Arya language, Indus or IVC seals and script

[shaberon]

I have found things that call for an adjustment in thinking.

Some of it is very knowable -- carbon dating and genetics can paint a very accurate picture.

Some of it is unexplained -- what is recorded in the script found on IVC seals?


For ease of use, after the pictures in this post, are updating links to script topics, a Table of Contents, so we can slowly revise and focus things in a way no other single source can or will, with lucidity -- the posting order is the framework anyway, but it makes it easy to directly find something.

Also, displayed images are often compressed, and many of them when opened in a new tab are larger and clearer.



So, we are looking into the linguistic background of the Veda and the Zend Avesta.

The first thing we must do is reverse the subliminal suggestion of "Aryan people" and substitute it with "Arya language" and conceive of it as a voluntary spread. It's not from India. It's from a common environment with Avestan. That could be because of a college or guild type of facility.


Everything I have to post is about agreement, harmony, and cooperation.


First of all, the language has an inherent value of Friendly Speech. Aside from definitions of any words, there is an aesthetic, an attitude, a reason, an intention of speaking, based from friendliness and learning and working together. That is closer to the full meaning of Arya. If you don't have that, you can't actually read it.

Second of all, there are no non-Indian people who came into India until after the IVC era, and after or at most on the tail tip of the Vedic era. Any idea that Sanskrit was conveyed by some kind of people is basically physically impossible. An easier explanation is to suggest they adopted it.

And there is a very easy way to explain that, because art and writing come from Jiroft and Shahr-i-sokta in Iran. These places were massive. Civilization ran along the Helmand River in southern Afghanistan, through the Bolan Pass to Mehrgarh, in modern Pakistan, which around 5,000 B. C. E., had brick walls several meters thick. This east-west route was a virtual colossus, while it was also triangulated in the north with Ulug Depe in Turkmenistan, which has the longest continuous chain of inhabitation in Central Asia. On a human level, this was definitely formative, although it cannot tell us much about intellectual history, until the advent of writing. The scale and inter-knittedness of it are simply staggering.

That area is so rugged that to this day, some provinces of Afghanistan are still only connected by a single route of access, same as in all ages. Terrain has served as a "dictator" in the shaping of humanity.



IVC primarily refers to an architectural style like "Tudor" or "Georgetown". In the early times, India has settlements, but its major cities such as Kalibangan emerge around 3,300 B. C. E..

In other words, Iran was a gigantic and influential neighbor for over a thousand years before India had anything comparable. And when they do, you find relics with potter's marks and graffiti, and over time it is perfectly clear that several motifs are Iranian in origin. Some of this simply continues into the script. It seems plainly evident that some Iranian basics come in, and are replied with particularly Indian adjustments. The Indian philosophy and myths are at least somewhat independent of the vocabulary.


Then what happened is around 2,600 B. C. E., Kalibangan and Mehrgarh were both abandoned. In Kalibangan, it is believed an earthquake happened, however the site was relatively rapidly re-established in a hundred years or so. In the case of Mehrgarh, no suggestion is given, and then over the next few centuries, the whole Helmand culture disintegrates all the way through Iranian Sistan. The last traces linger to maybe 2,200 B. C. E..

Simple enough, the whole thing is now one of the worst deserts in the world.

It appears to have been uninhabited when colonized by Zoroastrians around 1,000 B. C. E. by using irrigation.

I would guess that Sanskrit developed out of that major influence followed by complete severance.

Is there an intellectual, perhaps spiritual, pilgrimage site to support this, yes.


Black Mt. Khajeh in Hamun Lake:






The Helmand River does not reach the sea, it drains into the plateau, here. In 4,000 B. C. E., the lake was much larger. It would be the only place a few people could survive during those dismal times following. Later claimed by Zoroastrianism.

The reason there is an Arya language is because it is attested in the Veda and Avesta with this meaning. It doesn't say "Proto-Indo-Iranian". Its relation to this would be Shahr-i-sokta is rather close to Hamun.


On the other hand, this would make India, itself, a sprachbund, because native languages are Dravidian.

But this would have generally been the case in Iran as well.

This part of Asia is Turanian.

What that means is that Indians entered the subcontinent through the Dorah Pass, and have been genetically separate from Iranians since 8,000 B. C. E. or even before. And you will notice the western swath of Turanians crossed the Strait of Hormuz, Yemen, and the Red Sea, entering Ethiopia.

You can see that in this "India excluded" flowchart. The Turanians who entered the sub-continent mixed to some extent with Australics, minor populations predominantly coastal. And then this Indian stock mixes outwardly into Shahr-i-sokta -- not the other way around:






That should be fairly assuring that Indians could have known about the Black Mountain.

Historically, Indians are basically just Indians in the sense that all their genetics took place in India itself. But their Ice Age origin was Siberia. At this deep level, they are related to east Iranians.


Corresponding to the above, there is a recent multi-author paper that refutes or re-writes Proto Indo European:

Wolfgang Haak, a Group Leader in the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, summarizes the implications of the new study by stating, “Aside from a refined time estimate for the overall language tree, the tree topology and branching order are most critical for the alignment with key archaeological events and shifting ancestry patterns seen in the ancient human genome data. This is a huge step forward from the mutually exclusive, previous scenarios, towards a more plausible model that integrates archaeological, anthropological and genetic findings.”

Simple enough, The root of this language is Armenia. It split in eastern and western directions around the dawn of agriculture. Sanskrit is believed to have developed around 3,000 B. C. E. and diverged from Avestan.

So, yes, if we look at the physical facts, plenty of reason to say this could happen.

My guess is they picked up an Iranian language because they wanted to.

But then this would lock in to the evolution of art and graffiti into script.

That would mean the language of literacy is most likely Sanskrit.


If so, it would be a Vedic rollback, in the direction most in common with Avestan.

Kalash and Khowar are later Sanskrit dialects. However they may be indicative of "non-Vedic Sanskrit".


I disbelieve most Sanskrit self-legends about antiquity. The Rg Veda only contains the philosophical implications that (a) there was a "first man" who did not talk, (b) speech was produced out of friendliness, (c) Vedic speech is a further refinement to this. Otherwise, no, it really says nothing about any total history of the world. My inclination is that this is a technique, first seen in the Sumerian Kings List, which takes relatively recent knowledge, and adds a story of "before", this technique being repeated in the Brahmanas and Puranas, in the Pahlavi, as Genesis, which is all contrived.

Since we need a conjectural yardstick starting point, I would think the Veda is certainly older than its "full compilation date". I don't think it's as old as some of Hindutva might want it to be. The Rg Veda in the sense of a continuously royally supported institution stemming from Divodasa could be around 1,800 B. C. E.. Atharva Veda in the sense of fragments and discontinuous bits that are in the Rg Veda tracing back to founder Atharvan mean that the practice might go back to around 2,000 B. C. E.. If so, the language it is created in, had probably been around for centuries. That would be IVC at its height.

From the outside, one reason for saying this is Kirat King Yalambar, who is considered a retreating fallout from the advances of Divodasa, in the 1,700s B. C. E.. By calculation, the Veda at this time would have to be reflecting astronomical changes that certainly took place after the height of IVC. The Purana can't really be true if it says humanity started at Manali in the end of Kullu Valley; rather, this region could only be accessed or obtained post-Yalambar, because it is Kirat territory. At that point you could say a new Sanskrit system developed at this holy place. That would still be true. But the Old Rg Veda is about getting to it.

Those are Mongolians who have been considered mostly isolated and would have nothing to do with IVC. In the Vindhyas and Aravallis, it probably does deal with Dravidian and possibly Mon Khmer-speaking peoples, and by inference it may deal with Vedic neighbors such as the Yadus (Dravidian) and Kambojas (Afghan). Over time, the remote Dorah Pass is shortcut by a more direct route over the Wakhan Corridor, and the development of Kabul. Commensurate with the decline of Sistan, there is the rise of east Afghanistan north to Gonur Tepe and Margiana, and it's like making a wishbone. The influence of the original Arya goes east to India, and north around Ulug Depe, and this makes a new and different configuration, with the script showing up all across it.

Around 2,300 B. C. E. is the foundation of Shortugai and Mari by irrigation. In this range we find what is thought to be the widespread and mature use of the script.

This thread will be for a lot of follow-up posts trying to coax the seals to tell us what they say.


I am going to make a bunch of suggestions, and then the space at the end of the post will be used like a Table of Contents, so that information in further posts can be organized in a coherent manner.



What is observed is that the IVC script reflects centralized organization, but the cities do not represent centralized power.


If you can figure out a large alphabet-sized, forty to sixty characters, you have probably solved the script.



There are a lot of projects on statistical analysis which are quite useful, and we can go into this later. Everything has the indication that scribes hundreds of miles apart and hundreds of years different were working from a rule set.

I don't think there was a lot of leeway. The script appears to have been taught by certain codices or libraries, whereas individual seals are like an appointment or a deputization.

There are not many studies on "field symbols", that is, the imagery.

I would suggest the first way to read it is artistically, similar to Heraldry.

Proliferously, 60-80% of the images are a Unicorn, an imaginary animal.

I think it may be a joke about the difficulty explaining to foreigners what a Rhinoceros is.

Related to foreigners, there is a famous Akkadian "translator" scene where the Meluhhan trader is holding an Indian Markhor Goat. It is possible the goat is a symbol of Agni who is Speech, and so it is a picture of a Meluhhan translator just like the Akkadian one.

Unicorn livery is a Pipal Leaf motif, and it is a creature of Soma. Veda and Avestan are both a Soma rite. A Soma Press is found all the way in Gonur Tepe at 2,300 B. C. E.. There isn't exactly a question "if" there was a "soma culture". There is a possibility of local recipes being unique, and a certainty that it is instantly recognizable in Sanskrit.

It's using a weird, weird, weird numerology, nothing like natural counting numbers. And you'll understand the gears of how this works if you think of a few things at once. Here's a mnemonic about how numbers work in relation to visual images: One -- Donkey, Five -- Bull.


No one talks about the Donkey on IVC seals, but, in actuality, this was the main pack animal for trade or travel from pre-history through the Assyrian Empire. And he is not on very many images, but he exists. What happens is he literally turns into a glyph.

Artistically, you get the sense that things are being sucked off the ground like by a tornado, like a big vacuum cleaner, get flung to the sky, and lodge in the script, sometimes inverting, such as the Chimera glyph.

