Priceless Indian Find and Yet More Destruction of Ancient Sites

From dawn.com
February 7, 2012
Rare Indus seal discovered in Cholistan (excerpted)

LAHORE, Feb 6: The Punjab University archaeology department has discovered a rare Indus seal in steatite material with carved figure of Ibex with two pictographs from Wattoowala, Cholistan, during a survey of different sites near Derawar Fort along the ancient bed of River Hakra.

(Not a good image, unfortunately) The seal dates back to 2500-2000 BC.

The seal has been discovered by a six-member team of archaeologists headed by PU archaeology department chairman Dr Farzand Masih, who has just concluded a Unesco-funded US$26,000 project “Sui-Vihar Excavations and Archaeological Reconnaissance of southern Punjab”.

Dr Masih told Dawn that the discovery would open new dimensions for scholars. The seal has a perforated boss in the back with variant style from Harappan seals showing the regional influence and perhaps a separate identity in the Harappan domain. The seal is almost square in shape and slightly broken from the right side but figure of Ibex is almost intact. The muscles, genitalia, hooves and tail of the Ibex were engraved artistically with high proportion of skill and craftsmanship.

Dr Masih said the team had also combed the Cholistan desert in the vicinity of Derawar Fort. Prior to that, he said, Sir Aural Stein and Henry Field had conducted the survey in 1941 and 1955, respectively. After the Independence, he said, Dr Muhammad Rafique Mughal had conducted an extensive survey during 1974-77 and discovered altogether 424 settlements on a 24-32 km wide strip on both sides of the dry bed of Hakra River.

He said the Mughals’ work in Cholistan had established a new dimension in the understanding of Indus cultures in Cholistan but unfortunately any indigenous or foreign scholar could not precede his work further even after three decades. Consequently, he said, the PU took the gigantic task of exploring the sites in spite of the inhospitable climatic conditions and surveyed some 25 sites in Cholistan Desert, which eventually led to the discovery of the rare Indus seal.

During explorations in Cholistan, the archaeology department chairman told Dawn that the team had also recorded flagrant violation of the Antiquities Rules to the cultural mounds which had been subjected to the worst human vandalism. “The land grabbers and other mafias have brutally murdered the cultural heritage while sinking tubewells on the mounds and ploughing the mounds to convert them into farm lands,” he said.

Dr Masih said the private land owners had sold the land including the cultural mounds and now the attitude of the new buyers towards the heritage was very hostile and it was feared that if no concrete steps were taken to safeguard the relics of the past, it might meet the fate of ruins of Harappa that suffered colossal damage during the laying of Lahore-Multan railway track.

“The entire scenario shows the dexterity of the investors and the pathetic attitude of the agencies responsible for cultural heritage of Pakistan,” he observed.

The Indus Script Back in the News

At the guardian.co.uk - posted at Punctuated Equilibrium
A Rosetta Stone for the Indus script
Posted by GrrlScientist Thursday 30 June 2011 09.43 BST

How would you solve the world's oldest and most difficult crossword puzzle? Watch this video to learn how one man is approaching this challenge (over 17 minutes in length, but very well put together and paced)

Do you love a good mystery and ancient texts? Rajesh Rao sure does. He is a computational neuroscientist at my alma mater, the University of Washington in Seattle. He has devoted much of his professional life to cracking "the mother of all crossword puzzles": How to decipher the 4000 year old Indus script (example pictured; public domain). To do this, Dr Rao uses computational modeling to understand the human mind in two ways: first, he develops computer models to describe how human minds think, and then second, he applies these models to the task of deciphering the 4,000-year-old script of the Indus valley civilization. This interesting video provides a glimpse into his methods and logic:



Some of the questions that motivate Dr Rao's research include: How does the brain learn efficient representations of novel objects and events occurring in the natural environment? What are the algorithms that allow useful sensorimotor routines and behaviors to be learned? What computational mechanisms allow the brain to adapt to changing circumstances and remain fault-tolerant and robust?

You can learn more about Dr Rao's work by visiting his official departmental website.

Significant Discovery: Stone Inscribed with Indus Signs in Gujarat

Story from The Indu.com

Stone inscription with Indus signs found in Gujarat
By T. S. Subramanian
The Hindu
Wednesday, May 5, 2010

SIGNIFICANT DISCOVERY: R. S. Bisht, former Joint Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, pointing to the Indus inscription found engraved on a sandstone at Dholavira in Gujarat.

