The Arrow Sign in the Indus Script
It was a warm and humid afternoon in August 1995. I was feeling tired and rather sleepy after a hard day's work in the library of the Directorate of Epigraphy at Mysore, where I was collecting
A paper by Iravatham Mahadevan on the arrow sign and symbol in the written script of the ancient Indus Valley people.
The Arrow Sign in the Indus Script 2
The most common supposition has been that these two signs are case suffixes, JAR for the genitive and ARROW for the locative or the dative.
The Arrow Sign in the Indus Script 3
There has been a controversy among Dravidianists whether the two-way gender distinction as in Old Telugu (masculine/non-masculine) or the three-way distinction as in Tamil
The Arrow Sign in the Indus Script 4
Most of these titles are obscure and are yet to be satisfactorily interpreted.
The Arrow Sign in the Indus Script 5
Before concluding, I may also draw attention to the possibility, as in other ideographic scripts, of a sign having both literal (pictorial) and transferred (phonetic) values in different