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The results reveal a string of names and titles associated with the Pantian dynasty
whose remote ancestors were probably traders in the Indus civilisation, he said.
After the collapse of the Indus civilisation, he said in his paper that a section of the
Indus Valley population had migrated to south India and the the Indus Dravidian
influenced the South Dravidian languages. The earliest traces of such migratory
influence are found in the Old Tamil.
The other stream that the epigraphist spoke of is the Earliest Indo-Aryan (Rig Veda),
which has inherited the Indus phrase through loan translations. Pusan, an early
Vedic God, for instance, is identified as a deity of the trading community (Vaisya). The
origin of the myths associated with Pusan becomes clear when their source is traced
to the Indus phrase, Mr. Mahadevan contended.
The results also show that the descendants of the Indus civilisation adopted the IndoAryan speech and that there was a long gap of time between the Indus civilisation and
the early Vedic culture, said Mr. Mahadevan. The Vedic Age succeeded the Indus
civilisation and the Rig Veda itself is a product of the composite culture, said the
scholar, who began studying the Indus script way back in 1968.
Mr. Mahadevan further explained that the results of the discovery, using the above
technique, are summarised in a Grid of correspondences, adding, the Grid
constitutes the proof of the discovery.
I have not claimed to have deciphered the Indus script. But the present paper appears
to me the most productive I have so far written, he claimed in his written paper,
adding that from the level of mere evidence, it has now attained the level of proof.
Iravatham Mahadevan
Hence, scholars are left with the option of beginning the decipherment
primarily through synchronic or structural methods deployed to the text
alone, in breaking the code and understanding the Indus Language.
Mahadevan was working in this line since 1968, resulting in his compilation,
The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables, published by the
Archaeological Survey of India in 1977.
After finding certain patterns in the relative placement of signs in the Indus
texts, Mahadevan in the present research approaches the language
question by considering the Script as rebus and by coming out with bilingual explanations.
Rebus was a technique employed in designing ancient pictograms. To
explain it in English through an example, an eye could be drawn to read
and mean I.
Rebus is usually language-specific and hence helps language identification
and phonetic decipherment.
The four signs explained through Rig Vedic Sanskrit, showing loan
translations from Dravidian
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Posted by Thavam