It's easy to think of a Donkey as a kind of "starting power" that way, and if you did, you'd find a kind of progression up to Four, but, Five is in kind of its own little room. It has an affinity for the Bull. And here's what he does in the visual realm:


Nothing.


He changes collars a few times, but he doesn't move or do anything.

In some cases, the script geometrically adjusts itself to go "uphill" on the bull's hump, and there probably is significance when the script does something other than a ruler-straight line. It exalts a glyph over his back, and even impresses it on the dewlap.

He is however very sagacious, in that his texts are an advanced blend of simpler work plus his own peculiar statements. He may even conform to a basic definition of India as Indra and Panchajanya. However, there is not a very large quantity of Bull texts, and the art of eloquence appears to be furthered by the Elephant, who similarly gets the glyph marked around his ear.

Those two particularly seem to embody advancement in script and speech, with the net result being that the large number of Unicorns also spill forth a decent volume of more difficult texts.



Fortunately, IVC has a whole heap of simple work.

Most glyphs are almost meaningless and unused as solo glyphs. Most of them do however have one or more basic pairs as units of meaning. In turn, most of the script involves building by common clusters.

Most of it has no grammar or punctuation, and resembles the compounding of Sanskrit nouns, which lead to multiple meanings. There are recognizable functions that change the order and behavior of the common clusters. But for example, the long seventeen-character text doesn't use it. It's not necessary, but, when it comes into effect, it can be observed to form patterns in repetitive ways.




In some cases, an animal has only one or two glyphs over it. This very plain variety is not included in:

Conversations Facing Glyphs


which is the peculiarity of a glyph falling out of the script and replacing the animal's feeding trough. And so we would think this has an "instructive" quality. Such low-order seals are particularly concentrated in Banawali. Another related category is one we will have to mostly make on our own, Humans Facing Glyphs.

There are many notices of humans performing multiple "narrative scenes", but, there is not an especially good synopsis that I have been able to find. Whereas animals are nearly eating "large, embodied" glyphs on the ground, people are aligned with giant human-sized glyphs.



When I say the Bull "does nothing", this is exceptional, because there are multiple species drawn on the seals, most of which do something.

If we want to know what they are and what they are doing, the basic idea is framed here:


Zoomorphism and its Avatars


parsed from thousands of seals in:

Zoomorphic Icon Catalog


They have family trees, so to speak, by different behaviors. It's coded such that "F3" means facing a glyph; it's entirely about appearance. It says nothing about text. Has to be manually compiled to be functional.


Some of the animals are quite realistic at times. But they follow other rules that are entirely unrealistic in:


Chimera Catalog



There are also Monumental Icons and a Tree.

What are the people doing that is realistic, absolutely nothing.

There is something unequivocally cerebral going on here.

It more or less does have a Book that marries imagery to script in a series from Mohenjo daro:

Copper Tablets


It is quickly and easily obvious these texts apply multiple forms of duality, such as:


Palindromes

Without and with superscript

Minor variations starting from a primal "Sprout" which is also its finale


Overall, it is trinitarian, as in presenting two alternatives and a resolution. The process is repeated more intricately to the animals. It is out of this we are able to determine Tiger Text, i. e., a special affinity for Three gets the Tiger glyph used in a wide assortment of texts.

This drill-like literary device is riven through the script in ever-more sneaky and subtle ways. It's not like a Sumerian accounting token of "six hammers for two sheep". What seem to be numerals are more like categories, as if it were Samkhya. The Person has an affinity for Four. From this, I have reasoned that there is a "basic" script related to curious text twists involving small numbers, and that a Person with Four is kind of like a diploma holder. Then, the Bull with Five represents a second, "advanced" script which uses a lot of individual modifiers and seems much more difficult. A small number of basic signs could be understood by anyone, and statistically most of the texts were a relatively small number of glyphs used in a basic way, so this was indeed meaningful. In this way, the basic texts resemble interfacing a sprachbund, while the advanced texts are almost another language.

This intriguing collection of Copper Tablets is basic.

It is evoking the mind or presence of a yogi or deity.


There is another type of library on a different class of artifact based on one of the few (or two) Quadruples:

Ivory Rods


That is a whole huge philosophy that is yet all bundled in a basic script, which is slightly akin to the Copper Tablets, but you can tell it proceeds to emphasize something else.

Similarly, the array of two-sided and prism tablets seem to be a primordial instructive mode configuring what might be used on individual seals. Most of the imagery of people is found here.


Another library class:

Large Copper Plates


contains the longest text (forty-three characters of Soma Speech), and is metallurgical alchemy. The nine specimens include practically pure copper and range through various impractical alloys until the Elephant is the only one that contains Lead.

There were more sources of arsenicated coppers, and galena, when processed for lead on an industrial scale, will yield valuable amounts of trace silver. So the alloys are self-explanatory for the region; Tin was optional because it was imported, on Donkeys.

The plates are arguably not recycled "scraps" because the ratios are unrealistic for tools or anything that was actually made; they're like carpet samples, exhibiting a type.

They roll print perfectly well onto textile like batik.


We have the ability to create upgraded versions of what mostly is limited to pdfs. Then anyone who looks at this can get a faster and better start than the fact of it taking eternity to have found it.


To start this off in a novel way, here are some high-quality images of a brand new library. It's so good I thought something must be wrong with it. The lead article does not explain Pathani Damb where these seals were found. These are from the director of the dig SJA Sindhi, and have just come out in the 20s.

The first missing link is that this site is only a few miles from Mehrgarh, that is, it is an IVC attempt to maintain stability with Mundigak near Kandahar, Afghanistan. That would nominally represent what we just perceived as the extraction and diffusion of Sanskrit. We want to train ourselves to think logically and geometrically with respect to the images. That is why to me this looks like a Calendar:






Anyone can see the horns or headdresses in the lower register count to four.

To me, the middle register looks like Three Seasons. It would be multiplication that makes a Year.

We see the Branch glyph in all registers, which is inherited from the pre-script Iranian-inspired art.

Yet IVC goes to Daimabad in the south at the headwaters of the Godavari, and we might ask if the same glyph actually continues as the next missing link tracked in 2023 Circle with a Trident Symbol of the south Indian Megalithic culture. Or ask the Ivory Tablets why it is Quadrupled.


We can trace what appears to be the first loan from Dravidian to Sanskrit. Curiously, it has the connotation of friendly spirit basically the same as Arya. That word is:


Puja.


Yes, it has the specific meaning of a ritual or offering rather than a language, but it is still framed in Honoring the Guest. So I'd like to think there is common ground in their thinking with what the Sanskrit or Arya language means or intends. It's in a Vedic mantra, so, I can't look around it suspiciously. This has to be seen as acceptable to those in service of Bharata royalty. It follows the deductive principle of no cognate or appearance in Avestan, so, it is unlikely to be from an older Iranian root language, and, is more likely to be Dravidian, even if its physical token was a flower.

That might satisfy a resemblance to Iranian Mountain Tulip, which may have started the glyph.

The seal above is very imaginary, and, it is of such a singular nature that it is not intuitive how they got these forms out of standard iconography. There is a lofty, above-it-all feel on this thing. Yet almost no writing.

If it was me, if I was trying to express something, this triple seal would give me room to say millions more things than a section of script. I think it looks exactly like a Calendar as designed by a college of persons.



This next piece works with what I call the Illusion. That's due to placing a Tiger with a Sky Crocodile:





We found plain "Person" and "U-shaped symbol" with Three Tigers, and, a Gharial has to do with Fish, so that is coherent. Because this text match is important, we will add it below.




This is an addition to Girl-in-the-air, which sometimes occupies the whole seal.

Kneeling Woman with an I-shaped Vase and Fish with "Slanted Hat":





Silver Bull:





Rhinoceros and Buffalo:





Man-in-tree:




That tells us something because it is so basic. He is a series. But the full telling of him is not from Pathani Damb. And so each region of IVC appears to be flagged with adding its own individual statement to a common aggregate. The Calendar may define the aggregate. My view is that ancient cultures each developed their own civil calendar, which would have limited mandatory common ground, such as the North Pole, and would have valid reasons for different ways of tracking or marking a year. This was probably the first science anywhere. Therefor it would make sense as a type of grand announcement from what would have effectively been a re-bonding to Iran during a few centuries of script use, and deserve one of the most extravagant seals.


So far, the finds from this site are not entropic, they are highly organized. The use of each of the icons is like atoms in a molecule.


For example, they can't just make a bunch of Tiger seals because they think it looks cool. They have one that is installed in a certain way. It has a basic text with a Round-headed Person and a stylized "U-shaped" symbol. This is repeated elsewhere on something unique and powerful.

This is a previous find, but we see the same pair of glyphs:






I would suggest that the center of this thing is the glyph Three Triangles.

That the Stripes have everything to do with the "dissipation" of this particular image and it running like a dye into images and script.

It may even be a symbol of Shakti.


The Tigers also follow the "dual or triplicate" basis of the script. You can easily see this in the visuals of many other places. For example, the seal at Pathani Damb is like saying "two of you tigers turn into something else". Or, if you follow the texts of Three Triangles, then, along with Three Mountains, it forms the substantial core of both most of the script statistically, as well as the coherent volume of the Copper Tablets.

There might be around forty glyphs that have an ad hoc, declaratory birth, as if being given assignments. However, glyphs like Three Mountains appear to be conjured by incantations formed from these basic clusters.

Just as almost everything we could post about "numbers" will make it look like no counting, basic arithmetic, or contractual accounting, is taking place, sequences like two Wheels have been used to refute their being double letters, syllables, or words. Their statistical distribution is fatally problematic for normal cryptographic methods based on deciphering writings into the sounds of languages. That doesn't work here. This script doesn't work like others. I would suggest the Wheel is not doubling anything because the explanation is that it is two different Wheels.


It's the same dual-or-triple idea as in the Copper Tablets. It seems to spill over to some particular glyphs and texts in other areas. It is effectively a "sub-stratum" of the whole way of thinking. Moreover, it works in the script and with the imagery.