First time Indus script found engraved on natural stone
An inscription on stone, with three big Indus signs and possibly a fourth, has been found on the Harappan site of Dholavira in Gujarat.

The discovery is significant because this is the first time that the Indus script has been found engraved on a natural stone in the Indus Valley. The Indus script has so far been found on seals made of steatite, terracotta tablets, ceramics and so on. Dholavira also enjoys the distinction of yielding a spectacularly large Indus script with 10 big signs on wood. This inscription was three-metre long.

Both the discoveries were made by a team led by R. S. Bisht, who retired as Joint Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India in 2004. While the stone inscription was discovered in 1999, the script with 10 large signs was found in 1991.

"The inscription on stone is unique because it is the first of its kind [in the Indus civilisation area]. It is the first inscription on a stone slab. But only part of it was found," said Dr. Bisht, who led 14 field excavation seasons at Dholavira from 1989 to 2001. "It was a natural limy sandstone cut into shape and then engraved with an inscription," he said.

The signs are seven cm tall and 6-10 cm wide.

The script has three large Indus signs, running from right to left, and there appears to be a fourth sign too. Dr. Bisht said: "The inscription must have run longer, but the stone was broken into pieces. The stone was used as ordinary building material for making an underground chamber in the bailey area of the citadel during stage five of the seven stages documenting the rise and fall of the Indus civilisation at Dholavira. It was placed in such a manner that it was facing us when we found it."

He was sure that there must be more stone pieces with the Indus script there. He surmised that the stone with the script must have been used as a lintel of the doorway of the underground chamber so that people could notice it. The inscription could have stood for the name of the house, its owner or an incantation. "It is a closed book," he said. (The Indus script has not been deciphered yet).

Michel Danino, independent researcher in the Harappan civilisation, called it "an unprecedented discovery because there is no stone inscription in the Indus civilisation." Stone was a rare material on the Indus plains. "This is the first time we have come across a stone
inscription, but it has not attracted the attention it deserves," Mr.
Danino said.

Dholavira in Kachch district is a major Indus site. It attracted wide attention in the 1990s for yielding what Dr. Bisht calls "a spectacularly large inscription made of 10 unusually big Indus signs" which were inlaid on a wooden board which had, however, decayed. The signs were made of thoroughly baked gypsum. It must have been sported right above the north gate of the castle, and "it must have been visible from afar with its white brilliance," Dr. Bisht said.

Highly literate society
He argued that it was a highly literate Harappan society that must have existed at Dholavira because seals, tablets, pottery, bangles and even copper tools with Indus signs were found everywhere in the citadel, the middle town, the lower town and the annexe of the site.

Besides, the same seals, beads, pottery and ornaments were found everywhere as if the entire population had wealth. "It appears to have been an egalitarian society. On the basis of material culture, you cannot draw a distinction among the city's inhabitants," he said.

Indus-Like Inscription?

Objective scientific analysis in this article - or political propaganda?

Article at The Hindu Online
Thursday, Apr 08, 2010

Indus-like inscription on South Indian pottery from Thailand
Iravatham Mahadevan

A fragmentary pottery inscription was found during excavations conducted by the Thai Fine Arts at Phu Khao Thong in Thailand about three years ago. (Dr. Berenice Bellina of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France, sent me a photograph of the object: Figure 1 [right])

The discovery of a Tamil-Brahmi pottery inscription of about the second century CE at the same site was reported earlier ( The Hindu, July 16, 2006). One can presume that the present inscription is also from the Tamil country and belongs approximately to the same period. The two characters incised on the pottery now reported are not in the Brahmi script. They appear to be graffiti symbols of the type seen on the South Indian megalithic pottery of the Iron Age-Early Historical Period (second century BCE to third century CE).

What makes the discovery exciting is that the two symbols on the pottery resemble the Indus script, and even the sequence of the pair can be found in the Indus texts, especially those from Harappa.

Rest of article.

Were Indus Symbols Used for Measures?

