளை எடுத்துக்காட்டிய அவர், பினீசிய எழுத்துக்கள் அரப்பா எழுத்துக்களிலிருந்தே உருவானதாக வாதித்தார்.

ஜான் ஈ. மிச்சினர் இவ்வாறான சில வாசிப்பு முயற்சிகளை ஏற்றுக்கொள்ளவில்லை. ராவினுடைய வாசிப்பு ஓரளவுக்கு முறையான அடிப்படைகளைக் கொண்டிருந்தாலும், பெருமளவு தற்சார்பு கொண்டதாகவும், இந்திய-ஐரோப்பிய மொழி அடிப்படையை விளக்குவதில் இது நம்பத்தக்க முயற்சியாக இல்லை என்றும் அவர் குறிப்பிட்டார்.J.E. Mitchiner: Studies in the Indus Valley Inscriptions, p.5, with reference to S.R. Rao: Lothal and the Indus Civilisation (ch.10), Bombay 1978.

பிந்திய அரப்பா வரிவடிவங்களின் மிகப் பொதுவாகக் காணப்படும் 10 குறிகள், பிராமி எழுத்துக் குறியீடுகளுடன் வடிவ அடிப்படையில் பெருமளவு ஒத்திருப்பது, சிந்துவெளிக் குறியீடுகளுக்கும், பிராமிக்கும் இடையே ஒரு தொடர்ச்சி இருப்பதற்கான சான்றாகக் காட்டப்படுகிறது.Kak, S. (1988). A frequency analysis of the Indus script. Cryptologia 12: 129-143. http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/IndusFreqAnalysis.pdf எண்களின் பயன்பாட்டிலும் இவ்வாறான தொடர்ச்சிக்கான சான்றுகள் இருப்பதாகக் கூறப்படுகிறது.Kak, S. (1990). Indus and Brahmi – further connections, Cryptologia 14: 169-183. இவ்விரு எழுத்துமுறைகளுக்கு இடையிலான தொடர்புகள் குறித்த தாஸ் என்பவரின் புள்ளியியல் ஆய்வுகளும் மேற்படி தொடர்ச்சிக்கு வலுச்சேர்ப்பதாகவும் கூறப்படுகிறது.Das, S., Ahuja, A., Natarajan, B., Panigrahi, B.K. (2009)
Multi-objective optimization of Kullback-Leibler divergence between Indus and Brahmi writing. World Congress on
Nature & Biologically Inspired Computing, 2009. NaBIC 2009.
1282–1286.

 ஆய்வுகளின் நிலை

காலத்துக்குக் காலம் தாங்கள் சிந்துவெளி எழுத்துக்களை வாசித்துவிட்டதாகக் கூறுபவர்களும் இருக்கிறார்கள் எனினும், இவையெதுவும் ஏற்றுக்கொள்ளப்பட்டதாகத் தெரியவில்லை.

 மேலும் காண்க
சிந்துவெளி முத்திரை

 மேற்கோள்கள்

 வெளியிணைப்புகள்
 Harappa.com
 Five Cases of 'Dubious Writing' in Indus Inscriptions
 ஹரப்பா நாகரிகத்தின் மொழி பற்றிய கட்டுரை
 Indus Script (ancientscripts.com)
 Indus Script (http://www.shangrilagifts.org/hp/indus.html – Comparison of Indus Valley Harappan 哈拉帕 and Ancient Chinese Jia-Gu-wen 甲骨文 "Bone Script")
 "Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu  ("Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu )
 BBC – 'Earliest writing' found
How come we can't decipher the Indus script?  (from The Straight Dope)
Iravatham Mahadevan, Towards a scientific study of the Indus Script
 "Studies in Indus Scripts – I"  by S. Srikanta Sastri, published in Quarterly Journal of Mythic Society, Vol XXIV, No. 3
 "Studies in Indus Scripts – II"  by S. Srikanta Sastri, published in Quarterly Journal of Mythic Society, Vol XXIV, No 4
Script Image;Article
 Collection of essays about the Indus script (Steve Farmer)
 WIRED.com (WIRED.com)
 .
 Rao, Rajesh (2011) "A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language" - காணொளி

பகுப்பு:சிந்துவெளி நாகரிகம்
பகுப்பு:வாசித்துப் புரிந்துகொள்ளப்படாத குறியீடுகள்

The codes.

"குறியீடுகளின்

எடுத்துக்காட்டுக்கள்

கிடைக்கின்றன

Excavations at Harappa 2000-2001: New Insights on Chronology and City Organization
Above: Excavation Debris Pile, DK-I Area, Mohenjo-daro
Through a comparative study of the artifacts, pottery, architecture, faunal, and botanical remains of Harappa, an increasingly sophisticated view is obtained of the complex and dynamic political, idealogical, and economic processes that were an integral part of Harappan urban society. During the past several seasons of research at Harappa, we have oriented our excavations toward answering questions of two kinds - temporal and spatial (Kenoyer & Meadow 2000; Meadow & Kenoyer 2000, in press). First, we have chosen areas suitable for identifying and characterizing the critical transitional phases of the ancient settlement, beginning with the earliest village on the alluvial plain (Period 1), through the phases of urban development and fluorescence (Periods 2 & 3), and into the phase of decline (Periods 4 & 5). Although we still require information about the final occupations at the site, the outline of the early phases of development seems clear. As a result, we can begin to address specific questions regarding, for example, the origin and development of craft technologies and writing the period preceding the emergence of Harappa as a major urban center of the Indus Civilization.

Question: what are those who are in the midst of the earth

The codes.

Question: who are the codes for

தொடக்ககால எடுத்துக்காட்டுக்கள்

The codes.

Question: who are those who are in the code

The codes.

Those who are in the midst of the earth , and those who are in the midst of the earth , and those who are in the midst of the earth .

The codes. Those who are in the midst of the earth, and those who are in the midst of the earth, and those who are in the midst of the earth.

He was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one.