When first posting, we'll start with a block outline, which, going along, can be edited to live links for posts under the subject. For now I'm also going to add a stack of sources at the end.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Outline


I. India

A. Archaic Sanskrit and "pre-IVC" era

B. Iranic Primacy, Munja, and period-appropriate Astrology



II. Indus Iconography

A. humans

1. Person holding U and plain people

2. People with items, three kinds of Fish, dominant tetragram

3. U IIII and U U U

4. Bird-face Goddess

5. Her concordance

6. Yogin perhaps Aryaman

7. Yogini (Jiroft Dreadfalls Woman and Tiger Centaur)

8. Man-in-tree (Chanhu daro)

9. Girl-in-air and Arch Goddess


B. Encyclopediae

1. Large Copper Plates

2. Voluminous Copper Tablets

3. Ivory Rods


C. animals

1. realistic animals

a. Donkey (Kanmer)

b. Ibex (Dholavira)

c. Markhor (Rehman Dheri)

d. Rhinoceros (Shortugai)

e. Zebu Bull

f. Elephant

1. Elephant Concordance

g. Tiger

h. Buffalo (Rakhigarhi) and Gaur

i. Bird (Lothal)

j. Deer (Copper Tablets usher) and Rabbit (Copper Tablets mystery)

l. One Realistic Fish and Sky Fish

m. Sky Crocodile

n. Cobra


2. unrealistic animals

a. Unicorn

b. Fake Unicorn

c. Hydra and multi-headed Chimerae

d. Horned Tiger Chimera (Banawali)

e. Human Markhor

f. Scorpion - Gharial Theophany

D. Objects such as Soma Filter, Tree, etc.



III. Indus script

A. Pipal Leaf over Three Mountains

B. Two Bearers of Striped Mountain and Compound Bearer

C. Trigrams and Tetragrams

D. Two Wheels

E. Numbers


D. two-sided and prism tablets

E. Kalibangan Pipal Leaf and Three Mountains

F. U

G. U-shaped symbol

H. numbers

I. X and Scorpion (dominant tetragram)

J. Compound Bearer and Asterisk

K. Two Bearers with Striped Mountain

L. Fat Flat Crab

M. Comb

N. Banawali low-order seals

O. various other examples...




That's subject to change, but is the basic concept of how we will be able to link up posts to quickly see whole things at once. The posts, themselves, might not be in such clean order, which won't matter if this is a filing system.

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The way to look up texts:

IM77 Concordance


This site is partially defective; you have to look up signs by number, only, otherwise the scrollable field will lock up and you have to log in again. It is partially limited because it was last updated in 1980. The Wells-Fuls ICIT is private, so this is about all that is freely available for us.


Bulk originals:

Corpus I

Corpus II


Papers and statistics:


Crocodile 2011

Gharial and Tiger 2007

n-grams

Sign Design

Anisotropy 2022

Huntington slideshow beginning with Pipal Leaf over Three Mountains

IVC Geographical Extent

Script of Shamans

Wells 1998

Bonta 2015

Walking with the Unicorn 2018

Kennoyer 2020 Origin of Script

Seals and Bhiranna 2016

Semantic Scope

Mechanisms of Meaning Conveyance

Jalalabad Seal

Shahr i sokta Chronology



blogs:

Indus Script & More

Bharat Kalyan 97

[shaberon]

This post looks at what a linguistic melting pot might have been, in the given time frame.

This is a new flexibility in this thread, because we spent eternity conservatively denying the existence of Sanskrit, aside from some unspecified group somehow anchoring it in India and giving it the Veda, which must have been right before an unadventurous estimate of the current compilation of Vedas. You couldn't say anything more about it, because it was supposed to have erupted in full form from the ether at 1,500 B. C. E..

For a couple of years, we looked at the only detectable influence into India, Sintashta, and begun to theorize, well maybe these were the important people with the "gift" of language. But Sintashta is like Media. No art or writing. They are slightly older than the conservative estimates of Sanskrit, but not enough to make them a factor in IVC seals. Besides, their origin was Europe, so it was probably another language.


I would say it is more compelling that there was a human channel across Iran more like 5,000 B. C. E..

Art, writing, and metallurgy are all found there. And if this is the source of Sanskrit, IVC script quite possibly is Sanskrit.

The Veda says nothing about this, although Arya is used in a similar fashion.



Usually, if we think of an educated or commercial language, it is reserved for "elites", which would make it a bit unusual for an Iranian language to permeate a foreign region. The most effective way to do this is music. The oldest form of Sanskrit is musical. We might consider that Sama Veda is a rule set on how to extract the Rg Veda. It's not impossible the seals follow a similar course.


Along with a few suggestions about Dravidian:

All of this points to a history, where, even in the time of the composition of the Rig Veda, very large numbers of Dravidian speakers, who were present in the same vicinity, adopted one of many Indo-Aryan dialects that co-existed them. Linguists attribute the above linguistic changes to effects of L1 speakers (Language 1 = Mother Tongue) having on L2 (Language 2 = Second Language). It is down to historians to fathom out how and why L1 speakers gave up their mother tongue(s) and adopted an Indo-Aryan L2. This also proves beyond doubt, the direction of the flow Aryans, as into India and not out!

Songs, writing, Iran was very impressive.

It's quite fathomable once you accept they may have been interested in doing that.

It's too easy to post some Tamil definitions and speculate, whereas it is just as easy but more telling to, for example, find no such thing as an Avestan rhinoceros. This is a Hindi rhinoceros:


From a variant of Sanskrit गण्डक (gaṇḍaka, “rhinoceros”). This word, along with Sanskrit खड्ग (khaḍga, “rhinoceros, rhino horn, sword, reed”), appears to be of substrate origin.


In an undated lecture from R Sharma:


Unicorns or single horned animals from the overwhelming
majority of animal symbols in seals and sealings. But this most favourite Harappan animal is not
known to the Rig Veda. The term ganda or khadga is used for the rhinoceros in Sanskrit and the term
ekasringa for both the unicorn and rhinoceros, but none of these terms occurs in the Rig Veda. It is
significant both ganda and khadga are of Dravidian origin according to Turner...


I don't know about the words, but native knowledge of the animal would be.

Well, it doesn't mount a big comeback and take a starring role in later Indian literature either. If I wanted to be obtuse, I would push the IVC script as being about a Buddhist Chakravartin. This is half a subject, the point is intellectual; since the folk symbols are not originally the property of Buddhist transmissions, what we have is a specific philosophy of it. And, it has a derivative, secondary symbolism, where the rhinoceros represents a Horse:





There you have Rhinoceros and Elephant, and it is really easy to say that IVC has a Wheel of Knowledge that is being turned. That would simply be by taking the Wheel glyph at face value, in the category of "low level" or basic explanatory depictions. We might even be able to get it to work that way for us.


In pre-historic India, they had a thousand years to bring something from Iran in whatever way they wanted to. The script, however, is probably closer to Sanskrit, since it must adjust by adding things such as "rhinoceros", and its full form is arising after the abandonment of Mehrgarh.


This may show what happens when a new language hits the way people think.

Here is a Tiger from a set of 36 Mundigak slides:






I had no idea what I was looking at.

That's a Caspian Tiger, now extinct. But yes, Tigers lived in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and so forth, and are ancestral to both Siberian and Bengal tigers.

It's brownish. Avestan and Persian babr connote this; Sanskrit babhru however, is just the color brown. If vyaghra is supposed to be cognate, note it comes up in the Rg Veda one time as a personal name, whereas "babhru" is in almost every single hymn. It, quixotically, has no tiger subject whatsoever. Therefor, its relationship to IVC Sanskrit would only be partial. No sardula.

The IVC script, on the other hand, is like saying "Stripes" to that Mundigak Tiger. I think you could more easily tell a foreigner "our tigers have stripes completely", than describe a rhinoceros to someone who has never seen anything remotely like it. Because the Soma culture is larger than India, the Unicorn could perhaps say "Indian Soma" to someone who has not seen a rhinoceros. R Sarker 1993 goes into the addition of "marks". It's one of the most frequent forms of modification to glyphs.




The seals are found in brick towns which India did not have in any way comparable to the Helmand or Hali Rud endeavors. And, we paint the worst possible names of them or anybody, just by using a "type site" as a generic catch-all. You then invent people called "the Harappans", by projecting an irrelevant name into something unknown.


The more famous sites are probably not really what India, in character, was.

Harappa was built ca. 2,600 after Ravi and Kot Diji phases.


In other words, there was a "settlement", wherein Ravi phase is simply named for the river Harappa was on. So it is similar pottery and tools across that general area. But then Kot Diji has to be taken as "pre-Harappan cultural drift" coming from across India. Only after this do you get a brick city with seals:

What is clear is that Harappan society was not entirely peaceful, with the human skeletal remains demonstrating some of the highest rates of injury (15.5%) found in South Asian prehistory. Examinations of Harappan skeletons have often found wounds that are likely to have been inflicted in battle. Paleopathological analysis demonstrated that leprosy and tuberculosis were present at Harappa, with the highest prevalence of both disease and trauma present in the skeletons from Area G (an ossuary located south-east of the city walls). Furthermore, rates of craniofacial trauma and infection increased through time demonstrating that the civilisation collapsed amid illness and injury. The bioarchaeologists who examined the remains have suggested that the combined evidence for differences in mortuary treatment and epidemiology indicate that some individuals and communities at Harappa were excluded from access to basic resources like health and safety.

Mohenjo daro is cited as built around 2,500 without any notice of prior standing.

It is possible that Dholavira, Kalibangan, and Mehrgarh were all shattered by earthquakes, shortly before this, and India restores its loss, while both developing existing places, and founding new ones. Using isotope analysis, the best guess is the denizens of these new, and, shall we say, in some cases quite large, cities, were just coming in from the surrounding countryside.

What would be the chain of custody, so to speak, for a language coming from Iran to have a re-radiated influence as Indian Sanskrit.


There is a quite long IVC List including sites such as Laukhanjo daro, that can't, and probably won't, be excavated, because modern cities are over them; that one is estimated at over 300 hectares. And with some deductive sleuthing, it is not Kot Diji that is the source of Kot Diji culture.



The heartland is Haryana close to Kunal:

Kunal, along with its other contemporary sites Bhirrana and Rakhigarhi on Sarasvati-Ghaggar river system, is recognised as the oldest Pre-Harappan settlement, with Kunal being an older cultural ancestor to Rehman Dheri in Pakistan.

The discovery of regalis (royal items) excavated from this mound are the oldest of its kind in the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia and Iran. Discoveries include woman's complete dress, tribal head attire, copper spearheads, steatite seals with geometrical patterns (indicating seal making in IVC first begun here), terracotta antiques, arrowheads, fish hooks, two crowns, bangles, silver beads, gold pendants and over 12,000 beads of semi precious stones including lapis lazuli.