Article at The Hindu Online edition of India's National Newspaper Sunday, Nov 15, 2009 Indus civilisation reveals its volumetric system T.S. Subramanian Combination of ‘V’ signs and linear strokes were used to indicate volumes The three pots from Harappa with volumetric inscriptions on them. Calculations indicate that the Indus volumetric system is based on multiples of 9.24 litres. (Below) A reconstruction of broken bangles from the Moneer area of Mohenjo-Daro. The number of reconstructed bangles (17) matches the number from the sealing text on the pot that had the broken bangles inside. The other photo shows Indus fish signs. CHENNAI: The Indus civilisation had a volumetric system with inscriptions on ceramic vessels (glazed pots from Harappa) indicating that the sign ‘V’ stood for a measure, a long linear stroke equalled 10, two long strokes stood for 20 and a short stroke represented one, according to Bryan Wells, who has been researching the Indus script for more than 20 years. These markings on the pots are identical to those found on the incised tablets and bas-relief tablets also found in Harappa, said Dr. Wells, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University for his thesis on “The Epigraphic Approaches to Indus Writing.” It is to be published as a book in 2010. Besides, a ceramic vessel from Mohenjo-Daro, which had fragments of blue-coloured bangles inside, had one long stroke and seven short strokes inscribed on it. When these broken pieces were reconstructed with a computer, they turned out to be 17 bangles. This again established that one long stroke equalled 10 and each short stroke one, Dr. Wells said. He described the findings as “an important discovery” and “very interesting.” Dr. Wells has proposed that “these sign sequences [sign ‘V’ plus numerals] are various values in the Indus volumetric system. The bas-relief tablets might have been used as ration chits or a form of pseudo-money with the repetitive use of ‘V’ paired with , , relating to various values in the Indus volumetric system. The larger the ceramic vessel, the more strokes it has. This postulation can be tested by detailed measurements of whole ceramic vessels with clear inscriptions.” For instance, he recently measured the volume of the three pots from Harappa, which are now with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) at Purana Quila in New Delhi. While the smallest of them had three long strokes and a ‘V’ sign, the bigger one had six long strokes and a ‘V’ sign and the biggest seven long strokes and a scale inscribed below it. When he measured their volumes, Dr. Wells found that the pot with three long strokes had an estimated volume of 27.30 litres, the vessel with six long strokes 55.56 litres and the one with seven 65.89 litres. Thus, the calculated value of one long stroke was 9.24 or approximately 10 litres. Dr. Wells (58), who is now a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Taramani here, has also focussed on creating an adequate sign list and corpus for the Indus script and the structural analysis of the Indus texts. He said he first saw the pictures of these pots with markings in the “Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions,” edited by Asko Parpola and his colleagues. When he learnt that the pots were with the ASI at Purana Quila, Dr. Wells travelled there to measure their volumes. No coincidence It was Michael Jansen, another researcher on Indus civilisation, who discovered the pot with broken bangles at Mohenjo-Daro in 1987. What intrigued Dr. Wells was the text of one long stroke and seven short strokes inscribed on it. When he reconstructed these broken pieces, using their internal circumferences, with a computer, he found that 17 bangles must have remained intact inside. Besides, the rake sign in the Indus script had a value of hundred and the double rake sign, 200. “This is completely regular” and “not a result of coincidence,” he said. When the ‘V’ sign with linear strokes that occurred on the Harappan tablets were found repeated on a number of ceramic vessels, “it gave me the idea that the ‘V’ sign is probably a measure,” Dr. Wells explained. It was possible that wages were paid in grain (from these vessels) dispersed from a centralised storage facility, or in the case of incised tablets, material for construction projects and other short-term projects was distributed. He asserted that “there is archaeological evidence bearing on this issue in the form of standardised ceramics with texts describing their contents.” “Fish” for weights Dr. Wells agreed with another Indus scholar Steve Bonta’s (Pennsylvania State University) theory that the “fish” sign in the script stood for weights. According to Dr. Bonta, the fish sign occurred frequently with numbers in the script and in clusters too. He later found that the Akkadian Sargonic texts referred to the weight systems of Dilmun (Bahrain) as “minus.” The system of weights from Dilmun was exactly the same as that of the Indus system. Dr. Bonta, who speaks Tamil, realised that “min” in Tamil meant fish. “So our theory is that the term “minus” is derived from the Indus and that the fish are weights,” Dr. Wells said. There were fish signs with one long stroke, two long strokes, a single rake or a double rake. “So the sign graph is doubling and the value is doubling. I think this is too much of a coincidence. But I am aware that a lot of people will disagree with me on the fish sign,” he added.