A Note on the Muruku Sign of the Indus Script in light of the Mayiladuthurai Stone Axe Discovery
|| by Iravatham Mahadevan, May 6 2006 ||
There are two near-identical signs in the Indus Script (Nos. 47 & 48, I. Mahadevan 1977) depicting a seated god identified as muruku for reasons summarised in this Note. (For background details, see my 1999 paper Murukan In The Indus Script).
A deity in the Indus script is likely to be an ideogram with a recognizable anthropomorphic form. The sign will also be of frequent occurrence and occur in repetitive passages suggesting some religious formula. Signs 47 and 48 representing a seated human-like figure meet the requirements and are identified as prima facie representing a popular Harappan deity.
The deity is represented as a skeletal body with a prominent row of ribs (in sign 48 only) and is shown seated on his haunches, body bent and contracted, with lower limbs folded and knees drawn up.
The two related but distinct signs of the Indus script seem to have later coalesced into one symbol (resembling sign 47) outside the Harappan region. (For pictorial parallels from later times, see illustrations in I. Mahadevan 1999).
According to the interpretation proposed here, the seated posture is suggestive of divinity and the skeletal body gives the linguistic clue to the name of the deity. The basic Dravidian word mur (Ta. muri, Ka. muruhu, Pa. & Ga. murg, Go. moorga etc., DEDR. 4977) means 'to bend, contract, fold' etc. Applying the technique of rebus, we get mur (Ta. murunku, murukku; Ma.murukka, Kol., Nk. murk, Malt. murke etc., DEDR 4975) meaning 'to destroy, kill, cut'. etc. Thus the name of the deity muruku and his characteristics 'destroyer, killer' are derived.
The skeletal forms in the pictograms suggest that the god was conceived as a disembodied spirit.
Turning to the oldest layer of Tamil Sangam literature, We find that muruku/ murukan was a spirit who manifested himself only by possessing his priest (velan) or young maidens. The priest performed the veri dance to pacify the spirit. The earliest references to muruku in Old Tamil portray him as a 'wrathful killer' indicating his prowess as a war god and hunter (P.L. Samy 1990). Another important clue is the frequent association of the muruku and the load-bearer signs in the Indus Texts, paralleled by the association of murukan with kavadi in the Tamil society. Outside the Indus valley, the muruku symbol has been found on a seal from Vaisali, Bihar, dating probably from ca. 1100 BCE. (for details and previous references, see. I. Mahadevan 1999).
In Tamil Nadu, the muruku symbol was first identified from the pottery graffiti at Sanur, a megalithic site. B.B. Lal (1960) correctly identified this symbol with sign 47 of the Indus script. In recent years the muruku symbol has turned up among pottery graffiti found at Mangudi (TN Dept. of Archaeology, 2003) and at Muciri, Kerala (V. Selvakumar et al, in press).
All these occurrences on pottery belong to the Late Megalithic-Iron Age period overlapping with Early Historic Period (broadly, ca. 3cent. BCE-3 cent. CE). It is likely that the symbol retained the same meaning and sound value as at Harappa, though it occurs only as an isolated symbol on Megalithic pottery and not part of a script. 2
However, the latest discovery of an Indus Text with four signs engraved on a Neolithic polished stone celt (ca. 2000-1000 BCE) from Tamil Nadu is a revolutionary advance with far-reaching implications. Unlike the megalithic graffiti, the text on the Neolithic tool is in the classical Indus script characters. The first and the second signs (signs 48 and signs 342), namely muruku and the 'jar' (to be read as -an) also form a well-known and very frequent combination on the Indus seals and sealings especially from Harappa. The third and fourth signs also occur in the Indus script (signs 367 & signs301), but their value is not yet known.
We can therefore conclude that the Harappans and the Neolithic people of Tamil country spoke the same language, namely Dravidian. It is recorded that the Neolithic people of South India were in contact with the Late Harappan or post -Harappan people of the Deccan. It is known that gold for the ornaments found at Mohenjodaro came from the Kolar gold fields in Karnataka. Finally, reference can be made to the traditional accounts in old Tamil literature tracing the origin of the Velir cheiftains to migration from the Saurashtra region of Gujarat which was at that time part of the Harappan civilization.
It is emphasised that the occurrence of the Indus text on the Neolithic tool and the consequences flowing therefrom are independent of the tentative phonetic values and meanings proposed by me.
Photograph of stone celt courtesy The Hindu.
References
1. DEDR: Dravidian Etymological Dictionary -Revised, Burrow and Emeneau, Oxford, 1984.
2. Excavations at Mangudi, 2003. Department of Archaeology, Tamil Nadu.
3. B.B. Lal, 1960. From Megalithic to the Harappa: Tracing back the graffiti on pottery. Ancient India, No.16, pp.4-24.
4. Iravatham Mahadevan 1977. The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables. Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi.
5. Iravatham Mahadevan 1999. Murukan in the Indus script. Journal of the Institute of Asian Studies Vol. XVI, No.2, 1999, pp.21-39.
6. Iravatham Mahadevan 2001. The Indus- like symbols on Megalithic Pottery. Vidyarnavavandanam, Essays in honour of Asko Parpola, pp. 379-386, Helsinki.
7. P.L. Samy,1990. Sanga nulkalil Murukan. Madras.
8. V. Selvakumar, et. al. Pottery inscriptions and graffiti from Pattanam (Muciri), Kerala. International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics (forthcoming).
muruk(u)- an- (?)- (?) proposed reading of the text on the Neolithic celt.
See also Asko Parpola's 2006 essay Study of the Indus Script
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ARROW SIGN MAIN | INDUS SCRIPT MAIN

Subramanium 2006; see also A Note on the Muruku Sign of the Indus Script in light of the Mayiladuthurai Stone Axe Discovery by I. Mahadevan (2006) in May 2007, the telecommunications department of the Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth's Earth.