Site is located closer to other important IVC sites, such as 18 km northeast of Bhirrana, 45 km northeast of Banawali, 80 km northwest of Rakhigarhi, 85 km west of Balu, Haryana, and 150 km northeast of Jognakhera. It is 30 km northeast of Fatehabad city.

It originally shows Hakra Ware. From ca. 4,000, it has a seal of "two deer" said to be similar to that of Rehman Dheri.

The Kunal seal is certainly suggestive of Rotating Tau on the Rehman dheri seal, and similar to another from Mohenjo daro:









The reference being given requires that krsna refers to an antelope by itself. Consulting the alternate translation:


...in the sky's vault the dark impetuous ones have danced.



sounds like today.

What is more curious is the information on the verse means the Veda goes to the Aravallis:


Ṛṣi (sage/seer): arbudaḥ kādraveyaḥ sarpaḥ

Devatā (deity/subject-matter): grāvāṇaḥ



There, you realize there is a Vedic Kadru, some kind of brood mother. Her name also derives from "brownish, earth-toned", which has a dual meaning as a Soma vessel. Is this not the same "hill people" that IVC got copper from?

Moreover, I would think the Rehman Dheri image is still a Markhor. The IVC Antelope can still be stylized naturally, although I am not sure it has script. It could be on pottery, where you find a few things that are not really used on seals. Conversely, the seals do things like convert an antelope to a Tau. That may have already happened. In lead objects, this shape is made by a tiger attacking an antelope. Here, around Kunal, seals were of geometric designs, until the first known image of its kind.




You can find Kunal's influence seep in and cover other places like an umbrella:

These sites have pre-Harappan indigenous cultural levels, distinct from the culture of Harappa, these are at Banawali (level I), Kot Diji (level 3A), Amri (level II}. Rehman Dheri also has a pre Kot Diji phase (RHD1 3300-2800 BCE) which are not part of IVC culture.

So, e. g., Banawali was the closest neighbor, first convert. It had some kind of independent origin, and soon adopted the "pre-Harappan" "Kot Diji" culture, neither of which is an accurate name, because it is coming from Kunal. That would not be an accurate name historically, either, it just alerts us to the onset of IVC. No one seems as shocked that a town would "renounce" its pottery style. They're mostly compared to the "six fabrics" of Kalibangan.


Only a limited number of other sites appear to have much importance in advanced antiquity.

Because of the redundancy of writing the suffix, we can just ignore it. We are dealing with something that began to expire around 2,000, or at least had done most of its publishing by then, and higher numbers are older.


Sothi 4600:

About 60 km to the west, the large Indus settlement of Kalibangan was situated at the confluence of these rivers.

Siswal, in Haryana, is located about 70 km to the east, and has similar remains. This is now known as Sothi-Siswal culture.

The ancient site of Rakhigarhi is about 140 km east from Sothi, and together with Sothi and Siswal, was situated in the valley of the Chautang river.

The river is the feeder from the Sivaliks of Himachal Pradesh into the Ghaggar:





Of course, that's someone's weird idea about an Arya Varta or kingdom, however it is relevant to the Rg Veda. Beas = Greek for Vyasa, and for him to compile any Vedas at Manali, the dotted border has to move from the conflux up to the headwaters of the Beas. I'm not really sure the Veda even goes that far, but, it does have to do with pushing the boundary that is drawn there.

Neighbors to the east of the border as drawn there would be Ikshvaku.





Chanhu daro 4,000

Cotton cloth traces preserved on silver or bronze objects were known from Chanhudaro, Harappa and Rakhigarhi.

Objects of Iron were reported from Chanhudaro, Ahar, Rajasthan and Mundigak and this gains importance as it has been claimed that Iron was produced in 3rd Millennium in South Asia.


Balakot 4,000, Makran, possibly the oldest furnace


This is a real, three-dimensional thing, not a trick of drawing in profile:

Four terracotta unicorn figurines were found at Ganweriwala and though depictions of unicorns are frequently found across sites within the Indus Valley, it is rarer to find them in terracotta form. Though they have been found at three other cities, (Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Chanhudaro) they had never been found in such a large quantity at one site.

...bricks that were used for constructing big cities were typically built in a ratio of 1:2:4.

It opens up something that persists as a homogenous unit for about seven centuries. This has hardly any other parallel in the knowledge base, except for Rg Veda.

Going forward, this should not be too hard to remember:



Jognakhera in Kurukshetra shows continuous accumulation of both IVC wares *and* Painted Gray Ware believed to begin around 1,300.


There is a part of IVC that didn't "collapse", in a famous battlefield. How that could not be known to the Veda is unfathomable.

Manda is unclear, but possibly persisted through the Kushan Empire. Can't tell if it means continuously. Burzahom and Daimabad are also supposed to have lasted to about 1,000.


Rakhigarhi has produced 61 skeletons which are not said to have the defects of Harappa.

I can't get a good understanding of when it was supposed to be abandoned. It may not be known. In sheer scale, this effectively was the "capital". It seems reasonable that once Mehrgarh ceased emitting any Iranic or Irano-Indian dialects, that the minor trickle from here became a huge wave. At first, Ravi and Sothi-Siswal were contemporary with Hakra Ware also linked to another place now desert:

Cholistan was part of the Cemetery H culture which grew as a surviving regional variant of the Harappan culture, which was then followed by the Painted Grey Ware culture.

Those are the two layers considered the "Vedic period".

It refers to the Ghaggar entering the Hakra River in the desert. Just down a bit from Haryana. This area has a lot of late growth considered refugees from floods at Lothal and other sites. It appears the gestation of Sanskrit was in this basin, which in turn appears to be informative to the Indus settlements.


But from its pre-script era, there is nothing intellectually that Hakra Ware can tell us. It manages to have one recognizable thing, from Bhirrana:

On the pottery painted black and white, there were motifs of Peepal leaves which gained popularity later into Mature Harappan.

Arguably, Kalibangan is the most Pipal:

Pipal leaves are a distinctive
motif of the pre-Indus ceramic complexes across wide regions
of the Subcontinent; they become very common in the KotDijian phase (approximately 2800-2600 BCE), and often
appear on the famous verres ballon of the Helmand civilization. The variant with the symmetrical swirling elements is
well-known at Kalibangan, in Haryana, where it occurs in different versions, painted or incised in a plastic state.




But then Kot Diji is not really from Kot Diji, it is from Bhirrana, and it is *this* which overtakes Hakra and its two associated wares and establishes IVC.

This is Kalibangan in "Sothi-Siswal or Kot Diji" mode:






That might even be a Scorpion-or-Gharial.

Does that make it a Sanskrit Pipal from around 3,000?

There isn't really script here, but, when it is re-built, then there is script.

K-53 singleton:





It seems almost negligible, however, Three Mountains seems very significant as an explanation or goal, etc., developed by the script. It is possible that Kalibangan is the life of Sanskrit, and Mohenjo daro Copper Tablets are like a big classroom. This could be simultaneous with teaching additional arts.





Coming back down to us:

Saraswati valley has the earlier phase of the PGW culture, such as excavation at Hat (Hathira) in Kurukshetra. Hathira was protected by a V-shaped moat. Similar moats were found Jognakhera and Kunal on the Saraswati river. The presence of moat shows these were chiefdom-based cultures. These cultures reach a peak in Ganga-Yamuna Doab before the rise of Mahajanapadas in the Northern Black Polished Ware period.

So the archaic IVC cultural bastion is like its Vedc-era survivor, which accounts for continuity extending to Ikshvakus in the Doab. I tend to use that familiar name, but, dynasties that might be more meaningful in Vedic Sanskrit would sound like:

Aila Pauravas and Ayodhya Prthus

Jognakhera was excavated during 2009, although local people are not aware of the importance of this ancient site.

The implication is Arya to IVC Sanskrit to Vedic Sanskrit, maybe to Classical Sanskrit. It may be a chain of pieces once thought separate.

Jognakhera was a copper smelting site where copper smelting furnaces with copper slag were recovered. The furnaces excavated from this site looked like huge saucers.

It's a relatively minor site that hasn't got any seals. In later periods, we do tend to start thinking that places could get taken out by wars, such as the Mahabharata. This is Kurukshetra.


There is a plausible environment for the development of a language as described, without anything to show a large migration of people. Nothing to say that anything taking place here is not on an intellectual basis. Vedic Sanskrit as we have it, of course, represents a couple of other cultural shifts such as the arising of kingdoms and motion of the stars, but it is not brand new, nor necessarily very different from what might be written in IVC script.



There is something from the Rg Veda which, I think, does refer to a wider, pre-existing myth and the unfolding of Sanskrit. Thought to be the world's first love story:


Pururavas and Urvashi


Here, one does not get the sense that a Vedic hymn is a first telling, but a memory. Such a legend is the reason for a dynasty of "descendants of Pururavas".


This is indirect; there is something vaguely called "Mehi sherd" which has a detailed image, to which the suggestion is that the Triangle between the Bull's horns is the "sun" and the "fire sticks", and this particular scene actually is Pururavas and Urvashi. Observation is made that IVC Comb glyph has perhaps appeared.


I can't find any outside references to this rather doctrinaire assertion. The linked book overall is of the "ambitious" nature, but, we have to handle the same evidence if we want to reason otherwise. Not finding this specific example carried, there are numerous comparable specimens including ones using Combs. So many that it turns into one person's attempt to call it "Veda" where I would suggest a broader "Arya" is appropriate. Nevertheless, there is great suggestion to local veneration of a unique Solar Bull:

At the moment, the earliest appearance of the solar humpback bull motif is recorded on Quetta Ware in Central Baluchistan, Pakistan (Stage 4, 3200–2800 BCE, according to Shudai H. et al.) (Fig. 1). [32] For the time being it is represented by only one specimen — fragments of a bowl of Mehrgarh Period VI style Faiz Muhammad — with a partially preserved figure of a humped bull with birds seated in its horns and with two solar signs — in front of the animal and behind its hump respectively. It is possible that two more solar symbols are depicted under its body and near its front legs (Fig. 2). [33; 34, p. 46; 35, p. 189, 219–220, 223] A. Uesugi dates this bowl to about 2900 BCE. [36, p. 15, 28, 33]

Later on, the solar humpback bull motif is abundantly represented on Kulli Ware of South-Eastern Baluchistan, Pakistan (2600–1900 BCE).

It lacks IVC script, but, it does have graphics that show up on IVC pottery slightly later.


There are rare instances of polychrome from some slides on Balochistan:








It is like jewelry which favors an agate -- carnelian against lapis -- turquoise palette.