Indus Script Dravidian - Says Expert

Here we go again - another round has been fired in the never-ending war of "Aryans," Indus, and "Dravidians." Article from thehindu.com Indus script linguistically Dravidian: expert S. Ganesan October 10, 2009 The Indus script is Dravidian linguistically and culturally closer to the old Tamil polity than what has been recognised so far, eminent epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan has said. He shared some of his recent and still-not-fully-published findings relating to the interpretation of the Indus script, in an endowment lecture on ‘Vestiges of Indus Civilisation in Old Tamil’ at the 16th annual session of the Tamil Nadu History Congress, which opened here on Friday. Mr. Mahadevan said that though the claim could be met with incredulity, the evidence he had gathered over four decades of intensive study of the sources — the Indus texts and old Tamil anthologies — had led him to the conclusion. Mr. Mahadevan, who specialises in the Indus script and Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions, said there was also substantial archaeological evidence to support the view that Indus Civilisation was pre-Aryan. The Indus Civilisation was urban, while the Vedic culture was rural and pastoral. The Indus seals, he said, do not depict the horse and the chariot with ‘spooked wheels,’ which were the defining pieces of the Aryan-speaking societies. “The Indus religion as revealed by the pictorial depiction on seals included worship of a buffalo-horned male god, mother-goddesses, the pipal tree and the serpent, and possibly the phallic symbol. Such modes of worship present in Hinduism are known to have been derived from the aboriginal population and are totally alien to the religion of the Rig Veda.” There was also substantial linguistic evidence “favouring Dravidian authorship of the Indus Civilisation,” he said, citing Brahui, a Dravidian language still spoken in the Indus region, Dravidian loan words in the Rig Veda, the substratum influence of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan as shown by the presence of retroflex consonants in the Rig Veda and major modifications in the Prakrit dialects moving them closer to the Dravidian than the Indo-European family of languages. Computer analysis of Indus texts has also revealed that the language had suffixes only as in Dravidian and no prefixes as in Indo-Aryan or infixes as in Munda. Clarifying that he was employing the terms, ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian,’ only in linguistic sense, he said speakers of the Aryan languages indistinguishably merged with Dravidian and Munda-speaking people millennia ago, creating a composite Indian society. [Well, their DNA can still be traced out, as recently evidenced - see my September 27, 2009 post.] Priestly functionary Referring to the ‘BEARER’ ideograms in the Indus script, he said the frequent Harappan title, ‘Bearer,’ originally meant a priestly functionary ceremonially carrying, on a yoke, food offerings to the deity. The corresponding Dravidian expression, ‘poray’ (bearer) was translated in the Rig Veda as Bharata (bearer). [I am not aware that ANY lexicon has been established and generally accepted by linguists for the Indus symbols - did I miss something?] The symbols inscribed on a Neolithic axe found at Sembiyan Kandiyur near Mayiladuthurai in 2006, a most significant discovery connecting Indus Civilisation with Tamil Nadu, corresponded to the signs of the Indus script. Symbols found on megalithic pottery and potsherds from Sanur and Mangudi in Tamil Nadu also resembled the signs of the Indus script.

'Indus' Symbols in Edakkal Cave?

I'm confused by this story. If I am reading it correctly, it seems that the symbols were originally studied in 1901, and that would, logically, mean that they were found at that time or earlier. So, are there new figures that were discovered recently? Not clear from the article - or I missed the key words! At any rate, I am wondering if this is an article in response to the recent DNA study I blogged about earlier that says India was settled by two genetically distinct peoples -- punch and counter-punch -- in the never-ending Aryan Invasion battle that's been going on forever! No photos accompanied the article. Here is the article: Tuesday,29 September 2009 20:18 hrs IST Symbols akin to Indus valley culture found - Kozhikode: A rock engraving, indicating clear remnants of Harappan culture, has been found in the Edakkal caves in neighbouring Wayanad district, linking the Indus Valley civilisation with South India. "There had been indications of remnants akin to the Indus Valley civilisation in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, but these new findings give credence to the fact that the Harappan civilisation had its presence in the region too and could trace the history of Kerala even beyond the Iron Age," historian M R Raghava Varier said. The unique symbols integral to the Indus Valley culture traced in Harappa and Mohanjedaro region that stretched upto Pakistan, were found inside the caves during recent excavations by the State Archaeological Department. Of the identified 429 signs, "a man with jar cup", a symbol unique to the Indus civilisation and other compound letters testified to remnants of the Harappan culture, spanning from 2300 BC to 1700 BC, in South India, Varier, who led the excavation at the caves said. The "man-with-the-jar" symbol, an integral remnant commonly traced in parts where the Indus Valley civilisation existed, has even more similarities than those traced in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, he said. The 'man-with-the-jar' has been a distinct motif of the Indus valley symbols. The Edakkal engraving has retained its unique style as the engraver tried to attain a two-dimensional human figure, Varier said. This could be attributed to the transformation from the distinct symbols of the Indus Valley civilisation that could have taken place in due course of time, he said. The 'jar' is more or less same as those in Indus ligature. But the human figure is a little different. "These symbols form part of compound letters similar to scripts and no concerted efforts appear to have been made in the past to decipher them, with a lone exception by Iravatha Mahadevan (a scholar on the Indus valley civilisation), who could gather valuable ideas from such letters," he said. "The discovery of the symbols are akin to that of the Harappan civilisation having predominantly Dravidian culture and testimony to the fact that cultural diffusion could take place. It is wrong to presume that the Indus culture disappeared into thin air," Varier said. The symbols and pictographs found in the Edakkal cave were subjected to study for the first time in 1901 by Fawsette, a police official of the then Malabar district. Later, Varier, along with noted history scholar Rajan Gurukkal carried out further studies, which testified that the caves had remnants upto the Iron Age. The new findings could take the history of Edakkal and Kerala even beyond and throw more light into the culture of the region, Varier added.