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Continuity of tradition: Megalithic pots with arrow-work graffiti found at Sembiankandiyur village in Nagapattinam district.
CHENNAI: In recent excavations in Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu, megalithic pottery with graffiti symbols that have a strong resemblance to a sign in the Indus script have been found. Indus script expert Iravatham Mahadevan says that what is striking about the arrow-mark graffiti on the megalithic pottery found at Sembiyankandiyur and Melaperumpallam villages is that they are always incised twice and together, just as they are in the Indus script.
The Hindu published on April 27 a report (“Megalithic period pottery found”) on megalithic pottery and urns found at Sembiyankandiyur, along with [in most of the editions] a photograph of three pots with arrow-like graffiti symbols on each pot.
In all the three pots, the arrow-like symbol appeared two times each and next to each other.
The Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department found these pots during excavations at Sembiyankandiyur between February and April 2008 after a school teacher, V. Shanmuganathan, unearthed a polished neolithic axe from the garden of his house at Sembiyankandiyur in 2006. The axe had engravings that resembled the Indus script.
In May 2007, the Department found several pots at Melaperumpallam near Poompuhar during a trial excavation. Some of these had the same arrow-like symbol occurring twice on them, and always adjacent to each other.
According to Mr. Mahadevan, seals unearthed at Mohenjodaro (now in Pakistan) in the 1920s have similar arrow-like signs that also occur twice and always together. There are several seals with the Indus script and engravings of a bull or a unicorn where the arrow-like sign always occurs in pairs.
While the megalithic/Iron Age pottery in Tamil Nadu is datable between the third century B.C. and third century A.D., the Indus script belongs to the period 2600 B.C. to 1900 B.C. of the mature Harappan period.
“In spite of the enormous gap in time and space between the Indus civilisation sites and [the] Tamil Nadu [sites], it appears that the megalithic graffiti of Tamil Nadu have continued the tradition of the Indus script,” Mr. Mahadevan said.
“Despite a slight difference in the graphic of the arrow-like symbol found on the megalithic pottery of Tamil Nadu and the sign in the Indus script, the fact is that they always occur in double and together. So this requires further study and investigation.”
In 1960, B.B. Lal, former Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), wrote a paper in the publication Ancient India brought out by the ASI, with a photographic catalogue of the megalithic and chalcolithic pottery with graffiti marks and comparing them with the signs of the Indus script. “Since then, many more examples of pottery with graffiti marks that have a strong resemblance to the Indus signs have been found at Sanur near Tindivanam in Tamil Nadu and Musiri (Pattanam) in Kerala,” Mr. Mahadevan said.
Particularly significant was a large megalithic terracotta plate found at Sulur near Coimbatore, with symbols closely resembling an inscription on a tablet found at Harappa, which is also in Pakistan now. Hence, “there is distinct possibility that the megalithic symbols and the corresponding signs of the Indus script have the same significance and meaning,” he said. (The terracotta plate from Sulur is on display at the British Museum in London).
In his paper, “A megalithic pottery inscription and a Harappa tablet: a case of extraordinary resemblance,” published in the Journal of Tamil Studies, Volume No.71, June 2007, Mr. Mahadevan said: “I suggest that close resemblances are possible only if the south Indian megalithic script is related to the Indus script. Further, the common sequence found on the Sulur dish and the Harappa tablet may indicate that the languages of the two inscriptions are related to each other.”
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How can we't decipher the Indus script?

வெளியிணைப்புகள்

நாகரிகத்தின்

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T.S. Subramanian
CHENNAI: A Neolithic stone celt with the Indus Valley script has been discovered by a school teacher, V. Shanmuganathan, in a village called Sembian-Kandiyur near Mayiladuthurai in Nagapattinam district, Tamil Nadu. The celt, a polished hand-held stone axe, has four Indus Valley signs on it. The artefact with the script can be as old as 1500 B.C., that is, 3,500 years old. The four signs were identified by epigraphists of the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology, according to its Special Commissioner, T. S. Sridhar.
Iravatham Mahadevan, one of the world's foremost experts on the Indus script, called the find "the greatest archaeological discovery of a century in Tamil Nadu." The discovery proved that the Indus script had reached Tamil Nadu. He estimated the date of the artefact with the script to be around 1500 B.C. "I have cautiously and conservatively put it between 2000 B.C. and 1500 B.C.," Mr. Mahadevan said. It was in the classical Indus script. He ruled out the possibility of the celt coming from North India because "the material of this stone is clearly of peninsular origin."
Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, where hundreds of seals with the Indus script were discovered, are in present-day Pakistan. Neolithic means New Stone Age and it is datable in India between 2000 B.C. and 1000 B.C.
According to Mr. Mahadevan, the first sign on the celt depicted a skeletal body with ribs. The figure is seated on his haunches, body bent and contracted, with lower limbs folded and knees drawn up. The second sign showed a jar. Hundreds of this pair have been found on seals and sealings at Harappa. Mr Mahadevan read the first sign as "muruku" and the second sign as "an." In other words, it is "Murukan." The earliest references in Old Tamil poetry portrayed him as a "wrathful killer," indicating his prowess as a war god and hunter. The third sign looked like a trident and the fourth like a crescent with a loop in the middle.
Mr. Mahadevan commented that the latest discovery was very strong evidence that the Neolithic people of Tamil Nadu and the Indus Valley people "shared the same language, which can only be Dravidian and not Indo-Aryan." He added that before this discovery, the southernmost occurrence of the Indus script was at Daimabad, Maharashtra on the Pravara River in the Godavari Valley.
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Question: where was the indus script discovered

How can we't decipher the Indus script?

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How can we't decipher the Indus script?

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How can we't decipher the Indus script?

what is the oldest script in indus valley

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How can we't decipher the Indus script?

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How can we't decipher the Indus script?

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How can we't decipher the Indus script?

Publications Harappa.com Five Cases of ' Dubious Writing ' in Indus Inscriptions Articles on the language of Harappa Script ( ancientscripts.com )

Indus Script ( – Comparison of Indus Valley Harappan and Ancient Chinese Jia - Gu - wen 甲骨文 " Bone Script " ) " Discovery of a century " in Tamil Nadu ( " Discovery of a century " in Tamil Nadu ) BBC – ' Earliest writing ' found

How can we't decipher the Indus script ?

வெளியிணைப்புகள் Harappa.com Five Cases of 'Dubious Writing' in Indus Inscriptions ஹரப்பா நாகரிகத்தின் மொழி பற்றிய கட்டுரை Indus Script (ancientscripts.com) Indus Script ( – Comparison of Indus Valley Harappan 哈拉帕 and Ancient Chinese Jia-Gu-wen 甲骨文 "Bone Script") "Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu ("Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu ) BBC – 'Earliest writing' found How come we can't decipher the Indus script?

How come we can't decipher the Indus script?

Publications Harappa.com Five Cases of 'Dubious Writing' in Indus Inscriptions Articles on the language of Harappa Script (ancientscripts.com) Indus Script ( – Comparison of Indus Valley Harappan and Ancient Chinese Jia-Gu-wen 甲骨文 "Bone Script") "Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu ("Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu ) BBC – 'Earliest writing' found How can we't decipher the Indus script?

How can we't decipher the Indus script?