One finds the IVC Shield shape evolved out of semi-circular, arch-like, roof, or "U" shapes, which also come in stacks. Nindowari also has Bird on Bull. The IVC Bull is the only place to find a pair of birds; they being more associated to Rhinoceros.



As with silver:

B. de Cardi points out that only rarely does true polychrome Nal pottery occur in the settlements of Surab. This pottery at Nal is clearly a funerary ware.

Our few metallic objects of the Nal Culture differ morphologically from those of the Harappa Culture and in that at least those fashioned in silver appear to be exclusively grave goods. Given the simple form of the metallic implements from the cemetery it seems unnecessarily risky to see in them the genetic predecessors of Harappan artefacts. Considered in the context of the entire cultural assemblage, especially the pottery, the artefactual similarities between the two regions are more disparate than previously thought. The metallic finds published and republished here bear witness to a still little-known culture in what Harappa/Greater Iran-oriented colleagues have called the Indo-Iranian borderlands...

The expression Quetta Ware primarily refers to Mehrgarh; Quetta is on the other end of the 55-mile Bolan Pass, but the next major site is Mundigak:




In other words, this art is in Banawali during the era just before the script.

There are several examples in the Solar Bulls article that substantiate -- at the very least -- this had something to do with how people think and therefor how they talk. I don't agree with the conclusions, but the presence is significant.


This remains reasonable:

During the early Harappan phase (c. 3500-2700 BCE), we find the earliest known examples of the Indus Script signs, attested on Ravi and Kot Diji pottery excavated at Harappa. Based on the fact that only one sign is displayed on the pottery surface, these examples represent a premature stage in the development of the Indus Script. Its full development was reached during the Urban period (c. 2600-1900 BCE), when longer inscriptions are recorded.

So:


Earliest known inscribed Ravi sherd






an impression among the earliest examples of script:





That may be a singleton of three Chevrons.

The Branch is a main subject of the script, and is possibly seen again in the next era.



There is another possibility of late continuity at Prabhas Patan:


A unique seal amulet of steatite, obtained from levels ascribable
to the later half of the second millennium b.c. and engraved on one side with seven stylized
deer and on the other with five, deserves special mention.



Parpola thinks it is a horse; this site near Somnath would most likely have been affected by the submergence of Dwarka. It is thought to have remained to 1,500, perhaps longer. So, it is a late image, geometrical quadrupeds without script. In general, these later, southern sites show a regression, that is, the complexity of compounds and modifiers decreases back to basic script. In a certain view, there are as few as twenty-one basic IVC signs, considering what remained in use. However, even the very late Bet Dwarka still uses a Chimera.

The pre-cursor would be model objects, flattened to pictures, converted to basic glyphs, enhanced in various ways.

From this, we see the typical Indian woman has her type at Nausharo and Mundigak. Some of the figurines are distorted, but in general they all have Fish Eyes. Aside from that, there is a fairly realistic woman with a Tika mark in the parting of her hair. She is a "style" among many others. Some of them are so weird, it is decided they are Human Birds.


From heavily perusing the script, I thought it might be obvious that it would give some basic indicator for "man and woman", but even this is less than plain. They might be the identical Twins. They might look the same, and have to be determined by context. On the other hand, animals never sit, and the images obviously have a penis or not. That means that the elephant and rhinoceros might be girls. Most of the others are males. Something else happens when placed in the context of prior three-dimensional objects.

Female figurines are more primordial; males are not really used until around 2,700. There are several kinds of what seem to be human women, of whom, the most extravagant seems to go out of circulation. A clearly abundant variety remains in actual existence, whereas the art of the seals depicts primarily two other kinds of women. One has the long braids, which may not be represented in Pakistan, which is why we want to say it is found in Iran. While we are thinking about drawing a pipal leaf, the three-dimensional braided woman has well made her mark in the oldest metallurgical objects. She is perhaps the oldest, most widespread cultural icon, if you want to put it that way.

The other kind of woman seems more local, the one with bulb-like hair:





Here she is on a type of Mehrgarh timeline:









We believe her three-dimensional form to be replicated in imagery and enter the script, as, possibly, its Chakravartin.

Her personal library is at least as, if not more powerful than, the Copper Tablets.

Although this can easily be shown in other ways, it turns out that in a related "instructive" class to Ivory Rods, the character faces a glyph on Ivory Plaque M-1653. The specimen is broken in such a way that there may have been a second glyph, but, the first is certain. It works impeccably or is among the character's strongest associations, to the exclusion of others.

Among similar objects, it is followed by Ivory Inscription M-1654:





which is the same design as the seal of Nindowari:




But that's back in Kulli country. Is that a foreign place, in the sense of geographically separated, yes, but I am not sure it is any different in a sociological sense.

They perhaps work differently. The braided woman is external, like a curator of the script, particularly the Branch. She is the main visual "yogini". But there is not an immediately apparent way she "enters the script", which, this second woman does in a rather strong way.

Scholars have puzzled with the variety of humanoid glyphs trying to figure them out, and most of them range from formulaic to trivial by comparison.

If I looked at crisis and resolve, or the dynamic or catharsis that would be in the script were it to qualify as "literature", it would mostly involve this person, along with how Three Mountains is like a power conjured by use of several basic texts.

The shape this is taking is not reminiscent of later Sanskrit material. Anyone could assert that the image just given "is" Ursa Major or the Pleiades, or something like that, but for now all we can say is this is less-than-random.

India was a supplier of finished objects, until at its height, it appears to have exported ivory blanks to artisans in foreign countries. One of the most significant artifacts is in fact the Ivory Comb. It would not be an anachronism if the Comb glyph were literally a Comb. It is highly associated with the Elephant. So that is realistic. There are good reasons to suggest among its meanings, Elephant includes Ivory and Lead.

Due to the graphics, in Sanskrit, it would have a preference for Hastin, because of the hand-like appendage. Cf. Avestan:


zasta [-]
18 (I, duA) m. hand (k206)


However, it does not become a stem for any animal names.

The main human character works with the Wheel and the Elephant. The rest of the script seems to follow suit.

There is the frequency of Tiger and Three, as there are Three Tigers, Three Triangles, and Three Mountains, which are suggestive of Shakti and possibly Triloka or Trivikrama. One cannot be sure the Veda invents its underlying metaphysics, but, rather, creates a theological Path as the way to deal with reality.

The same character portrays that in a visual way in one continuous statement. The script is the same way overall, and gives us a pair of alternates with a balancing statement, in numerous ways, while it has precious few texts of glyphs that actually are balanced.


There is the unscripted story of Lady Riding a Bull Throne and Bull Boat with Bird People:






The eyes are explained by usually containing an applique' pigment that has since vanished. That, itself, does not get rid of bird-ness. but attests to the majority of Doll artifacts as probably having been colored (e. g. yellow people). As you see, the males have small flat caps like a beret or fez, among the crew of, this. It is not a cart, such as some bronze artifacts, but is a rather large object with a handle on the back. There is such a thing as a canopied bronze cart, and, certainly, the "cabin" of this thing is a bit unnatural, kind of an artificial cylinder. The lady inside is about 30% larger than the other people. The report has several additional views of it.

They might be related to the people of the seals if they never do anything realistic.

The most realistic thing an IVC human does is sit down in a yoga pose.

This particular specimen has received the epithet "wackiest thing ever".


If it represents how they thought:

From 1996 to 2003, the ASI (Archaeological Survey of India) conducted excavations in the Hisar region of Haryana and recovered some ancient tombs of Harappa. The report released by the ASI examining the graves states that "the dignity and standard of living of women in the Harappan society was far superior to that of the men and the Harappan society was quite progressive in the advancement of women."

Even the speciality of the ‘cowboat’ was primarily women. The demeanor and costumes of the female characters in the vehicle prove that it is an archeology built in a matriarchal society. That is, this vehicle gives us evidence of a women-centric civilization 5,000 years ago.

The most notable feature of this vehicle, with a total of 15 passengers, is that the women are larger in size than the men. Even their seats are taller and the female statue on the throne is the largest. Also every male idol is clothed while the females are naked. Another remarkable thing is that the kind of clothes that the male passengers are wearing in the vehicle have never been seen anywhere.

According to Massimo Vidal's experiments, the vehicle was built in around 2600 BC and the contrast in the male and female statues represents the Harappan social system.

She and her crew display unusual features including large almond-shaped eyes, elongated heads or headdresses, and beak-like noses.


In that sense, the women are more bird-like.

It just looks like a Solar Barque to me.

Because Hathor and Byblos were united, it is not entirely impossible the above is knowledgeable of Hathor. Or, of the Solar Bull.

It sounds like what was just reported of Kunal. The women are typically buried with more regalia.


Again, when people throw around words like "matriarchy", it can get as misleading as "Aryan" or "the Harappans", but when you regularly find superior burial goods, we can't say it's because they are more dead. Just like with the "boat" above, there is no reason to suspect an external solar or river goddess, any more than the chieftess may represent an individual woman on her journey. It might be a funeral ritualistic item, asking for her to be attended and transported. The script might happen to specify one way or another.

Maybe it was just a gig where she rode around in a barge and people threw flowers in the water.

I am not sure about the Cobras as reported on the Bull's shoulders, as it seems to be a continuous vine-like design with cobra-like terminals. Doesn't look like a leaf. Not sure if that makes a Cobra Pipal. The ones from the tablets are a little more obvious.




I'm thinking of one post to capture the physical presences and absences of being, such as, at the point of script origin, India does not have a horse, which is probably only acquired in the late period around 2,000. Then we will try to form up a collection based on the field symbols, before statistical methods as a container.

[shaberon]

This post is for physical considerations.

I am making a type of reverse hypothesis, suggesting that what we consider "writing" is derived from a similar use of three-dimensional objects.


One remark was that India would "bring home" something it was interested in, such as a horse, possibly a language. Then mostly they reproduce it on their own. Through all of the digs, so far, in terms of commerce, India barely imported anything as finished goods. The most important find is that it did not "import" people, as invaders, or a mass exodus, or any significant migration. Instead, they mixed partly outwardly, towards Sistan.

This is what that source of curiosity was like. To exit India, enter Bolan Pass:





pass this in its heyday:






to arrive at the Hamun:





which would have a larger city just beyond it, and, a route to Kermanseh. This province has a physical corridor going to the narrow point of Hormuz Strait. And it has what may be the origin of writing at Konar Sandal or Jiroft:

Some archeologists believe the discovered inscription is the most ancient script found so far, predating these others, and that the Elamite Cuneiform and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform written language originated in Jiroft, where the writing system developed first in its original form and was then spread across the old world.

