HVK Archives: Scripting a solution
Scripting a solution - The Indian Express
N. S. Rajaram
()
4 May 1997
Title : Scripting a solution
Author : N. S. Rajaram
Publication : The Indian Express
Date : May 4, 1997
The first cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, better known as the Harappan
Culture, was discovered by Indian and British archaeologists in 1921. Since then,
many more cities belonging to this fairly advanced civilisation have come to
light, yet so much about the people who inhabited theses urban centres remains in
the dark because the script they used, specimens of which are available in the
3,000-odd Harappan seals, continues to baffles scholars.
The seals clearly show that the Harappan people were literate. Since the old
Aryan invasion theory held. that the sub-continent's original inhabitants were
Dravidians displaced by invading Aryans, it was claimed that the language of the
seals must have been some form of ancient Dravidian unrelated to Sanskrit. This
assumption prevented scholars from deciphering the script.
But recently, there has been a dramatic breakthrough. Natwar Jha, a 58-year-old
Vedic scholar and palaeographer from West Bengal, has at last found the solution
to the great problem. In a slim volume of 60 pages titled Vedic Glossary on Indus
Sedls, Jha has provided both the key to the ancient script as well as a large
number of readings. After a careful examination of his work, the American Vedic
scholar David Frawley and I found his reading to be substantially correct. We
announced our finding at a public meeting in Bangalore on January 4 this year.
Further study following the announcement has only strengthened our belief about
the script. We can now independently read a large number of seals using Jha's
Glossary.
Jha's first major step was to recognise that the Aryan invasion theory and the
Aryan-Dravidian divide were modern theories that lacked empirical support. Most
archaeologists today, in fact, totally reject the notion of any invasion of India
in ancient times. Jha also proceeds on the premise that the so-called Dravidian
languages like Tamil and Kannada never existed Independently of Sanskrit.
Linguists have constructed hypothetical 'Proto-Dravidian' languages, but these are
entirely theoretical. Scholars who tried to decipher the Indus script using
Proto-Dravidian's languages, therefore, were attempting the impossible: they were
trying to read an unknown script using a non-existent language.
Once we discard these various theories as unfounded, we are led naturally to
ancient Sanskrit of the Vedic period. Jha decided to search for Vedic words on the
seals. In this he was helped by an ancient work known as the Nighantu. It's a
glossary of Vedic words compiled by the ancient sage Yaska. Jha also found that
the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata preserves an account of Yaska's search for
older, 'buried' glossaries in compiling his own. From this he concluded that some
of the seals must contain words found in Yaska's Nighantu.
This gave him the clue to the language - that it must be an archaic form of
Sanskrit. To identify the letters on the seals, Jha next compared the Harappan
writing with all the ancient scripts of the Indian sub-continent and neighbouring
regions. He found that letters of most of the ancient scripts were related to
Indus signs. Since he knew language, and also had Yaska's Nighantu as reference,
this allowed him to identify the symbols and read the seals.
As far as the Indus script is concerned, it is both similar to and different from
modern Indian scripts. It is phonetic like modern Indian scripts, but for the
most part, it has no vowels. Only consonants are written; it is up to the user to
supply the vowel values. For example, one of the seals contains a word written as
na-ra-tta-ma. This can be read as narottama. Similarly, a word written as
ra-va-sha-ta-ka-sha can be read as ravishataksha. The stroke that we now use to
indicate vowel values was a later development.
Such a system is called a 'syllabary', rather than an alphabet. Some languages
like Hebrew and Arabic are still written without vowels. In such a script it is up
to the reader to supply the vowels. To meet this need, the Indus scribes evolved
an ingenious method. They indicated vowel beginnings with a Ushaped symbol. This
symbol, however, is used only at the beginning of a word, and for all vowels; in
the remainder of the word, the reader has to fill in the necessary vowels as we've
already seen. With this innovation, it becomes possible to write words with vowel
beginnings, too.
The word agni is written as ugn. Similarly, ishvara becomes ushvr; indra, undr;
arkagni, urkgn; and so on. Someone familiar with the language would have little
difficulty in reading it, but one must know both the language and the literary
context.
What this means is that the Harappan alphabet is really a hybrid proto-alphabet:
it is a syllabary, or a consonantal system, enhanced with a generic vowel symbol
for words beginning in a vowel. The recognition of this fact is one of the keys
to Jha's reading of the script. Besides, composite letters - a striking feature
of all Indian scripts - appear also in the Harappan script. All in all, Harappan
writing may be seen as an intermediate stage in the transition from a primitive
consonantal system to highly scientific alphabets like Brahmi, the source of
nearly all Indian scripts.
Pictorial symbols are also there - apparently more common in the early stages of
the writing than in later layers. They invariably represent complex sound. A bird
is used to represent shak (from Shakuni); similarly, a scorpion represents vrish
(from vrishchika); a dotted square represents ksha (from aksha, or dice); and so
on. In some cases, one can actually trace the evolution of the alphabet from the
pictorial symbol. For instance, parallel wavy lines, which must have been used to
represent a river (nadi in Sanskrit) became the symbol for the letter n.
In his book, Jha provides a complete alphabet and a methodology that anyone can
use, provided the user is familiar with the language and vocabulary of the Vedic
literature. For instance, the messages on two famous seals with the image of the
bull, and the image of the horned deity, or Pashupati - can now be read. The first
simply reads Indrah, referring to the Vedic god Indra associated with the bull,
the symbol of strength. The Pashupati seal reads Ishadyattah marah, which means
marah (or evil adversaries) controlled by Isha.
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