Rao and Rajesh (2011)

“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

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A Staff Report by the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
10-May-2005
Dear Straight Dope:
I just got a book on ancient civilizations. In the chapter dealing with written languages, they list Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mesopotamian pictographs, and Indus script as the three oldest known written languages. The book goes on to say Indus script has never been deciphered even though over 2,500 examples of it exist. Maybe I've watched too many sci-fi movies where a master linguist deciphers alien languages, but I really thought we had terrestrial languages mastered. What's the deal with Indus script? Is the art of linguistics still held hostage by our inability to decipher ancient languages without a "key" ŕ la the Rosetta Stone? --Troy Dayton, Fargo, ND
SDSTAFF bibliophage replies:
Too much science fiction? No such thing. Star Trek, for example, teaches us that a good communications officer can send a message that transcends mere language, especially if she has legs down to here and a hemline up to there. Mmmmm. Mm-HMMMmmmmm . . . er, sorry. Was I saying something?
Yes, I was. The Indus script, which was written in and around Pakistan over a period of several centuries centered around 2500 B.C., is the most famous undeciphered script, but there are many others. Other mystery writing systems include Linear A (Greece, 1800 B.C.), Zapotec (Mexico, 500 B.C.), Meroitic (Sudan, 300 B.C.), Isthmian (Central America, A.D. 200), Rongorongo (Easter Island, A.D. 1800) and Joycean (Ireland, A.D. 1900). Okay, maybe not that last one.
Why haven't they been deciphered? It's instructive to look at some deciphered scripts to see what makes the enigmatic writing of the Indus valley different. Script decipherment is not as easy as it's made out to be in science fiction--and sometimes not as easy as it's made out to be in history books. Chances are the impression you took away from school was that the Rosetta stone made it child's play to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Not so. How many schools teach that some of the best minds in the world pored over the Rosetta stone for a quarter century before it finally revealed its secrets?
One of the biggest obstacles was that the ancient Egyptians used a writing system unlike anything known when the Rosetta stone was discovered in 1799. Scholars knew about logographic systems like Chinese, where there are thousands of symbols, each normally representing a whole word or idea. They knew about alphabetic systems like Hebrew and English, where there are typically 20 to 30 symbols, each normally representing one consonant or vowel. Some scholars may have known about syllabaries, with several dozen symbols each representing one syllable, as in Japanese hiragana and katakana. But Egyptian hieroglyphics had too many distinct symbols to be an alphabet or syllabary, and too few to be logographic.
The decipherment published by Champollion in 1823 (building on work by many others, including Thomas Young) showed that Egyptian hieroglyphics were (neglecting some complications) a logo-phonetic system. In such a writing system, any given symbol can represent either an entire idea or word, or the sound (or initial sound) of that word. Some simple ideas can be expressed efficiently with a drawing of the object or an object it's associated with. But to express an abstract idea that can't be readily drawn, you can use a string of sounds. Suppose you want to express the English word "charitable" without an alphabet. You could draw a picture of a chair and a table (since "chair table" sounds sort of like "charitable"). This is the rebus principle. Today we may consider rebus puzzles to be nothing but a silly game, but to the ancients, they were a natural way to write a language. Other early scripts, like Mayan hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform, are built on the same principle.
The rebus approach may seem an unwieldy way to write a language, but it's a step up from non-linguistic pictograms. A picture of a chair and a table can only convey "chair and table," or at best an idea associated with a chair and table, such as the act of sitting down at a table. An abstract concept such as "charitable" is difficult to get across using pictograms. Writing systems built on the rebus system are a way of filling the void, but have the drawback (for us latter-day translators) that, unlike pictograms, they'll only work in one language. For a speaker of Latin, for example, pictograms of a chair (in Latin, sella) and a picture of a table (mensa) would never suggest the word for charitable (benignus).
I go into such detail about logo-phonetic systems because the Indus script appears to have about the right number of distinct symbols (250 to 400, depending on who's counting) to use this system. Knowing that, shouldn't it be easier to decipher the Indus script? Not really--the decipherers of Egyptian hieroglyphics had the help of the Rosetta stone, a bilingual or bitext (parallel texts of the same message in the unknown script and a known script). No bitext for the Indus script has yet been found.
A bitext is no guarantee that decipherment will be easy. Take the case of Etruscan writing, found in Italy. At a superficial level the script is easily deciphered, since the letters are close in form to archaic Greek and Latin alphabets. But the language remains largely uninterpreted. What's the difference? Given a piece of Etruscan writing, we have no difficulty pronouncing the words, but no idea what most of the words mean (think of a trained politician reading off a TelePrompTer). The trouble is that Etruscan is apparently unrelated to any language understood today. Champollion, the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphics, had the advantage of knowing Coptic, which he correctly suspected was the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. Etruscan has left no descendants.
The dozens of Etruscan bitexts (with Latin, Greek, or Phoenician) aren't very helpful. All they really tell you is that a given block of mysterious text means such-and-such. There's no sure way to tell which Etruscan word corresponds to which word in the parallel text, since the order of ideas and number of words vary widely among the different languages. All is not lost, however. If, for example, a Latin word occurs several times in a text and a mystery word occurs the same number of times in the corresponding Etruscan text, you may be justified in supposing that they mean the same thing. But beware--often the two messages in a bilingual text are just paraphrases of each other, not word-for-word translations. Still, using methods like this, together with glosses (explicit translations of individual words in the documents), scholars have been able to determine--or at least make a reasonable guess at--the meanings of a couple hundred Etruscan words.
If we understand the language or a close relative or descendant of the language, it ought to be pretty easy to decipher the script, right? Not so fast. The Rongorongo script used on Easter Island after European contact almost certainly represents Rapa Nui, the well known Polynesian language of the Easter Islanders. But no one now remembers how the script symbols are meant to be read. Steven Fischer recently claimed to have deciphered Rongorongo, but his critics say "Wrong-o, wrong-o." I don't know if Fischer is right or wrong, but undeciphered scripts do seem to invite harebrained analysis. Jacques Guy bluntly calls them "kook attractors," but even serious scholars aren't immune. Hrozný, who correctly deciphered Hittite, later went down many wrong paths with other scripts.
The real kooks are those like Goropius Becanus of the Netherlands, who in 1580 proved to his satisfaction that Egyptian hieroglyphics represented Dutch. A Jesuit priest named Heras is one of scores who have claimed to decipher Indus script. Here's one of his translations: "There is no feast in the place outside the country of the Minas of the three fishes of the despised country of the woodpeckers." Whatever you say, padre.
You mention the 2,500 examples of the Indus script. The number of available texts now exceeds 4,000, but quantity is no indication of ease of decipherment. Some scripts have been translated with far fewer texts. Take Palmyrene, the first ancient script ever deciphered. A handful of inscriptions were found on the walls of the ruins of the city of Palmyra in Syria. Scholars knew from ancient Greek writers that the language spoken there was closely related to Syriac, a well known Semitic language. The script was obviously derived from the known Aramaic alphabet but many letters weren't immediately identifiable. Among the ruins were several bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Palmyrene. If you know the Aramaic alphabet, it's a fairly simple matter to use the identifiable Aramaic letters and the similarity of proper names in Greek and Palmyrene to get a good start. Then you can use your knowledge of Greek and Syriac to fill in the blanks. Your Syriac is a little rusty, you say? Not to worry--a decent Syriac dictionary will serve just as well. Soon after the first decent reproductions of Palmyrene inscriptions were published in Europe in the 1750s, Barthélemy in France and Swinton in England independently deciphered them, each taking just a few hours to finish the job. It was perhaps a bit more challenging than the cryptogram puzzles you can find in your Sunday paper, but not by much. Most decipherments, needless to say, are a good deal tougher to crack than that.
Returning to the matter at hand, is the lack of a bitext for the Indus script an insurmountable obstacle? Not necessarily. Some scripts have been deciphered without them, although not without a good deal of cleverness. Ugaritic writings, like Palmyrene, were found in Syria (in 1929), suggesting that they too might be a Semitic language. About two dozen symbols were used, suggesting an alphabetic script. Several of the words were only a single letter long, suggesting Ugaritic used a consonantal alphabet written without vowels (as was the case with other early Semitic alphabets such as Hebrew). Applying letter frequency analysis to the problem, Hans Bauer tentatively assigned the values L and M to two Ugaritic letters. In Semitic languages, L is common as a single-letter word, but not so common in suffixes and prefixes; M is the only letter that is really common in Semitic suffixes, prefixes, and as single-letter words.
