20. (Right) The six or seven ladies (the Pleiades?) on an Indus seal In the Indus script, numerals are marked by repeating a short vertical stroke the required number of times. The pictograms of 'six' (six short strokes divided to two lines) and (on its left side) 'fish' together form a syntactic unit (Fig. 13f). It corresponds to the compound aru-meen 'six-star' occurring… >

The Indus script represents logo-syllabic writing. This means that it does not constitute such a closed system of single-valued graphemes as the syllabic and alphabetic scripts, which could be cracked as wholes. Rather, individual signs may be interpreted one by one, and many of the graphemes are likely to remain eternal mysteries. The interpretations presented above, few i… >

Notes 1. This paper is a revised English version of Parpola: 1985 and essentially a summary of earlier published original work. Detailed documentation, which the reader can find elsewhere (see especially Parpola: 1975, 1984 and 1986), is omitted here. 2. For the term 'icon', see Lyons: 1977, 102-105. 3. Cf. Pfeiffer: 1972, nos. 308 and 725. This root may be related to… >

1. Meeting the Challenge of the Indus Script In 1920, excavations at Harappa brought to light the ruins of a large brick-laid city, and soon a whole unknown civilization was uncovered in and around the Indus valley (Figure 1). 1 The Indus civilization, now dated to c. 2600-1800 B.C., collapsed some 500 years before the composition of most of the hymns collected in the Rgved… >

1. Map by J.M. Kenoyer, courtesy Harappa Archaeological Project (HARP). 2. A scheme of the evolution of different types of scripts. Copyrighted drawing planned by Asko Parpola and drawn by Virpi Hameen-Anttila. 3. The Indus script and other early writing systems. Copyrighted drawing planned by Asko Parpola and drawn by Virpi Hameen-Anttila. 4. Pots from Mundigak IV,1 … >

Meeting the challenge of the Indus script In 1920, excavations at Harappa brought to light the ruins of a large brick-laid city, and soon a whole unknown civilization was uncovered in and around the Indus valley (Figure 1)1. The Indus civilization, now dated to c. 2600-1800 BCE, collapsed some 500 years before the composition of most of the hymns collected in the Rgveda-Samh… >

There is no such thing as an accepted Indus Valley script dictionary. Such a dictionary is probably decades away. Nonetheless, below are summarized some of Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan's speculations on some of the most common ancient Indus signs. Asko Parpola Sign/SequencePictorialmeaningPhonetic (Dravid… >

How, then, is it possible to decipher an unknown system of writing? Confronted with this primary question we are doubly fortunate in comparison to the decipherers of the Egyptian hieroglyphs more than 150 years ago. In the first place, we have a number of successful decipherments to look back to, both as potential models and as sources of inspiration, which reassure us in th… >

The early logo-syllabic scripts functioned like picture puzzles, based on the rebus principle. Each sign was originally a picture, denoting the object represented by it. For example, the picture of an arrow meant 'arrow.' But because many things, especially abstract concepts, are not easy to draw as pictures in a simple and unambiguous manner, another expedient was resorted to… >