A tribute to Flinders Petrie.

Indus Script inscriptions are

accounting records of metalwork of Tin-Bronze
Revolution, 4th millennium BCE
This is a note on one of the earliest attempts of decipherment of Indus Script by a famed
Egyptolost, Flinders Petrie. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flinders_Petrie

I pay this tribute to Flinders Petrie who made an insightful comment

that Egyptian hieroglyphs may yield a clue to the form and function of Indus Script.
He is proved right.

The decipherment of about 8000 inscriptions of Indus Script identify each 'sign' and 'pictorial
motif' as hypertext composed of hieroglyphs. Each hieroglyph is read rebus in the spoken form
Meluhha language of Sarasvati-Sindhu Civilization. Just as the hieroglyph tradition of Egypt
found its echoes in Ancient Near East, Indus Script hypertext tradition also found its echoes in
Ancient Near East and in Ancient Far East. The inscriptions in Indus Script hypertexts are a
documentary, accounting records of wealth-producing activities of metalworkers and seafaring
merchants of Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization. These functionaries of artisan guilds were the
intermediaries between Ancient Far East and Ancient Near East, participating in the Tin-Bronze
Revolution of 4th millennium BCE.

A renowned Etyptologist Flinders Petrie proposed (Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, 1932,
'Mohenjo-daro', in: Ancient Egypt and the East, Macmillan and Company, ii, p. 34) an Indus
decipherment on the basis of the supposed similarity of its pictographic principles to those of
Egyptian hieroglyphs. A succinct narrative of Petrie's decipherment is provided by Andrew
Robinson (Andrew Robinson, 2015, The Indus--lost civilizations,Reaktion Books, p.147). This
narrative is excerpted below:

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S. Kalyanaraman
Sarasvati Research Center
August 26, 2017