On the assumption that related languages use similar words for common concepts (much as European languages have father/vater/pater), Bauer then used the M and L assignments to search the texts for the expected Semitic word for "king" (M-L-K or similar) and "kings" (M-L-K-K or similar). Proceeding along these lines, he found the words for "son" and the name of the god Ba`al, and so eventually determined the values of several other letters. His real insight was to guess that the word for axe might occur in the text inscribed on several axes. He turned out to be right about that, but chose the wrong phonetic values (he guessed G-R-Z-N as in Hebrew; the actual Ugaritic form was the related but not identical H-R-S-N). Édouard Dhorme later corrected the reading and finished the decipherment. One of the axe inscriptions said, in a language related to biblical Hebrew, "Unto the high priest doth this axe belong, wherefore shouldst thou keep thy hands off it!" Or something like that. It strikes me that Bauer's guess was pretty lucky--I have two axes in my garage but have yet to inscribe either with the word "axe." But hey, when the high priest tells me, "Inscribe the word 'axe' on this axe, chop-chop," I'm not about to wait around for him to axe me politely.
Ugaritic isn't the only language to have been deciphered without a bilingual. Georg Friedrich Grotefend made considerable progress in deciphering Persian cuneiform by looking for and finding proper names of Persian emperors known from ancient Greek and Hebrew sources. (Henry Rawlinson finished the decipherment in the 1830s.) The point is that bilinguals aren't necessary to decipher an unknown script. Still, in the case of Ugaritic and Persian, scholars had a pretty good handle on the language the script represented before they started work. In the case of Etruscan, where the language is largely unknown, complete decipherment thus far has eluded us.
What do we know about the language the Indus script wrote? We can say little for certain, but the best guess is that it's a language of the Dravidian family, an idea that has been around since at least the 1920s. Today most Dravidian speakers live in Sri Lanka and southern India, 800 miles or more from the Indus valley where the bulk of the Indus inscriptions have been found. But about a hundred thousand speakers of one Dravidian language, Brahui, live in western Pakistan and neighboring parts of Iran and Afghanistan, not too far west of the Indus. Contrary to earlier speculation about recent migrations, linguistic and genetic analyses show that they have been separated from other Dravidian speakers for at least several thousand years. Further evidence that Dravidian or related languages were once spoken in the general area comes from Linear Elamite inscriptions, found in the ruins of the ancient city of Susa in southwestern Iran. The script has been deciphered from a phonetic standpoint because of its similarity to Mesopotamian cuneiform, but as with Etruscan, the language remains largely unknown. A significant percentage of words in Linear Elamite appear to be of Dravidian origin, which could mean it is descended from a hypothetical Elamo-Dravidian ancestor language, or just that it borrowed a lot of words from a Dravidian language spoken nearby. In either case, the Elamite connection makes it seem more likely that a Dravidian or related language was spoken in the Indus valley when the inscriptions were made.
Many Indian nationalists, and some serious scholars, believe the Indus script writes a language of the Indo-Iranian (Aryan) branch of the Indo-European family, which includes Farsi (modern Persian), Sanskrit and Hindi. All things considered, this seems unlikely. The inscriptions go back to about 3200 B.C., which according to mainstream archaeological thinking is before any Indo-Europeans had come that far southeast. Another problem is that Indo-European peoples kept domesticated horses and used chariots and had other cultural traits not shared with the ancient Indus civilization. Indeed, according to the mainstream thinking, the arrival of the Indo-Europeans in the Indus Valley around 1800 B.C. is more likely to have been the end of the Harappan culture than the beginning of it.
If the Indus script turns out to write a language that is neither Indo-European nor Dravidian (or Elamo-Dravidian), then the chances of deciphering it are slim. In the words of Alice Kober, who helped decipher Linear B, "an unknown language written in an unknown script cannot be deciphered, bilingual or no bilingual." There are really no other decent candidates among known languages, so we would be left with an unknown language, and the prospects of complete decipherment would be as poor as with Etruscan.
But faint hope is better than none. Sumerian is a linguistic isolate, but the script has been phonetically deciphered, and the language partly deciphered. Most of the cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia are direct descendants of the Sumerian script, though they're used to write unrelated languages. Babylonian and Akkadian and some other languages written in these related scripts were amenable to decipherment in part because they were members of the well understood Semitic family. The similarity of the scripts, the many Sumerian loanwords in these Semitic languages, and the unusually large number of bilingual texts have allowed scholars to reconstruct the Sumerian language with considerable success despite its being unrelated to any known language. No such combination of circumstances exists for the Indus script, and no discoveries along these lines are seriously expected.
What will we get if the Indus script is finally deciphered--great historical works that reveal the local political situation 5,000 years ago? Classic works of literature like the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh? Insight into ancient religious practices of the sort revealed by Ugaritic? No to all the above. The sad truth is that the longest known Indus inscription is only 17 symbols long. The bulk of the 4,000 or so Indus inscriptions are believed to be simple identifying marks. Most of the inscriptions are on seals or seal impressions, similar to signet rings or rubber stamps. So even if we decipher the script and the language, chances are we'll discover they say nothing more fascinating than "government property" or "John Smith" or "tax paid." As with the revelation that Linear B wrote an archaic form of Greek, if the Indus script is deciphered, the most interesting fact learned will be what language the ancient script wrote--that is, if it writes a language at all.
If it writes a language? They wouldn't call it the "Indus script" if it weren't a script, would they? Don't be so sure. When the first inscriptions were discovered in the 1870s in and around the Indus valley of Pakistan, and when the early cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were excavated in the 1920s, archaeologists assumed that civilization and writing always went together--a complex urban culture couldn't possibly develop without writing. The Indus sites were urban; ergo, the inscriptions were writing.
Today we recognize that civilization and writing don't always go together. The Inca empire, for example, was urban but lacked true writing. Historian Steve Farmer now questions the assumption that the Indus script is true writing. In a recent paper, he and two linguists compare the Indus script with medieval European heraldry. Like heraldry, they say, the Indus script may consist of discrete conventional elements that serve as identification marks but don't encode a spoken language.
This controversial idea has some points in its favor. Considering the corpus of texts as a whole, there's a considerable amount of repetition among symbols, as would be expected if they wrote a spoken language. But there's less repetition than expected within the texts, even considering their brevity. Further, several systems of pictograms from around the world--for example, the Vinca signs of southeastern Europe, written about 4000 B.C.--resemble the Indus script in their use of conventional symbols, but nobody believes they code a written language.
Traditionalists have some points in their favor too. The Indus script was linear, that is, usually written with symbols following one another in a line, rather than being placed randomly or in some other geometric pattern. Linearity is found in most writing, though not exclusively so. More to the point, the characters often crowd at the end of a line, as if the writer wanted to avoid breaking up a word. This is a distinctive feature of true writing. The comparison with heraldry may not hold water either. Hittite hieroglyphics were initially considered heraldry by serious linguists but were eventually found to be true writing and deciphered. Much the same has been said about many other undeciphered scripts likewise shown to be true writing.
Still, Farmer feels so strongly that the Indus script is not a real script that he has offered a $10,000 reward for proof that it is true writing. He will accept as proof an authenticated inscription more than 50 symbols long. Farmer thinks the extant texts are all so short because they don't write a language. The pro-language side thinks the longer texts once produced in Harappa and other cities have been lost because they were written on perishable surfaces. Certainly a long text would be a great gift to modern science. I just wish they wouldn't use the lame excuse that they couldn't give it to us because they ran out of Harappan paper.
Further reading
Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson, 2002
The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script by Maurice Pope, revised edition, 1999
"The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization" by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel in Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, Dec.13, 2004. This and related items can be accessed from Steve Farmer's download page at www.safarmer.com/downloads/.
--SDSTAFF bibliophage
Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
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Question: who wrote the book on indus script

