Eternal India Encyclopedia

Eternal India encyclopedia

ARCHAEOLOGY

scribes are found to have evolved two highly significant principles namely accenting the basic cursive signs by attaching short diacrit- ics (one, two or three) and forming compound signs by joining two or three basic cursives which are often mistaken by scholars for pictures of 'load-bearer', 'archer' etc. A careful analysis of these pseudo-pictures or compound signs into basic signs (fig:22) has revealed that there are 34 basic cursive signs and 28 true pictures while all the rest in more than 2800 early seal-inscriptions are only combinations and accenting of these basic cursive signs and pic- tures. With so few basic signs the Indus script could not have been a pictograph or ideograph because both require thousands of signs to connote words or ideas derived from pictures. Some scholars have assumed the Indus script to be a logographic system of word signs with 417 signs taking accented and ligatured forms also as basic signs, which is not correct. To determine whether a writing is phonetic or ideographic or word-syllabary the basic signs are im- portant. The average number of word-signs in Sumerian and Egyp- tian scripts varies from 600 to 700, while in the Indus script the basic signs forms including pictures and cursives are 62 in the early stage and 24 cursives only in the later stage. The phonetic charac- ter of the Indus script is therefore beyond doubt although there may be five or six determinatives standing for town, king or house in the early stage. The pictures of scorpion, hill, pipal leaf, bird and field are joined to other pictures or cursives, which is an indication that

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The Decipherment of the Indus script (For details see, S.R. Rao 1991, 200-282)

More than 3000 seals and seal-impressions (sealings) left by Harappans is the only source for ascertaining the language spoken and the nature of writing evolved by them. The foremost contribu- tion of the Harappans to the progress of man through easy commu- nication of thought is the simplification of a partly pictorial and partly-cursive writing into a pure cursive writing of a limited num- ber of signs or alphabets wherein each had a- single sound value instead of a word value corresponding to what the picture of a bird, hill or insect stood. This process of evolution of mixed picture- cursive writing into a pure cursive writing in which some signs resemble Roman alphabets D, E, H, P, U, V, W, X etc., has been traced by S.R. Rao at Lothal as a result of classifying the seals and sealings (seal impressions) into early and late ones based on stratigraphic evidence. In the early seals the pictures of hill, pipal leaf, scorpion, ploughed field, bird etc occur side by side with the cursive signs D,E,H,P,U,Y etc in the inscriptions while, in the late ones almost all the pictures are dropped retaining only cursive signs (fig:20). Rao has been able to distinguish the basic signs from the non-basic signs (fig:21) occurring sometimes in the same inscription both in the cursive and pictorial forms. The Harappan

' Fig: 23 — Analysis and phonetic value of compound signs