Ancient Writing: Indus Script

From the Smithsonian Can Computers Decipher a 5,000-Year-Old Language? A computer scientist is helping to uncover the secrets of the inscribed symbols of the Indus By David Zax Smithsonian.com, July 20, 2009 The Indus civilization, which flourished throughout much of the third millennium B.C., was the most extensive society of its time. At its height, it encompassed an area of more than half a million square miles centered on what is today the India-Pakistan border. Remnants of the Indus have been found as far north as the Himalayas and as far south as Mumbai. It was the earliest known urban culture of the subcontinent and it boasted two large cities, one at Harappa and one at Mohenjo-daro. Yet despite its size and longevity, and despite nearly a century of archaeological investigations, much about the Indus remains shrouded in mystery. What little we do know has come from archaeological digs that began in the 1920s and continue today. Over the decades, archaeologists have turned up a great many artifacts, including stamp sealings, amulets and small tablets. Many of these artifacts bear what appear to be specimens of writing—engraved figures resembling, among other things, winged horseshoes, spoked wheels, and upright fish. What exactly those symbols might mean, though, remains one of the most famous unsolved riddles in the scholarship of ancient civilizations. There have been other tough codes to crack in history. Stumped Egyptologists caught a lucky break with the discovery of the famed Rosetta stone in 1799, which contained text in both Egyptian and Greek. The study of Mayan hieroglyphics languished until a Russian linguist named Yury Knorozov made clever use of contemporary spoken Mayan in the 1950s. But there is no Rosetta stone of the Indus, and scholars don’t know which, if any, languages may have descended from that spoken by the Indus people. About 22 years ago, in Hyderabad, India, an eighth-grade student named Rajesh Rao turned the page of a history textbook and first learned about this fascinating civilization and its mysterious script. In the years that followed, Rao’s schooling and profession took him in a different direction—he wound up pursuing computer science, which he teaches today at the University of Washington in Seattle—but he monitored Indus scholarship carefully, keeping tabs on the dozens of failed attempts at making sense of the script. Even as he studied artificial intelligence and robotics, Rao amassed a small library of books and monographs on the Indus script, about 30 of them. On a nearby bookshelf, he also kept the cherished eighth-grade history textbook that introduced him to the Indus. Rest of article.

The Mystery of the Indus Script

Perhaps one step closer to solving one of linguistics' most enduring mysteries. Story and image from Wired Science: Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery By Brandon Keim April 23, 2009 1:01:09 PM An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers. Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures. "The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what's found in many languages," said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao. The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long. In 1877, British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham hypothesized that the Indus script was a forerunner of modern-day Brahmic scripts, used from Central to Southeast Asia. Other researchers disagreed. Fueled by scores of competing and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to decipher the script, that contentious state of affairs has persisted to the present. Among the languages linked to the mysterious script are Chinese Lolo, Sumerian, Egyptian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Old Slavic, even Easter Island — and, finally, no language at all. In 2004, linguist Steve Farmer published a paper asserting that the Indus script was nothing more than political and religious symbols. It was a controversial notion, but not an unpopular one. Rao, a machine learning specialist who read about the Indus script in high school and decided to apply his expertise to the script while on sabbatical in Inda, may have solved the language-versus-symbol question, if not the script itself. "One of the main questions in machine learning is how to generalize rules from a limited amount of data," said Rao. "Even though we can't read it, we can look at the patterns and get the underlying grammatical structure." Rao's team used pattern-analyzing software running what's known as a Markov model, a computational tool used to map system dynamics. They fed the program sequences of four spoken languages: ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English. Then they gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language. The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic. Spoken languages fell in the middle. When they seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages. As for the meaning of the script, the program remained silent. "It's a useful paper," said University of Helsinki archaeologist Asko Parpola, an authority on Indus scripts, "but it doesn't really further our understanding of the script." Parpola said the primary obstacle confronting decipherers of fragmentary Indus scripts — the difficulty of testing their hypotheses — remains unchanged. But according to Rao, this early analysis provides a foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of Indus script grammar, and ultimately its meaning. "The next step is to create a grammar from the data that we have," he said. "Then we can ask, is this grammar similar to those of the Sanskrit or Indo-European or Dravidian languages? This will give us a language to compare it to." "It's only recently that archaeologists have started to apply computational approaches in a rigid manner," said Rao. "The time is ripe." Citation: "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script." By Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari and Iravatham Mahadevan. Science, Vol. 324 Issue 5926, April 24, 2009. Image: J.M. Kenoyer/Harappa.com