Rao and Rajesh (2011)

“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

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S. Srikanta Sastri , published in Quarterly Journal of Mythic Society , Vol XXIV , No . 3 "" Studies in Indus Scripts – II "" by S. Srikanta

Rao and Rajesh (2011)

“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

who is the author of the study of indus script

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Rao and Rajesh (2011)

“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

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Journal of Mythic Society , Vol XXIV , No . 3 "" Studies in Indus Scripts – II "" by S. Srikanta Sastri , published in Quarterly Journal of

Rao and Rajesh (2011)

“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

where was the study of indus script published

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Rao and Rajesh (2011)

“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

who is the author of studies in indus script

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Rao and Rajesh (2011)

“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

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Rao and Rajesh (2011)

“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

( from The Straight Dope ) Iravatham Mahadevan , Towards a scientific study of the Indus Script " Studies in Indus Scripts – I " by S. Srikanta Sastri , published in Quarterly Journal of Mythic Society , Vol XXIV , No . 3 " Studies in Indus Scripts – II " by S. Srikanta Sastri , published in Quarterly Journal of Mythic Society , Vol XXIV , No . 4 Script Image;Article Collection of essays about the Indus script ( Steve Farmer ) WIRED.com ( WIRED.com ) .

"A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language" - காணொளி

(from The Straight Dope) Iravatham Mahadevan, Towards a scientific study of the Indus Script "Studies in Indus Scripts – I" by S. Srikanta Sastri, published in Quarterly Journal of Mythic Society, Vol XXIV, No. 3 "Studies in Indus Scripts – II" by S. Srikanta Sastri, published in Quarterly Journal of Mythic Society, Vol XXIV, No. 4 Script Image;Article Collection of essays about the Indus script (Steve Farmer) WIRED.com (WIRED.com) . Rao and Rajesh (2011) “A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

Rao and Rajesh (2011)