The success of those is perhaps because they write the sounds of words, whereas Indus script likely does not do this, because each glyph is a word or more that has an explanation. In that case, it's not really possible to read it. We might be able to understand it, as a variant of one of the oldest glyphs, Master of Animals. This is possibly from the fourth millennium at Giyan Tepe in the Zagros Mountains:






Now is that abstractly transferred to IVC, yes, but in detail, no.

It is easy to find some commonality.

What we are calling "Ibex" is really the Iranian animal par excellence from time immemorial. This is quite simple if we think in terms of Agriculture:

Ibex (Bezoar) goat mating season starts at the end of Oct beginning of Nov, when Ibex males, which are normally solitary, gather to fight for females.

Elam (Western Iran) was another place where Ibex (Bezoar) goat was "The Goat of Rain" (rain season started when Ibex goats began mating). Other parts of the world where we find the same link between Ibex (Bezoar) goats, rain season and fertility are Crete, Cyprus, parts of Anatolia, Levant, Arabia, Mesopotamia, parts of Central Asia.

Ibex dominates the oldest religious images in Mesopotamia, which date to the time before the irrigation was invented. During that time, people depended exclusively on rain to water their fields. Hence the veneration of Ibexes who signalled the arrival of rain season.

The main contrast is to Egypt, which had flood-based agriculture. Iran only recognizes two seasons, rainy and dry. India is of course also rain-based, but, originally, observed three seasons, hot, wet, and balanced. Later Sanskrit literature evolves this from four up to six seasons. But if we look in the IVC seals, the Ibex is instead of rain, paired with the Sun. In terms of border-less speak, this feasibly could be Mitra or Aryaman. They are also paired under the so-called "Pashupati", which if anything is perhaps "Mitra".


Painting on pottery is ancient in west Iran at Tepe Sialk:


Zagheh archaic painted ware (c. 6000–5500 BC) is found in Tepe Sialk I






In the current knowledge base, this is where the art of Silver comes from:

Pieces of charcoal found in one of the furnaces in which litharge fragments were found provided a radiocarbon date of 3660-3520 B.C. which introduces them as the oldest so far known fragments of such process in the ancient world.

That's what will become historically known as the Isfahan region. This is a pendant that still has the loop:




It has a Ziggurat by around 3,000.

The easy way out of the mountains gets you out into what will become Elam and Susa, where IVC seals have been found. The long way over the Zagros is back towards Armenia and other refugia around the west Caspian shore.


Jiroft figurines were distributed like seals:

They were found widely, in archeological digs from the Indus Valley in modern day Pakistan to the Persian Gulf and as far north as Gonur Depe, a site in Turkmenistan.

Here is something self-explanatory about iconography.

Animation created with the images on a pottery goblet (c. 3178 BCE) found in Shahr-e Sookhteh:





From the same milieu, Jiroft Dreadfalls Woman:







I don't think she matches the...pottery, or, most media. But she is more famous in IVC seals than the one resembling Dolls. Jiroft rather strongly and clearly has its own internal mythos based on Scorpion Centaur. It in fact is extremely interesting. But there is no script. It is possible she may have character development somewhere over there; right now we can only say it is a somewhat drastic and therefor intentional look.

The Iranian source of silver was probably the same as India, galena extractive process. Does that sound like a craft someone would possibly be willing to travel to study. Yes. Again it would probably be close to a thousand years for the chance of curiosity to come up, before there is a corresponding production in IVC.




There are horse remains in India that probably match the late IVC period, and, could possibly be imaged on a few late seals. There are old references to thirty-four ribs, which is a better match for the Arabian rather than the Steppe horse.

The chicken was first domesticated in the Thai highlands about 1,850, and this is the origin of chickens worldwide. One branch went southeast into Oceania. The other went west to India around 1,300. All the rest of the chickens in the world came out of India. The gene for yellow shanks is Indian. There is no such thing as a chicken in the Rg Veda. There is not one in IVC remains, just wild game fowl that may have been a fighting sport.

In the Avesta, rooster is a symbol of holiness due to awakening one for prayers. Consequently I would suggest its time frame is the 1,200 - 1,000 range, whereas Balkh and Yaz Culture more broadly at 1,500. This is its own local resurgence after Gonur Tepe.


IVC is too old to have these concepts. It is, however, outstanding, for an object that may literally get two-dimensionally imaged and converted into a glyph.


Indus Ivory Comb found in Oman from ca. 2,400 B. C. E., and also seen in Turkmenistan.









A soft-stone flask, 6 cm. tall, from Bactria (northern Afghanistan) showing a winged female deity (?) flanked by two flowers similar to those shown on the comb from Tell Abraq.(After Pottier, M.H., 1984, Materiel funeraire e la Bactriane meridionale de l'Age du Bronze, Paris, Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations: plate 20.150). Ivory comb with Mountain Tulip motif and dotted circles.





They seem to have a lot do do with the script, without bearing any particular statement or combination. Comb is, of course, an Elephant glyph. Here are some of the corresponding accoutrements:






From Mari, of Indian origin:





An interesting reaction to stones is on the page for Twins:

Seven EDII seals show contest friezes (Ashmolean Museum) The lapis lazuli seal shows in the lower register geometric motifs reminiscent of the Jemdat Nazr Diyala seals. ram in the thicket has not only horns, fringe, beard, eyes and eye-rims of lapis lazuli, but also part of its fleece is made of overlapping sections of the blue stone. Lapis lazuli was also used in amulets sculpted as frogs, fish, flies, calves, bulls, rams, ibex, monkey, seated bull, eagle.

In Mesopotamian and Sarasvati-Sindhu valley sites, significant numbers of objects of lapis lazuli have been found. In the 'royal' tombs, lapis lazuli, carnelian and gold are the three important materials used. Lapis lazuli is a rare stone found in Badakhshan mines (NE Afghanistan, currently known as Kerano-Munjan), in the Pamirs and near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia (F. Rutley, Elements of Mineralogy (rev. by H.H. Read 1948), pp. 380-381). "Darius states that his lapis lazuli came from his satrapy of Sogdia, in which province Badakhshan was located; and finally, the colour range from Sar-i-Sang is closely comparable to that of archaeological lapis lazuli. The varying shades of the pieces of veneer on the 'Standard' of Ur, for instance, can be exactly paralleled by modern specimens from Badakhshan...


4 lapis-lazuli mines are at heights ranging from 6000 to 17000 ft.:

Sar-i-sang, S (Stromby), C (Chilmak) and R (Robat-i-Paskaran)

He almost figures this out in some accidental notes:


stem of muñja grass (used for thatching)

the reed Saccharum munja, reed in a weaver's warp


That's because it's self-reflexive to the same place.

The real gate of India was coming in from the Pamir Highway. The original north-south route went through Dorah Pass:







Dorah is 51.8 km (32.18 miles) long, running from Sanglich (in Badakhshan Province in northeastern Afghanistan) to Imirdin (Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan).

Citral Today says it goes into Munjan, is the shortest route to Central Asia, and has been used for war and trade as far back as they know of.


The ancient Sar-e Sang mines are in the Kuran va Munjan region. Perhaps closer to Zebak than the valley name indicates.

It's the source of the Oxus or Amu Darya River.

This is the destination of the IVC colony, Shortugai. It of course perished, but, curiously, the current residents of Citral where the pass emerges are the Kalash, that derivative, non-Vedic-Sanskrit speaking group, who are genetically practically pure Sintashta.

They are such the purest people on earth, the genetic expression for them is an "eighth continent". Badakhshan, however, is inhabited by Iranians or "Bactrians".

This is its interior.

Kokcha watershed:





Shortugai is actually on the north side of it. There is a canal coming out of the Kochka and parallel to it, around Dast i Qala, that goes on to the Rustaq. Another link with a map and picture makes it obvious that it is on the fairly distant border to Tajikstan and is effectively at the headwater of the Oxus River. Its location is most likely because this is navigable. It is not quite "on" the Oxus/Amu Darya as most articles state, but connected, and obviously still has a difficult trek to the mines.

There are no signs of catastrophe and no particular guesses on why it seems to have been spontaneously abandoned ca. 1,600-1,200.


To be most precise, the area of activity begins after that horseshoe-shaped conflux where "Kuran e munjan" is printed. The link for its mineral data shows multiple mining interests all the way down river to Jurm. Then if you pop the "15", that is Sar-e Sang, about halfway between or approximately where "Yamgan" appears above.


Munji is still the current name for the language and people. Unlike most others, this does register in the same context in the Rg Veda. The grass is even used to make the sacred thread of Brahmins. But it is a saccharum, which means it could probably be pressed for Soma. In fact, here, in the intermediate stage, we are between Sakar as the Sanskrit original for English sugar. As with other things, history shows the usage of various "wild" sweeteners until the emergence of official "sugar cane" from Indonesia.

In terms of directions, this is the center of the world, and in terms of access, there is none. Other than the river, there is one route that notches through the place. For India to even know about such a strategic location is itself impressive. For at least a few centuries it was successful.



The most legitimate Indian timeline is observable in a vast natural shelter.

Bhimbetka near Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh is rather close to the IVC, and has signs of inhabitation from over 100,000 years ago to the historical period. Therefor, the truly ancient or "Australic" Indians did not only live at the coast. It seems they were as far north as the Shivaliks.

The native testimony is in its Rock Art:

It's hard to look at these images and not think that there are deep similarities with ancient Indus iconography. The intricate design patterns of Mesolithic art (10,000-5,000 BCE) mesmerize; there is the figure with the bow and arrow; the side profile nature of animal depictions, especially bovines carried through to seals; a hunter spearing a buffalo; bangled women; the ubiquitous use of red oxide paint. It does not seem irrational to suppose a continuity between Neolithic, Mesolithic and later Indus iconography, a continuity from which nearly all traces have been lost to archaeology and science. Except for these rock paintings, that is.

Then there is, in Neumayer's words "the ithyphallic Hero surrounded by - or confronting - animals, a recurring mythologem in Chalcolithic art."

There is even a "Deity of the 'Pashupatinath-type' with a wide out-loading horn-crown from which emanate plant-sprouts."

There are people with spiky or "bulb" hair.

They have re-curved bows.

This *does* use the Boar, heavily, which is perhaps remembered as Panjurli in other areas, but so far remains sanitized from IVC script.

