indus valley seals carried meaning like modern coins do ......tablets have not used rebus as the...
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A majority of the Indus Val-ley inscriptions were writtenlogographically (by usingword signs) and not by usingphonograms (speech soundsunits), claims a recent re-search paper published inPalgrave Communications, aNature group journal.
The paper, titled Interro-gating Indus inscription tounravel their mechanism ofmeaning conveyance, pointsout that the inscriptions canbe compared to the struc-tured messages found onstamps, coupons, tokensand currency coins of mod-ern times.
Epigraphic analysisDiscovered from nearly4,000 ancient inscribed ob-jects, including seals, ta-blets, ivory rods, potteryshards, etc., the Indus in-scriptions are one of themost enigmatic legacies ofthe Indus Valley civilisationwhich have not been deci-phered due to the absence ofbilingual texts, extremebrevity of the inscriptions,and ignorance about the lan-guage(s) encoded by the In-dus script.
“This article mainly fo-cusses on understandinghow Indus inscriptions con-veyed meanings, rather thanon deciphering what theyconveyed,” Bahata AnsumaliMukhopadhyay, the authorof the paper, told The Hindu.
For the study, Ms. Mukho-padhyay has used the digi-tised corpus of Indus in-scriptions compiled bywell-known epigraphist andIndus scholar Iravatham Ma-hadevan. She studied it us-ing computational analyses
and various interdisciplinarymeasures.
Analysing the brevity ofthe inscriptions, the rigidpositional preferences main-tained by the signs of the in-scriptions, and the co-occur-rence of restriction patternsdemonstrated by certainclasses of Indus signs, she in-fers that such patterns cannever be phonological co-oc-currence restrictions. Phon-ological co-occurrence res-trictions refers to two ormore sound units that can-not be pronounced together.“A very compelling, nearlyunassailable proof of the lo-
gographic nature of Indus in-scriptions comes from theco-occurrence restrictionpatterns maintained withinthem,” the paper states.
Ancient tokensIn the publication that runsinto 37 pages, Ms. Mukho-padhyay classifi��es the signsinto nine functional classes.Based on archaeological evi-dence, she says, “The in-scribed seals and tabletswere used in some adminis-trative operation that con-trolled the commercial tran-sactions prevalent in thetrade-savvy settlements of
the ancient Indus Valley ci-vilisation. These inscriptionscan be compared to the mes-sages found on stamps, cou-pons, tokens and currencycoins of modern times,where we expect formulaictexts that encode certaintype of information in somepre-defi��ned ways, ratherthan freely composednarrative.”
A common perceptionamong some scholars is thatthe Indus script is logo-syl-labic, where one symbol canbe used as a word sign at onetime and as a syllable sign atanother. This method,where a word symbol alsogets sometimes used only forits sound value, is called therebus principle. For exam-ple, you can combine thepictures of a honey bee and aleaf to signify the word “be-lief” (bee+leaf ). According toMs. Mukhopadhyay, thoughmany ancient scripts use re-bus methods to generatenew words, the inscriptionsfound on the Indus seals andtablets have not used rebusas the mechanism to conveymeaning.
The researcher said thatthe popular hypothesis thatthe seals were inscribed withProto-Dravidian or Proto-In-do-European names of theseal-owners does not holdwater. It is not that no otherIndus scholar has proposedthe logographic theory be-fore. Mr. Mahadevan himselftried to read these inscrip-tions logographically for de-cades, just that the logo-graphic theory was notarticulated well enough. Ms.Mukhopadhyay said her cur-rent work could serve as abasis in future for the deci-phering of the script.
Indus Valley seals carried meaninglike modern coins do, shows studySo far, inscriptions from the ancient civilisation have remained an enigma
Practical use: Structural similarities between some Indusartefacts and modern coins and stamps. * SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Shiv Sahay SinghKolkata