“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

HISTORY
Towards a scientific study of the Indus Script
IRAVATHAM MAHADEVAN
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Future research should deal both with structural analysis of the Indus texts aided by the computer and also with archaeological and linguistic evidence to find answers to the riddle of the Indus Script.
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Additional material with Indus inscriptions are being continually unearthed from the older sites as well as from newly discovered sites. It is quite likely that we may reach a critical mass of inscriptions necessary for a successful decipherment. The criticism that there has been little or no progress towards decipherment is also not based on facts.
Photos: The Hindu Photo Library
AN URBAN CIVILISATION: The Great Bath of Mohenjodaro.
I HAVE been a researcher in this field for the last four decades. After completing the first phase of my studies of the Tamil-Brahmi script in 1968, I turned my attention towards the Indus Script, having been attracted by the pioneering work of the Russian scholars led by Yuri V. Knorozov and the Finnish scholars led by Asko Parpola. What I found especially appealing in their brilliant work is that, unlike all previous attempts to decipher the Indus Script, the computer was employed to carry out sophisticated cryptanalytical procedures on a scientific basis. I felt that similar work should be undertaken in India also.
In 1970, I was awarded a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship for this project. In 1970-71, a photographic card catalogue of the Harappan inscribed objects was assembled. The Indus texts and their background data were coded in a numerical format suitable for computer analysis. An experimental concordance was prepared in collaboration with K. Visvanathan with the help of an IBM 1620 computer at the Fundamental Engineering Research Establishment in the College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai. Publication of this paper brought me an offer of collaboration from leading computer scientists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. Mythili Rangarao designed the computer programmes. Professor R. Narasimhan, the doyen of computer scientists in India, guided our work at TIFR.
Interdisciplinary collaboration
This interdisciplinary collaboration resulted in the publication in 1977 of my book, The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables, published by the Archaeological Survey of India. As the title indicates, the book provides the basic source material in an organised manner for further research, but does not put forward any particular theory of linguistic decipherment. In retrospect, this has turned out to be a very salutary precaution, as the Concordance is now used world over by all researchers, whatever be their own views on the language of the Indus Script.
Iravatham Mahadevan, an expert on the Indus Script.
In 1977, a computerised Input Data File was compiled at TIFR; it was updated in 1980. This is the master file from which the pictorial version of the Indus Texts and the Concordance (published in my 1977 book) were created through brilliant and innovative computer programmes at TIFR. To appreciate this achievement, one must remember that the computers of the early 1970s were much less powerful than computers of today. We had to use punched cards to put in the data and also to obtain the output. There were no monitors for visual check. The pictorial version of the Indus texts has been widely acclaimed as aesthetically appealing and close to the originals, providing research scholars without access to the originals with reliable texts to pursue their own lines of research.
Professor Gift Siromoney and his colleague, Professor Abdul Huq, carried out further work on the Indus Script with the help of the computer in the 1980s at the Madras Christian College. Their collaboration resulted in the publication of a series of brilliant research papers (and a doctoral thesis by Abdul Huq), which explored the structural properties of the Indus texts like frequent combinations of signs, segmentation of texts into words, and phrases, etc. What is especially noteworthy about their work is its scientific character without any pre-supposition on the linguistic affinities of the Harappan people and the Indus Script.
Use of computers
The potentialities of the computerised Input Data File have not been exhausted by my 1977 book or even by the further researches by Professor Siromoney and his colleagues. For one thing, much of the data compiled in the file, including details on the locus and stratigraphy of inscribed objects, are yet to be published and remain open to further research. For another, new data are becoming available both from the earlier sites like Mohenjodaro and Harappa and from newer sites like Dholavira. Stratigraphic data from sites like Lothal and Kalibangan are still unpublished.
The format of the Input Data File now stored at the Indus Research Centre (IRC) will permit all such additions, enlarging the corpus of texts and their background data for further research. I have faith that the availability of this material in an accessible computerised form will attract younger scholars from university departments of mathematics, statistics, and linguistics. They can join together in inter-disciplinary research teams to explore further the structure of the Indus Script and ultimately its linguistic character. Fortunately, the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL) is well equipped with the latest computer facilities and well staffed with experts to lend strong support to the research activities of the IRC.
The IRC proposes to conduct regular workshops and colloquia on different aspects of the Indus Civilisation, including especially the Indus Script. The centre will also arrange occasional seminars inviting scholars in India and visiting scholars from abroad to present their research findings. In due course, I hope it will publish regular bulletins on the work done at the centre or by contributing scholars elsewhere. May I take this opportunity to appeal to scholars and research institutions engaged in similar work to let us have copies of their books, monographs, research papers, and other publications to enable the IRC to build up an exhaustive library on all aspects of the Harappan civilisation and the Indus Script?
No ideological bias
I should like to lay particular emphasis on the fact that the IRC is a forum for scientific investigations without any ideological bias. This does not of course mean that the centre will not undertake research into the linguistic aspects of the Indus Script. After all, linguistic decipherment of the Indus Script is the ultimate objective of research. What we mean when we say there should be no ideological bias is that we should not start with preconceived notions or presuppositions and tailor our research to fit into ideology-driven linguistic models.
Still a riddle: Some examples of the Indus Script.
Let me illustrate this statement with a couple of examples:
Analysis of the Indus texts has now conclusively established that the writing of the Indus Script was from right to left (with some minor exceptions). Yet we find some scholars claiming that the Indus Script should be read from left to right because that is how Sanskrit (or Tamil) scripts are written. It is clear that all attempts to read the Indus texts generally from the left are ab initio invalid.
Computer analysis has shown that the Indus texts possess only suffixes, not prefixes or infixes. This indicates that the Harappan language was of the suffixing type (like Dravidian), not of the prefixing type (like Indo-Aryan).
Archaelogical context
It is also necessary for well-rounded research to look beyond the inscriptions and take the archaeological context into account. Let me again illustrate this with some well-known examples:
The Indus civilisation was urban in character. The Vedic civilisation was rural and pastoral. There is hardly any description of city life in the Rig Veda.
The Indus seals depict many animals but not the horse. The chariot with spoked wheels is also not depicted in the Indus art. On the contrary, these are among the main features of the society depicted in the Rig Veda.
The Harappan religion, as far as we can make out from pictorial representations, included the worship of buffalo-horned male gods, mother goddesses, the pipal tree, serpents, and probably also phallic worship. Such modes of worship seem alien to the religion of the Rig Veda.
These examples (among many others) make it very improbable that the Harappan city dwellers were the same as the people of the Vedic culture.
Substantial evidence
Ruling out the Aryan authorship of the Indus civilisation does not of course automatically make it Dravidian. However there is substantial evidence favouring that supposition. I mention the most important aspects of the evidence without going into details:
The survival of Dravidian languages like Brahui in North India.
The presence of Dravidian loan words in the Rig Veda.
The substratum influence of Dravidian languages on the Prakrit dialects of North India.
The evidence indicates that Dravidian languages were once spoken widely in North India and one or more of Dravidian dialects could well be the language of the Indus texts.
Let me state with all the emphasis I can command that `Aryan' and `Dravidian' are names of languages and not of races. Speakers of one language can, and frequently did, switch over from one language to another. We should not allow research into the Indus civilisation and language to be vitiated by false notions of racial or ethnic identities.
Speakers of the Aryan languages indistinguishably merged with speakers of Dravidian and Munda languages millennia ago creating a composite Indian society, culture, and religious traditions containing elements inherited from every source. It is thus more than likely that Indus artistic and religious motifs and craft traditions have survived and can be traced in the Sanskrit literature from the days of the Rig Veda, and also in the old Tamil traditions recorded in the Sangam poetry. This is the basic assumption that underlies my own work on the interpretation of the Indus Script through bilingual parallels drawn from Sanskrit and Old Tamil works.
Quite recently, Steve Farmer and Michael Witzel proposed that the Indus Script was not a writing system at all but merely a collection of picture signs conveying messages visually but not linguistically. It is difficult to take this new theory seriously because concordances of the Indus texts compiled by different authors (G. R. Hunter, Parpola, and Mahadevan) are in essential agreement and bring out obvious linguistic features like the existence of regular sign combinations suggesting words and phrases and grammatical elements like suffixes. Scholars like Knorozov and Gift Siromoney working independently have also confirmed these linguistic features. The theory that the Indus Script is no writing at all appears to me to be defeatist, born out of frustration reflecting the lack of success of the decipherment efforts.
Solving the riddle
Lastly, let me also refer to the view that the Indus Script can never be deciphered owing to the limited material, their repetitive nature, and the absence of bilingual records. I am optimistic that sooner or later the riddle of the Indus Script will be solved.
My optimism is based on the following considerations. Additional material with Indus inscriptions are being continually unearthed from the older sites as well as from newly discovered sites. It is quite likely that we may reach a critical mass of inscriptions necessary for a successful decipherment. The criticism that there has been little or no progress towards decipherment is also not based on facts.
While it is true that linguistic decipherment has not yet been achieved, much preliminary work like determination of the direction of writing, segmentation of texts into words and phrases, and isolation of grammatical features like suffixes has been completed. In these matters a large measure of agreement has emerged from independent work by different scholars; this gives us the hope that we are progressing in the right direction towards decipherment of the Indus Script.
I hope that future research in the IRC would deal both with structural analysis of the Indus texts aided by the computer and also with the archaeological and linguistic evidence such as the ones I have mentioned above to find acceptable answers to the riddle of the Indus Script.
(This article by one of the world's leading scholars on the Indus Valley Script is based on his address at the inaugural function of the Indus Research Centre at the Roja Muthiah Research Library, Chennai, on January 25, 2007. Rani Siromoney has gifted her late husband Gift Siromoney's research material on the Indus Script to the centre; and the author said he was "only following her noble example" in gifting his own research materials on the subject to the IRC.)
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“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”

