Altogether, the area covered by this civilization was about 800,000 km2 : roughly one-fourth of today’s India, or if we can make comparisons with contemporary civilizations, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia put together. This vast expanse must have offered unique opportunities as well as posed peculiar challenges — opportunities in terms of a wider choice of sources for raw materials and a richer store of human skill and experience; challenges arising from a greater diversity of regional cultures which had to be integrated , or at least coordinated, and the sheer extent of communication networks required to keep it all together.

It turns out that the Harappans indeed took the challenge seriously and made sure that the script was uniform across this vast region.

“Writing is an important window to the intellectual creativity of a civilisation. Our analysis reveals that people who designed the Indus script were intellectually creative and considerable time and effort went into designing it. The manner in which the signs were modified shows that it was acceptable across all the sites of the civilisation and was not intended for a small group of people,” said Nisha Yadav from TIFR, the principal author of the study.

The Indus script is found on objects such as seals, copper tablets, ivory sticks, bronze implements and pottery from almost all sites of the civilisation. “The Indus civilisation was spread over an area of about a million square kilometres and yet, the sign list over the entire civilisation seems to be the same indicating that the signs, their meaning and their usage were agreed upon by people with large physical separation. A lot of thought, planning and utility issues must have been taken into consideration while designing these signs,” says the TIFR paper, published in the Korean journal, Scripta.

The paper also indicates that the script may have a connection with scripts from India or even China. The authors say that the signs of the Indus script seem to incorporate techniques in their design that were used in several ancient writing systems to make optimum use of a limited number of signs.[Indus script designed with care, say TIFR researchers (via IndiaArchaeology)]

http://youtu.be/kwYxHPXIaao

In Indus Script Cipher: Hieroglyphs of Indian Linguistic Area (Sarasvati Research Center, 2010) Dr Kalyanraman has picked up the most difficult puzzle to solve: the Goliath of the Indus script. The Indus valley civilization was contemporary with the great civilizations of the ancient Near East in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Though not always figuring as important in world history books, it was the largest urban civilization that existed in the ancient world in the third millennium BCE, dwarfing the Near Eastern civilizations in size and in the uniformity and continuity of its remains.

The Indus civilization should properly be called the Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization because the great majority of its sites were located on the now dried banks of the Sarasvati River, a once great river that flowed east of the Indus and whose termination around 1900 BCE probably corresponded to the last phase of this great civilization.

The final drying up of the Sarasvati occurred because tectonic plate movements made the mighty river lose two of its tributaries, Yamuna and Shatadru (modern Sutlej). Sometimes it is called the Harappan civilization after the place name of Harappa, one of its first large sites discovered. Over the years, at least five larger sites were found stretching as far south as Daimabad in Maharashtra.

Although certain aspects of the elite culture, and most seals with motifs and pottery with Indus script on it, disappeared, the Indus culture itself was not lost. In the cities that sprung up in the Ganga and Yamuna river valleys between 600-300 BCE many of their cultural aspects can be traced to the earlier Indus culture. The technologies, artistic symbols, architectural styles, and aspects of the social organization in the cities of this time were continuous with those in operation in the Indus cities, an idea that is shared by many prominent archaeologists including Jonathan Marc Kenoyer, Jim Shaffer, and Colin Renfrew (see Tarini Carr). Ruins of the cities of this civilization were excavated (particularly at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in the province of Sindh in modern Pakistan) in the twentieth century indicating that it had a highly developed urban infrastructure.

…K started by looking for simpler though vital clues to decode the Indus script. He noticed that many seal or inscriptions feature certain motifs and signs came in duplicate: two goats, two short-horned bulls, two tigers, two heads of heifers, and two fencing persons. Analogously, he also found reduplicated signs (straight or wavy lines, dotted circles); about a dozen of them. The word for duplication is dula (pair) in Kashmiri, which is homonymous with a Munda word dul but which means ‘cast’ [metal] (p. 145). Secondly, he also found that a number of glyphs, in turn, appear as predictable pairs in stable sequences. He determined stability by measuring the frequency of occurrence of two signs within an inscription. He found, for instance, that the pair made of a sign for the human body and the picture of a container or jar occurred in 87 inscriptions and generally stood for a scribe making inventory of artifacts that were produced (pp. 153-154). Thirdly, to produce one message, the artisans employed on an average one pictorial motif plus five signs. The short message suggested to him that the Indus script did not record essays or even paragraphs detailing metaphysical dissertations or religious ideas. The messages more likely dealt with describing the listed and traded articles with relevant descriptions (p. 49).

…
K next looked for familiar motifs, signs, and themes from the ancient Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization that have been depicted on the seals and that remain continuous with the local cultures and the broader, pan-Indic civilization of today’s India. He was able to find the following: the motif of the pair of deer or antelope (mriga) present on the platform below the man seated in a ‘yogic’ position from Harappa sin the scenes depicting the various activities of the Buddha; use of the conches and bracelets first recorded at Nausharo in 6500 BCE; the practice of wearing a red powder/dye at the parting of hair by married ladies as evidenced by two terracotta toys; the gesture of welcome (namaste) and various yogic postures (asanas); use of the cire perdue technique for making bronze icons; the practice of wearing a shawl (uttariyam) leaving the right shoulder bare etc (pp. 234-235). …

Concluding remarks

https://sites.google.com/site/kalyan97/indus-script-cipher

Do watch.

Repudiating linguistic evidence for the Aryan hypothesis: Prof. Angela Marcantonio
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/49574316/Marcantonio-Repudiating-linguistic-evidence-Aryan-hypothesis-Compatibility-Mode

Mirror: http://www.scribd.com/doc/35599742/Marcantonio-Repudiating-Linguistic-Evidence-Aryan-Hypothesis-Compatibility-Mode

Presentation (ppt) made at a Symposium on Indo-European Linguistics

WHEN? Wednesday, July 28th, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM
WHERE?: Salem State College, Central Campus, Building One, Room # 225
WHO?: Professor Angela Marcantonio, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, dpt. of Linguistics; P. A. Moro, 00195 Rome
***
Thanks to Dr Kalyanaraman