Want to know what these objects indicate?
You will get to know them and 100s of such other glyphs in a recent book Indian Hieroglyphs, authored by Dr S.Kalyanaraman.
In his efforts to retrieve the forgotten culture of Sarasvati- Sindhu culture, Dr S. Kalyanaraman has brought out his magnum opus to identify Indian sprachbund terms of metal technology which were represented as Indian hieroglyphs.
A review by Manju Gupta is posted here.
A comprehensive volume of Indian hieroglyphs
By Manju Gupta
Indian Hieroglyphs: Invention of Writing, S Kalyanaraman, Sarasvati Research Centre, Pp 798, price not given
It is a very comprehensive book on Indian hieroglyphs. The corpora of Indus script show over 600 glyphs. Such a large number of glyphs cannot all be abstractions unrelated to an underlying language if the glyphs were intended to convey 'meaning'. Language words are powerful tools for communication of 'meaning' in any messaging system. The book establishes that inventors of Indian hieroglyphs were iterate and used hieroglyphs to present their sounds of speech.
Archaeology has shown that the users of Indian hieroglyphs were innovators in the technology of using minerals, stones and creating alloys of the Bronze Age – alloying copper with tin, arsenic and zinc – heralding a true industrial revolution managed by corporate formations called sreni, 'economic guilds'.
The author of the book says that the total number of inscribed objects with Indian hieroglyphs has now reached a critical mass of over 6,000 – a database "for solving a mathematical problem is cryptography of matching cipher text with plain text."
Objects which have been discovered outside of Sarasvati-Sindhu river basins are also evaluated in this book and these include seals, tablets, ingots, etc. Indian hieroglyphs were not syllabic writing. Indian hieroglyphs were word-writing (sometimes called logographic or morphemic writing) to denote the Bronze Age repertoire as experienced by artisan guilds. Thus the process of writing moved from the stage of tally-bullae system of accounting to a written account of a furnace scribe, an associate of the Bronze trader to support economic transactions. A corollary to the account presented in this book of this stage of evolution of writing is the identification of over 1,000 glyphs of the lingua franca of the artisans, scribes and traders who used Indian hieroglyphs.
The inventor of Indian hieroglyphs represented a smith, ayakara by representing two glyphs in fish (aya) + crocodile (kara). The writing system evolved further with combinations of glyphs as ligatures to connote word-phrases. For syllabic representations, new methods – syllabic scripts – were invented, called kharosti and brahmi which were used together with Indian hieroglyphs, on, for example, punch-marked coins.
The work avers that the invention of writing, using Indian hieroglyphs, was necessitated by the economic imperative of the Bronze Age, c. 3,500 BCE. Indian script was composed of hieroglyphs written and read rebus. The Indian hieroglyphs were orthographic representations of lexemes (phonetic-semantic) of an underlying language of artisans. The language was meluhha (cognate mleccha) of Indian linguistic area (sprachbund).
This book will be of special relevance to historians, scholars and archaeologists.
(S. Kalyanaraman, Sarasvati Research Centre).
No comments:
Post a Comment