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Articles: Studies in Indus Scripts-I by Dr S.Srikanta Sastri
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The Famed Indus Unicorn
The Three faced Yogi seal with horns adorning the head
STUDIES IN THE INDUS SCRIPTS
I
It has been the fashion to assume, following the lead of Sir John Marshall, that the Indus culture was non-Aryan, on the grounds that the Aryans had no knowledge of towns, used horses and defensive armour and held the cow, and not the bull, sacred. The Aryans also apparently had no image worship or that of the phallus. On such slender and mostly negative evidence, it is concluded that the Indus culture was pre-Aryan.
Leaving aside the fact that purs were known as strong holds of the Dasas, it is clear, as urged by Prof S.V.Venkatesvara (J.R.A.S., 1916) that some of the Vedic deities were conceived as anthromorphic and it is not impossible that figurines of the Earth Goddess or Agni were employed in ritual. The figure of a horse has recently been discovered at Mohenjo-Daro and therefore it cannot be urged that the Indus culture was pre-Aryan. Nor can we urge a later date because domesticated horses were employed in Sumer a thousand years earlier than usually supposed. The excavations at Khafaje have revealed a plaque depicting a king leading a chariot drawn by four horses (Illustrated London News, October 8, 1932). Moreover the chariots found in Sindh are exactly of the same type as described in the Rg-Veda. The axle and the wheels were made of the same block and the axle turned with the wheels (Rg., 1. 166. 9). The horse was not indigenious to Mesopotamia and was imported from the East probably from the Sindh and Punjab. It is equally illogical to assume that the bull was not held in as high an esteem as the cow by the Aryans, for we find in the Vedic hymns, the comparison with the bull employed almost ad nauseam. To give only a few instances:
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Articles: Studies in Indus Scripts-II by Dr S.Srikanta Sastri
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Intricate Art on an Indus Valley Bowl
The Indus Bull
STUDIES IN THE INDUS SCRIPTS
II
The Vikramakhol Inscription and the Glozel Forgeries
The Vikramakhol inscription found in the Sambhalpur district, according to Mr. Jayaswal, gives a script that is a development of the Indus script and forms a middle stage in the development of Brahmi. Several resemblances to the script of the seals can be pointed out, but it is remarkable that almost all the characters in the Vikramakhol inscription have a remarkable likeness to the Glozel alphabet and are nearer to Kharoshti than to Brahmi. The discoveries at Glozel near Vichy in France in 1924 gave occasion to a furious controversy as to the genuineness of the finds. Drs. Elliot Smith and Reinach believed that the Glozel alphabet belonged to the Neolithic epoch in Europe in about 200 B.C. Mr. Jayaswal similarly dated the Vikramakhol inscription as roughly of about 1500 B.C. But M.Jullian considered that there was nothing Neolithic in the Glozel script and that it was merely “cursive Latin of the time of the Empire”; and it seems to be now generally accepted that the tablets are forgeries. But the remarkable resemblances between the Glozel and the Vikramakhol scripts still remain unaccounted for, unless we consider the latter too a forgery or detect a mere accidental coincidence. But the similarities appear to me so pronounced that we have to look to some other explanation.
It is now a generally accepted fact among scholars that in the first two millenniums B.C. there was a series of linear scripts – one linear semitic script near Sinai and another in Minoan II probably introduced by the Phaenicians. According to Reinach, the Cretan resemblances in the Glozel alphabet are beyond dispute, and probably the alphabet and pottery of Western Europe were modelled upon the linear scripts of the Mediterranean.
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Rao and Rajesh (2011)

“A Rosetta Stone for a Lost Language”