Otherwise, Bhimbetka scenes are added probably through the IVC period, perhaps by Khasis at that. It does seem to portray battles and men on horses. Yet it has no writing, is abandoned and forgotten to the point where its neighbors simply believe it haunted or cursed.


It fails to yield any telling connection to the Veda or IVC. Yet it may be that some of those are "prior Indian ideas" that enter the script.

It comes at a point that does not compete with the oldest forms of writing, but, it does match irrigation-based expansions at Shortugai, Mari, and Kanesh around 2,300. Although some of the glyphs are older, mature IVC script runs about 2,300 - 1,900. Around 2,100, it begins to be copied in Dilmun for about fifty years, at which point they seem to be able to generate their own scribes to work it, and then it goes off on a tangent. Even more bizarrely, they have the presence of untold numbers of grave cities, in just one area is something like an estimated 400,000 interments, as if people went there to die, or they were shipping in human remains for luck.

They have, I think, the obvious digression from IVC script, because they begin using the date palm as the "Tree of Life" or "Asherah Pole", but where do we find this pipal tree? In the National museum of Kuwait:






That's gold.

It has an orientation. The pipal is supposed to be up.

The presence of Markhor is non-Kuwaiti, and if you continue along, you get to a type of Markhor totem pole where it looks like he has a third eye.

The limited use of Ibex is more proportional to IVC.


You'd almost guess that someone was very interested in Pipal with two Unicorn Heads and perhaps primarily just swapped out the Unicorn for some of its realistic adjuncts.

It's probably more fascinating than Jiroft, and along with Old Syria has what I would call an extremely difficult heraldic art. Unlike anything related to cuneiform, this stuff remains unsolved, and seems thoroughly permeated by Indian antecedent. Maybe if one is solved, they will fall like dominoes. For the time being, I'm going to leave those as their own subjects, as large as or larger than this one.

The most continuous relic spread as far as Mari and is still valid today. It's mathematical -- geometrical. That would be the system of weights based on Ratti Seed. The basic part of this system is binary (2, 4, 8, 16...), and it has other parts that are a little different (such as multiply and divide by two). I would not be surprised, then, if the script handles the difference between multiplication and exponents. This is reported as having been in use all across west Asia, though not necessarily more than a few centuries. In India, you can obviously tell, it never changed.




Otherwise, there are factors that gainsay human memory retaining anything for any length of time.

For example, Armenia is thought to be the home of "Indo-European", whose eastern and western branches differ by a few consonant shifts, and the typical verb last of the east. It's how humanity survived the Ice Age for a few thousand years before this split. But they don't know what happened. Even in later times, there is such a thing at the Lake Van Cuneiform, which was forgotten in about two hundred years. It actually does record history in a way that agrees with Assyrian records from around 900-600. But then we notice around 300, they take in the legendary history of Zoroastrianism, stitching in their national hero. And then when Christianity arrives, the process is repeated in terms of Genesis. Considering that Cuneiform means they must have been subjected to Semitic literati, it sounds like they have taken a re-vamping multiple times. and can't answer our curiosity about how "Hittite" might be related. This represents the source of all languages in its family. Nothingness in the intellectual sense.

In other cases, physical science can pinpoint events, which there is no recollection of. One is the eruption of Thera or Santorini near Crete in the Mediterranean. I've never found a contemporary story that says "this blew up" or "these people fled", you just suddenly find it inhabited by Myceneans who write about something else. The only guess I've come up with it that it may be tied into the rubric of "fear the wrath of Poseidon". It may be indirectly remembered. But there are no records of a verifiable major event.


One of the first mistakes made about India is that people try to push the Zodiac on it.

The oldest known complete Zodiac derives from a couple of Babylonian border stelae from around 1,300 that have added Aries.

To the Greeks, this is the era of Troy, that is, the Golden Fleece. What they consider ancient Olympian legend points to a new definition of a star sign coming from the east. You can try it, but Aries does not call attention to itself. It was specifically designated by someone around this time. The Sumerian records have a different sign, Hired Man or Man with Plough. So, if India makes any attachment to Aries, they have made a mistake. Nothing natively found represents this or its associated belt.

The Zodiac is highly imaginary, hard to see, and circles its own made-up path. India observes the quite physical path of the Moon.


So, humans aren't particularly good at memorializing catastrophes, but they are supposed to be star gazers. Things happen in the sky, and we can read certain x-ray formations to get an idea about the explosion of a star. This has been parsed against the knowledge base of writings and traced the earliest attestation of a Supernova, which happens to be Chinese and around Antares ca. 1,300.

And so our wonderful sky-mapping instruments can detect these x-ray blobs and so forth, and plot what is considered to be "supernova remnants", and the comment matches the plot. it just says there was a new star, it got big, and then faded away, over something like six months. There were no volcanoes or thunderbolts, or panics or revolts of the people, they just noticed this thing happening.

And so you can look around for that in any other cultures, and, I don't think they mention it.

But the time frame is too late to be relevant to the seals.


Here's what happens. You tick the plot readings for supernova remnants back a notch, and you get to something Really Big.

It can't be said *precisely* when this happened. We can only give it a broad range that probably comes out no later than IVC. The extrapolation from the readings is that it would be about 100 times brighter than Venus which means it would be about like the Moon.


Moreover, the place where this happened is already beside a void, and, if we are not sure whether the supernova was 2,000 or 5,000, we could presume it would have called attention to its constellation. In near opposition to Vega and the Galactic Center Sagittarius A*, for Capella or Alpha Aurigae:

In Akkadian times, Capella may have been Dil-gan I-ku, meaning “the messenger of light,” or Dil-gan Babili, the patron star of Babylon. In Sumerian, it was called mul.ÁŠ.KAR, meaning “the goat star,” and in Assyria it was known as I-ku, “the leader,” meaning the leader of the year. The start of the year is believed to have been determined by Capella’s position relative to the Moon at the vernal equinox before 1730 BCE, when the Sun entering the constellation Taurus marked the beginning of spring.

In Bedouin astronomy, Auriga stars represented a herd of goats. The Bedouin in Sinai and Negev called Capella al-‘Ayyūq ath-Thurayyā, “Capella of the Pleiades.”

In Hindu astronomy, Capella was called Brahma Hṛdaya, “the heart of Brahma.”

Baltic people called Capella Tikutis or Perkūno Ožka, meaning “thunder’s goat.”

We can be sure that, if it has not started this way, Capella moves into what might be the most spiritually powerful position in India.

It's physically un-missable. Capella has a very nice page of its own as the Galactic Anticenter:

In one hand, the charioteer cradles a goat known as Amalthea...

Sometimes, Capella and Aldebaran are the Pole Star. But that is outside the scope of our consideration.

During the seals, the Crocodile is probably "north", whereas Capella -- Auriga is really "up", and, it may also be a seasonal marker.


This underlying facet of Indian thought is a profound dread of the Cosmic Axis.

The galactic center is literally down, like Down a Well in the Rg Veda, a spiritual prison. It is the worst influence. Astronomers argue it is the best reference because it is the true fixed point. Its opposite is not clearly symbolized by a goat, because it is the heart.



Any kind of "Goat Capella" is an utter change from the Australic Indian Astrology, which has no Zodiac, but is largely a farming scene made mostly of this cluster:


Orion-Taurus-Auriga-Gemini


Their Capella is archaically a Bird's Nest, later a Well, and it is timed such that its heliacal setting indicates monsoon season.


I don't wind up thinking the seals are intellectually sourced from there.

From a Sumerian meaning, Gam for "shepherd's crook" may be the Auriga constellation.

Or it is Mul.Gam for the Shepherd himself.

That is to say, auriga = chariot/eer would be a later, further adaptation.


So, alright. There is an inner Indian view that the star is a Well, being tended by Gemini which is really two sisters drawing water from it. In Sumeria, it is a goat. Not a goat sign like Aries, just a goat star. Carried or led by a person or their staff. Sounds a bit like the Meluhhan interpreter.


Askar the Goat Star or Matu -- Tempest was certainly Akkadian New Year. It is of:

bāb-ilû, meaning "Gateway of the god(s)", translating Sumerian Ka.dingir.ra

or of grove-of-life.

Auriga usually has no chariot, always has a goat. The Sumerian list uses "south" stars as the chariot. We are left with the Age of Taurus apparently being marked by a Goat.



Since the Zodiac was not a factor in the original star gazing, what we call "Age of Taurus" physically looks like a change of two constellations:

Note that because of the position of the constellations in the sky, it is possible to see Auriga as "taking over" for Gemini, and to see Taurus as "taking over" from Orion (or rather, usurping Orion's position, as it was more often encoded in mythology). Strictly speaking, Taurus took over from Gemini, because the path of the ecliptic rises at an angle (an angle related to one's latitude, as discussed in this previous post). However, mythologically speaking, we find Auriga and Orion playing roles in the stories which the ancients used to preserve the record of this mighty shift from Gemini to Taurus.

The special relation of Amalthea and Zeus is the Greek relegation of that prior age to pure myth.

That's a way of dealing with "ages" -- obliterate them. I'm going to compromise -- that is, disregarding Zodiacal Ages until you can be sure someone was applying that format. If we ignore the constellations, and simply ask what prominent stars would have been appropriate to mark the spring equinox, it is around p. 498:


Castor & Pollux 4,000

Sirius 2,500

Capella 2,000

Betelgeuse 1,600

Aldebaran 700

Pleiades 200


So, even if the star signs or constellations are not just debatable, but actually different in different places, that does not affect which individual star would mark the equinox.

This is relevant because, to study ancient astronomy, you have to look at it in their terms, meaning the first and most important luminaries to be mentioned are Sun and Moon. And most extant astrology relies on Zoroastrianism, such as remarked in the Greek syncretic schools of Egypt in the time of Serapis, in a way that is probably far more flattering than it is true. Yes, there was Zoroastrian astronomy, however it is not from the Avesta, but from later interactions in Babylon. The Avesta hails the Sun and Moon. There is a Star, which is probably Sirius, although this is known from later associations, and not directly producible from the original Avestan text.

It doesn't have planets.

The planets are found creeping in one or two at a time. The classical tradition of Seven Planets is probably only slightly older than the Zodiac. The site of Mudumal in India is so far said to have drawn one planet. Therefor, the expectation would be IVC script is highly reticent about planets or Zodiacal signs. To a limited extent, there may be uses of the same asterism in other ways, for instance the Indian Gemini is Mithuna the Couple.

So we will put up the Twins glyph versus the fact that the west has Gemini Dioscuri, while placing verb first before its object usually.


