New Delhi: The key to unravelling the secrets of the great Indus Valley civilization lies in the Rig Veda, according to a German writer, who has developed a new method to decipher and decode the Indus script, that has defied researchers and scriptographers for centuries.
Experts are no doubt impressed by the method, but would like more in-depth study beore they put the seal of approval. Of the few scholars, who have claimed to have succeeded in deciphering the Indus script, the method evolved by the German, Mr Egbert Rochter Ushanas, gives a new dimension to the tantalising search.
After over six years of research, he has come up with a method that relies heavily on the verses of the ancient Rig Veda, and the premise that the holy scripture was influenced by the Indus way of thinking. He has found striking - if not parallel - similarities between the translations of the motifs on Indus seals and the verses in the Rig Veda.
(The news item provides the details of the connection between Rig Vedic hymns and the writings on Indus seals.)
According to him (mr Ushanas), it is impossible to arrive at a translation of an Indus inscription without the Rig Veda for comparison. All the Indus signs on the seals, including the number signs, were originally names of gods.
Mr M.C. Joshi, former director general of the Archaelogical Survey of India (ASI) is clearly excited about the conclusions. The deduction that the inscriptions have parallels in the Rig Veda may need further probe, but the methodology adopted by Mr Richter-Ushanas certainly has an interesting logic, he told the TOINS.
The discovery of the Indus Civilization by the archaeologists took the academically recognised history of India 3000 years back from the days of Asoka, and about half that number years back from the postulated period of the Aryan Invasion.
But the liguistic identity of the Indus people became a major subject of controversy. The major sites of the Indus Civilization cover roughly the same regions as the Rigveda testifies for its composers. As Sethana puts it, "Rigveda no less than the Harappa culture flourished in the Indus valley." (Karpasa in Prehistoric, A Chronilogical and Cultural Clue, by KD Sethna, 1981). Hence, while protagonists of the invasion theory classified the Indus Civilization as "Dravidian", others classified it as "Aryan".
The identification of the language spoken by the Indus prople is therefore of very crucial significance for Indian History. If they spoke a Dravidian language, it would certainly corroborate the Aryan invasion theory according to shich a Dravidian civilization in the north was destroyed by invading Aryans. If, however, they spoke an Indo-European language, it would certainly demolish the invasion theory, since the Indus civilization is archaelogically dated more than a millenniem and a half - almost two millenniums - before the alleged date (1500 BC) of the invasion, and its roots go even further back by more than a millennium.
But the main problem in identifying the language of the Indus people was that they did not leave behind documents and inscriptions in their language. The only things, in this connection, excavated by archaeologists from the Indus sites were thousands of small seals (used for stamping purposes) made of seatite, terracotta or copper, depicting figures of human beings and animals, and bearing short inscriptions of a few letters each, in an unknown script which has been simply called the Indus or Harappan script.
The major obstacle in deciphering the script was the inadequacy of the available material. The script was an absolutely unknown one, it was not found anywhere in conjunction with another known script and the inscrip- tions on the seals were nowhere of any great length than a few letters each...
....many attempts were made to decipher the Indus script, by individual scholars like Langdon, Hunter, Hronzy, Mahadevan and others, and by teams of Finnish and Soviet scholars. All these attepts, however, met with failure. Moreover, these scholars set out on the exercise of attempted decipherment was based on arbitrary and whimsical methods. Moreover, these scholars set out on the exercise with two preconceived notions: first, that the script could not be an alphabatic one, and could only be pictographic- ideographic one; and second, that the language of the inscriptions was a Dravidian one (or, in the case of some Indian scholars, that it was sanskrit)....
Having taken two arbitrary steps, in presuming the script to be a pictographic-ideographic one, and in presuming the language to be Dravidian, the scholars then proceeded to set out on a spree of reckless and whimsical interpretations: each individual letter of the Indus script was taken up and arbitrarily presumed to stand for a particular object or concept; then the letter was "read" by giving it the sound-value of the particular present-day Tamil or general Dravidian word which was arbit- rarily presumed to be the one word, out of many, which best expressed that object or concept; then that letter, on different seals, was variously read with different arbitrary variations of that sound-value, each variation being again arbitrarily connected up with other similar present-day Tamil or general Dravidian words or word-parts.
Using these arbitrary and whimsical methods, it is not very surprising that these scholars came up with a hundred diferent, even diametrically opposite "readings" for any single seal, and ended up tying themselves up into knots and convincing no one but themselves and their committed admirers.
However, Dr. S.R. Rao, the eminent archaeologist, decided to be less speculative in his method. He refused to presume the identity of the Indus language to be either Aryan or Dravidian, and preferred to await the results, if any, to decide its identity.
He noticed two basic facts about the Indus script which had not caught the attention of the earlier scholars. Firstly, he noticed that of the 400 to 500 letters found on the seals, some letters seemed to be basic letters, while most of the other letters seemed to be those same basic letters with some additional signs attached to them. Secondly, he noticed that the script was, as generally believed, absolutely uniform over the entire period of the Indus civilization. Those seals, which were later in time, seemed to have less complicated letters, thereby indicating an evolution.
He, therefore, gathered together all the data on the different inscrip- tions and classified them periodwise. He also separated the basic letters from those with additional signs, and arrived at a small number of basic letters.
Then, he decided to examine, without prejudice, those scripts and alphabates of the world which were closest, in time, to the Indus script, to see whether those scripts or alphabates could give any clue as to the sound-value which could be assigned to these basic letters.
The oldest extant inscription of the Indian Brahmi script dated to around 450 BC or so, while the Indus sites excavated dated down to the mid-2nd millenium BC, leaving a gap of a thousand years.
However, in West Asia, the South Arabic and Old Aramaic alphabetes had come into prominence by the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, and the Ahiram Sarcophagus (1300 BC) and Gezer potsherd (1600 BC) provided the earlier stages of these West Asian scripts. And here Dr. Rao struck gold. He found that many of the basic letters of the Indus script bore resemblance to the letters of these two West Asian alphabets.
He decided to assign to each Indus basic letter the same sound-value as the West Asian letter which closely resembled it. After assigning these values to the Indus letters, he proceeded to try to read the inscriptions on the Indus seals. The language that emerged turned out to be a "Aryan" one.
The above is rather simplistic narraration of the procedure adopted by Dr. Rao, which is given in detail in the two relavant books: Lothal and the Indus Civilization, The Decipherment of the Indus Script.
Among the many words yielded by Dr. Rao's decipherment are the numerals aeka, tra, chatus, panta, happta/sapta, dasa, dvadasa and sata (1,3,4,5,7 10,100) and the names of Vedic personalities like Atri, Kasyapa, Gara, Manu, Sara, Trita, Daksa, Druhu, Kasu, etc.
While the direct connection between the late Indus script (1600 BC) and the Brahmi script could not be definitely established earlier, more and more inscriptions have been found all over the country in the last few years, dating 1000 BC, 700 BC, and so on, which have bridged the gap between the two. Now it is evident that the Brahmi script evolved directly from the Indus script....
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