Indus Valley Script Blog

The Connection Between Indus Valley Script and Easter Island Symbols : Andis Kaulins, Guillaume De Hevesey and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Agree : It Exists

2010-04-01T16:29:00.001+03:00

The connection between the Indus Valley Code and Easter Island Script - which we made here - is supported by the research of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who also sees this connection via Guillaume De Hevesey, who in 1933 "pointed out striking similarities between about 90 Indus signs and 90 signs from the script of the Easter Islands.":

The above .jpg has been reduced in size. See the full size at indus_vlley.jpg

These symbols are astronomical.

Many thanks are extended to Pierre N. Overton, who sent me this link.

Computer Analysis and Unconvincing Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script

2010-04-01T15:34:00.000+03:00

Raja Murthy at the Asia Times in Indus Valley code is cracked - maybe reported on an April 23, 2009, paper in the journal Science by Rajesh Rao et al. titled "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script”, which claims that computer analysis of Indus Valley signs shows them to have an internal linguistic structure similar to ancient world languages.

That paper conflicts with an earlier 2004 paper by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat and Michael Witzel, 'The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization', and those authors quickly replied on April 24, 2009 in a two-page paper titled "A Refutation of the Claimed Refutation of the Nonlinguistic Nature of Indus Symbols: Invented Data Sets in the Statistical Paper of Rao et al. (Science, 2009)", where it was alleged that the Indus symbols had been compared with "artificial sets of random and ordered signs".

As we have shown with some credibility, some of the Indus Valley signs are astronomical viz. astrological in nature and represent symbols for star groups, asterisms and/or constellations. That direction of inquiry will be more fruitful for all of the above participants, should they choose to consider alternative solutions.

The Last UK University Palaeographer? King's College London to Shut Down UK's Only Palaeography Chair : Maybe They Should Read My Blogs

2010-02-14T03:12:00.001+02:00

Not much money in studying ancient texts.
Just ask the author of the posting you are now reading.

Hence, we are not surprised to read at The Guardian in Writing off the UK's last palaeographer that:

"The decision by a London university to axe the UK's only chair in palaeography has been met by outrage from the world's most eminent classicists. John Crace on why the study of ancient writings matters – and why history will be lost without it...."

As Crace writes:

"Indus Valley script

Plenty more work to be done . . . palaeographers are yet to decipher the Indus Valley script....

Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that it was to close the UK's only chair of palaeography....

Not that palaeography has the answer to everything. No one has still made head or tail of Linear A (dating back to around 1900BC), and the Indus Valley script of the third millennium BC is still a mystery.

[Our comment: Maybe the politicians, journalists and academic mainstreamers alike, should first do their homework about the Phaistos Disc and about the Indus Valley Script, before they go into uninformed decisionmaking and propagandizing.

For example, in the Indus Valley Script pictured by Crace -

- as can easily be seen from my graphic at the top of the page of my blog at Indus Valley Script, with the human to be replaced by the upturned arrows and the comparable bow-type symbol, the Indus Valley script pictured by Crace marks the stars from the Winter Solstice to the Autumn Equinox ca. 2000 B.C. Obviously this a stamp - so the reverse is intended, i.e. from the Autumn Equinox to the Winter Solstice.]

But just days before King's made the announcement, its sister London institution, University College, was boasting how two of Ganz's former students, Dr Simon Corcoran and Dr Benet Salway, had pieced together 17 fragments of parchment that form an important Roman law code – believed to be the only original evidence yet discovered of the Gregorian Codex (a collection of constitutions upon which a substantial part of most modern European civil law systems are built) that had been thought lost for ever." [emphasis added]

Computers Unlock More Secrets Of The Mysterious Indus Valley Script

2010-01-21T09:02:00.000+02:00

Computers Unlock More Secrets Of The Mysterious Indus Valley Script
as reported in Science News at Science Daily (August 4, 2009)

The Ancient Indus Valley Script and some past Interpretations

2010-01-21T09:00:00.000+02:00

The Ancient Indus Valley Script and some past Interpretations are shown at this site. None of the solutions presented there are anywhere close to the truth.

Code unknown: the fierce argument over ancient Indian symbols - The National Newspaper

2010-01-21T08:57:00.000+02:00

Code unknown: the fierce argument over ancient Indian symbols - The National Newspaper

Indus Valley Script as Astronomy and Compared to Easter Island Script

2010-01-21T08:30:00.001+02:00

Reposted from 26 LexiLine 2007 Indus Valley Script as Astronomy and Compared to Easter Island Script

Daniel Salas has alerted me to his website and his interpretation of "Indo-European Sanskrit decipherment of the Indus Valley script " as astronomy. He writes there:

"I found that the Indus Valley script signs matched the star constellations along the ecliptic. "

I am very sympathetic to his approach since it mirrors some of my own views about the common astronomical origin of many symbols in disparate cultures.

I do not however agree with many of his individual interpretations, but I think he is definitely on the right track in seeing symbols of the Indus Valley script to be astronomical signs for the Nakshatras (ancient Vedic Sanskrit moon stations of the sky). In other words, he is very right in seeing the astronomical connection. I then saw it is my responsibility, based on my experience with ancient astronomical scripts, to identify those symbols that I can.

Below, I compare one of the seals that Daniel Salas shows on his website with my decipherment 26 years ago of a wooden tablet from Easter Island known as "Honolulu Tablet No. B. 3622 which I showed to be an ancient zodiac, as published in the year 1981 in An Astrological Zodiac in the Script of Easter Island. That there is a clear connection between that Easter Island script and the Indus Valley seal pictured byDaniel Salas is beyond doubt, and I interpret the Indus Valley seal accordingly below.

At the bottom of the graphic right (and reproduced next to it left) is the Indus Valley seal pictured by Salas:

To our eye, the second line appears merely to be a variant writing of the same symbols.

In the middle of the page below is found the Easter Island Zodiac deciphered by me in the year 1981:

If we now directly compare the Indus Valley seal with the Easter Island tablet we get the following comparison and identification of astronomical signs:

The second row of symbols on the seal appears to be a variant form of the same group of symbols - or - perhaps this lower group of symbols applies to the southern heavens, which would support the ancient Vedic Sanskrit legends that the ancient seafarers mapped the southern heavens so as to be nearly identical to their northern counterparts. Richard Hinckley Allen in Star Names, Dover Publications, N.Y. 1997, reports of ancient legends that the southern stars were initially created by ancient seafarers to approximate the shape of Northern constellations in similar positions. Allen writes in Star Names (p. 436) as follows:

"Before the observations of the navigators of the 15th and 16th centuries the singular belief prevailed that the southern heavens contained a constellation near the pole similar to our Bear or Wain; indeed it is said to have been represented on an early map or globe. Manilus wrote:

The lower Pole resemblance bears
To this Above, and shines with equal stars;
With Bears averse, round which the Draco twines;'

and Al Biruni repeated the Sanskrit legend that at one time in the history of the Creation an attempt was made by Visvamitra to form a southern heavenly home for the body of the dead king, the pious Somadatta; and this work was not abandoned till a southern pole and another Bear had been located in positions corresponding to the northern, this pole passing through the island Lunka, or Vadavamukha (Ceylon). The Anglo-Saxon Manual made distinct mention of this duplicate constellation 'which we can never see.'..."