Thursday, December 19, 2024

Progress On The Harappan Script


Dr. Srini Kalyanaraman has been doing some painstaking work and making slow but steady incremental progress in making sense of the Harappan script. 

Like the Vinca script and the earliest Minoan writing, it is probably more of a collection of brands, logos, and ideograms than a full script for the Harappan language that could be used for any purpose. The Harappan language was the language of a people who called themselves Meluhha, according to the records of ancient Sumerians who traded with them and had a trade colony of Harappans in the Middle Bronze Age.
 
I get regular updates on his new papers, because I was apparently cited once in one of his papers, from a firm called Academia. But there are lots of them, and I haven't had time to follow them closely, paper by paper. In the indefinite "someday" future, when I have the time to do so, I aspire to download and review them all and write a post or two about them.

3 comments:

Mitchell said...

Indian Youtube has been buzzing with the work of an Indian-American cryptographer called "Yajna Devam" who claims to have deciphered the script.

andrew said...

Thanks for the heads up.

andrew said...

He's a crank. One of his papers is "50+ Longest Indus inscriptions and their scriptural references.
List of 50 longest Indus inscriptions read as grammatically correct Sanskrit" But Sanskrit wasn't present in India when the inscriptions were made. https://independent.academia.edu/yajnadevam