The Tale of a Broken Pot

From The Hindu: The tale of a broken pot May 13, 2008 Iravatham Mahadevan and S. Rajagopal Today I am a broken pot stored away in a museum. But, about eighteen hundred years ago, I was a shining new kalayam. My proud owner was a toddy-tapper named Naakan. He lived in a small hamlet at the edge of the forest (near present-day Andipatti in Theni district of Tamil Nadu). Naakan was too poor to own land; but he earned his living by taking on lease some coconut and palmyra trees, tapping and selling the toddy. There were several toddy-tappers in the hamlet. They would climb the trees early in the morning, make deep cuts on the crown of the trees with their sharp bill-hooks, and tie their pots beneath to collect the sap (juice) that oozed from the cuttings. The pots, when full, would be taken down and stored for a few days to allow fermenting of the sap into toddy, for which there was a good market. Etched belongings Poor he might have been, but Naakan was literate. In order to identify his kalayam and its contents, he scratched this message on it with his sharp iron tool: naakan uRal ‘Naakan’s (pot with) toddy-sap’ The Tamil word ooRal (from ooRu ‘to ooze’) meaning ‘freshly tapped toddy’ is spelt here with the short vowel u probably due to oversight or reflecting the colloquial usage. Determining age Archaeologists who dug me out of the earth near Andipatti a couple of years ago, have determined from examining the fabric of my body, that I was made in about the third century A.D. Epigraphists (who study old inscriptions) have identified the writing on my shoulder as in Old Tamil written in the Tamil-Brahmi script of the same period. And that is not all. The two-word inscription carries an important message, namely, how widespread literacy must have been in the ancient Tamil country, if a poor toddy-tapper, living in a remote hamlet far away from urban and commercial centres, could write down his name and what he was doing with the pottery he owned. That is the reason why I am preserved in the museum and not discarded like other broken pottery! Iravatham Mahadevan is a well-known researcher of the Indus and Brahmi scripts. Dr. S. Rajagopal is a senior archaeologist specialising in Old Tamil inscriptions, who retired from the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology. The issue is the controversy surrounding translation (or, to be more accurate, no translation) of the Indus script. Various translations of the script have been put forward through the years, but none of them has been accepted by the archaeological/academic community. In the background is the other always-simmering, sometimes explosive controvesy of the "Indo-European invasion" versus some Indologists' claims that the Indus civilization was not destroyed by this "invasion" but gradually transformed into the civilization of southern India as the Indus people migrated south. There is, frankly, a racist component involved, as the people who live in Tamil Nadu and areas of southern India are very dark-skinned compared to the peoples further north and west. All is even more complicated by the gloss of the Hindu caste system and religious beliefs involving "karma" and reincarnation. Whew!

Ancient Inscriptions

Wow! Compare these inscriptions from (1) Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon) to the ideograms found on the (2) Indus seals, and the ideograms of the (3) Jiroft script: From the Sri Lanka Sunday Times Online ISSN: 1391 - 0531 Sunday March 9, 2008 Vol. 42 - No 41 News Rare cave inscriptions By Gamini Mahadura A cave with rare ancient inscriptions dating back to more than 10000 years has reportedly been discovered at Badungala in the PS division of Yakkalamulla in Galle. Archaeology officials say that the inscriptions date back to the Endera yugaya or the era when animals were domesticated. They say similar cave inscriptions had been so far discovered in Alauwa, Ambilikanda and Mawanella. This is the first time that such a find has been reported from the South.