Articles on inscriptions, the script or sign system, iconography and writing in the Indus Valley Civilization from the earliest appearances of potters marks on. Includes articles by leading scholars of the Indus script, including Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan.
Early writing or sign systems were fragile. They could disappear leaving seemingly little trace in the systems that followed. This is true of the ancient Indus sign system. It is also true of the proto-Elamite one. >
"My conclusion," writes the Indus script scholar Asko Parpola, "is that the Indian Rsyasrnga legend goes back to the Harappan religion, where the unicorn bull depicted on thousands of seals has a real local animal, the nilgai antelope, called rsya in Sanskrit. His single horn, the length of which is exaggerated, has a phallic connotation and emphasizes the importance of this animal as a symbol of fertility." >
"Debt lurks in the shadow of reciprocity," is the wonderful starting sentence of this paper. Highly theoretical, it opens up important questions about seals in the ancient Indus and Mesopotamian civilizations and their role in the system of administrative control which helped integrate society at the dawn of urban civilization. >
First published by the IEEE Computer Society in 2010, this paper by a University of Washington Professor analyzes the count of signs and combinations in the Indus script. >
A proof of this upcoming survey article by the dean of Indus script scholarship, Asko Parpola, is now available on Academia.edu; it will be published in the highly anticipated Seals and Sealing in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 2018). >
One day Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be of great help in reading ancient Indus inscriptions. There are likely to be many steps before we get there however. >
An insightful article that focusses on the clues in a seal and set of sixteen tablets found together at Harappa in 1997 to proffer that they may have been economic tokens. >
During the second half of the 3rd millennium BC, the Harappan Civilization covered an area of over one million square kilometers in South Asia, from the Afghan highlands to western India. Excavations at large urban sites like Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and Dholavira, as well as at smaller production si… >