Consequently, you would think there is an extreme likelihood the script deals with Sun and Moon, and, in descending probability, certain stars or planets, and, possibly, some recognizable constellations. But just as there are not six seasons in the Rg Veda, the full set of Nakshatras or Mansions of the Moon is not attested until the Atharva Veda. Some of its signs are in the Rg Veda, which somewhat implies observations of the moon's trail, but not necessarily that each day has its own house.


Naturally, Astrology is the first science and most important subject for Time and Direction, this is true anywhere. This is in tandem with Agriculture. That is, the year may not have been marked by a star, and what seems to merit strong consideration in the Veda is the Frog as the symbol of Rain.

Egypt's Nile sort of translates to India's Frog.

That matches the seasonal cycle, more easily than a number of days. The number 365 1/4 is again something that was not determined until Serapic or Ptolemaic Egypt. We cannot be sure if IVC might observe the new year by a Frog and Rain, or Sirius or Capella, but a lunisolar opposition is less likely because more difficult to track. Most of history is based in a lunar calendar which is inaccurate, and uses various types of "adjustments" or "corrections" so that its months will fasten to the seasons as desired.

You don't care if you just want the Frogs and Rain to come out. It doesn't matter how many days, it matters that it happens, and realistically usually varies by two weeks. It doesn't matter if a "year" is 358 - 372 days, but it does matter that it is somewhere in that range, because you could get floods and blight, or drought. That would seem to be a priority, although it is possible they may have used an equinox marker and figured out how to contrive a year that way. That seems questionable, or possible, in IVC, but I would not be terribly confident about a calendar based on tracking a moon -- sun Opposition.



Astrology has been used by the Funeral school to suppose that the IVC animals are constellations. It thinks this is the Unicorn:


Auriga is the body, Taurus the head.


But then it winds up using Aries for IVC. And so it turns out to be another unloading of arbitrary assignments without any basis to establish them in the first place. However, it may be possible the themes converge in an India-related track to the west, identifying Pipal with two Unicorn Heads with an Asherah Pole:


This pole is identified
with the goddess Inanna and thereby the Auriga
constellation. The square with the wheel in the
right side lower corner is the symbol of sun
calendar (as per Benght Hemtun).


Out here, it is not a problem to imply the Taurus constellation was in use, so, the question becomes, does "standing on a bull" equate to a "new equinox marker"?

It is a Zebu mounted by Syrian Goddess:






Or see one at the British Museum:

The Syrian goddess stands facing right, wearing a square-topped, horned headdress and a robe with rolled borders, and holding a cup below a disc set in a crescent; before her a small monkey raises one paw in worship. The Syrian goddess faces a naked goddess, with frontal torso, and head and legs turned towards the left, and whose arms hang by her side. Behind her stands a veiled woman with her hand raised in worship; between the two figures is an ankh. A stylised tree terminates the scene.

This culture called Old Syria ran from 1,800 - 1,600.



The Dravidian school is unaware of Capella, which was brought in by Frawley:

The Milky Way intersects the zodiac around two main points, 0 Gemini and 0 Sagittarius.

The 0 Gemini area is marked by the Nakshatra of Soma called Mrigashira or the antelope’s head (23 20 Taurus – 06 40 Gemini, with 0 Gemini as the central point). It is said to be the head of Prajapati or Brahma, the Creator, who also has the form of a deer or antelope. Mrigashira includes the same region as the constellation Orion, marking its upper portion. If one draws a line directly north from the three stars in the belt of Orion one comes to the star Capella (Alpha Auriga), the star called the heart of Brahma (Brahma-hridaya) in Vedic thought (Surya Siddhanta VIII.20). This appears to be the main spiritual power point in the Vedic zodiac.

A confirmation to the connection between Rashis and Nakshatras can perhaps be found in Harappan archaeological ruins. An Harappan seal dated to 2400 BCE has been found recently that shows a deer and an arrow on one side, the symbol of Mrigashirsha (Orion) and a Scorpion on the other. Scorpio is opposite Orion in the zodiac. When one rises, the other sets. S.M. Ashfaque has argued an astronomical basis for this seal (“Primitive astronomy in the Indus Civilization. In Old Problems and New Perspectives in the Archaeology of South Asia, ed. J.M. Kenoyer, 207-215, Madison, Wisconsin).

The idea has some traction with UNESCO:

A 3rd-millennium seal from Rehman Dheri, showing a pair of scorpions on one side and two antelopes on the other, suggests knowledge of Vedic themes. It has been suggested that this seal represents the opposition of Orion (Mrigashiras, or antelope head) and Scorpio (Rohini of the southern hemisphere) nakshatras. The arrow near the head of one of the antelopes could represent the decapitation of Orion. It is generally accepted that the myth of Prajapati being killed by Rudra represents the shifting of the beginning of the year away from Orion and it places the astronomical event in the 4th millennium BC.

The dedicated attempt uses Archer Deity as the "Rudra" of the legend. Yes, the physical fact is true that Orion "moved", but there is no particular reason the legend has anything to do with this. Vedic Rudra is Medicine. We aren't sure they had "Scorpio". Brahma, on the other hand, as the name of a star, has simply the meaning of "praise", whether as the verb, the utterance, the practitioner, it is all about mantra, and has nothing to do with an externally conceived creator deity. It has creation, of at least four kinds, but it does not have these later versions of deities or their myths.


If I use the primitive meaning, then I would read the phrase "Brahma Hrdaya" as:


The heart and soul of the practitioner go up.



What happened is that Upanishadic mantras imitated the last line of Sukla Yajur Veda:


Om Kham Brahma


As far as I can tell, that is the only Vedic mantra that begins with Om.

Otherwise, om is an adjusting syllable to keep the verse in meter.

People struggle with this verse as if it were a mystery, but, just by reading it in tune with how we just read the cosmos, it is simple enough that Kham represents:


Heaven


And so it has to do with a direct link of one's mantra to heaven. In that sense, it is fairly straightforwardly translatable, "oh praise heaven". Something not too far from that.

In the long run, I would have to say the Vedic solar myth is its own, would not be apparent in Avestan or IVC, except of course the basis of it would be. And we see the Vasisthas have a common patronymic, Mitravaruna, one word, and Agastya is frightfully close to what seems to be the late IVC to south India establishment. Or possibly before.


South India is different enough that you can see things like Canopus and the Magellanic Clouds.


One of the things that is the same wherever you go is the North Pole, and on this, India actually does have something that is highly structured. Moreover, everyone still uses it today. That is the ceremony of Marriage. In the most superficial aspect, it lacks the intrigue of the solar myth as developed in the Rg Veda. But this is how Sukla Yajur Veda is a bridge from the esoteric into one's household. It's an abbreviated, truncated version, which is not a contradiction, but incomplete.

One of the early and significant events of the Veda is that the Sisumara is bound. Here's how it works with the timing going from Iyengar:

There are several different Sūtra texts attached to the four Vedas demonstrating not only their lateness, but also their spatial spread in accounting for the variation in the practices. However, the common feature of all these texts, in the historical context, is their memory of Dhruva as a fixed star to be invoked, seen and shown to the bride in the marriage rite. In all cases, the hymn for addressing Dhruva is same as or very similar to the one in the Ekāgni-kāṇḍa (I.9) mentioned above.

and:

But for the more ancient period we have no exclusive texts other than Lagadha’s Vedānga Jyotiṣa (c 1400 BCE)

Over a long period of time the effect of precession was also felt as with the loss of importance for the constellation Śiśumāra (Draco) and shifting of the Pole Star Dhruva. The astral descriptions and the religious lore behind the above astronomical entities provided the inspiration for the development of observational and mathematical astronomy in India.

That's the "mid" estimate. Shrewd critics want to force the Vedanga to fit the estimation of the "final compilation"; however, the self-evidence within the text fits it to an earlier date. It is not impossible, that, owing to factors like acceleration, or the measurement of signs, it *might* need to be adjusted back to 1,800.

It is probably not later than what he said, and, he is speculating that obviously if you go back far enough, there will be different stars pointing to the pole.

The "Aranyaka" is considered wilderness literature from roughly the same period as the Brahmanas, around 800 or so. This is an instance of naming the Sisumara sign such that it is no longer Draco. Abhaya is not clear as a star, when we are given Simsumara first from Taittiriya Aranyaka:

….dharmo mūrdhānam brahmottarāhanuḥ yajño’dharā viṣṇurhṛdayam samvathsaraḥ prajananam aśvinau pūrvapādāvatrirmadhyam mitrāvaruṇavaparapadau agniḥ pucchasya prathamam kāṇḍam tata indrastatḥ prajāpatirabhayam caturtham| sa vā eṣa divyaśśākvaraśśiśumāraḥ…| …….dhruvastvamasi dhruvasya kṣitamasi tvam
bhūtānāmadhipatirasi tvam bhūtānām śreṣṭho’si tvām bhūtānyupaparyāvartante namaste namaḥ……śiśukumārāya namaḥ||


(TA. II.19.1) ….Dharma is the forehead, Brahma is the upper jaw, Yajña is the lower jaw, Viṣṇu is the heart, Samvatsara is the genital, Aśvins are the forelegs, Atri is the center, Mitra and Varuṇa are the hind legs. Agni is the first stem of the tail, then Indra, then Prajāpati and then Abhayam is the fourth. This is the shining celestial Śiśumāra…….You are fixed (dhruva), you are the place of Dhruva……You are the Lord of Beings; you are the best among them. (All) Beings go around you. Namaste!…… salutations to you the boy-child. The commentary of Sāyaṇa clearly mentions that this hymn is to be used in the evening, turning towards the north and looking at the dhruva-maṇḍala, for meditating on the Cosmic Brahma.

Brahmopasthānamantra


is the name of this for evening meditation.

The Titirri school is intriguing because it remembers the Vaikhanasas, and says the Vatarasanas are Aruna Ketus. It is the source of Mahanarayana Upanishad. Yaska is associated with this lineage.






The bridal hymn is:


60 dhruvakṣitiḥ dhruvayoniḥ dhruvamasi dhruvatasthitam | tvam nakṣatrāṇām methyasi sa mām pāhi pṛtanyataḥ || Ekāgni (I.9)

Here the quality of Dhruva as a star is said to be fixed. Dhruva is praised as the methī or the fixed column to which the nakṣatras are bound.

Śiśumāra, the 14th star counted from the head and placed on its tail being the fixed Dhruva or the Pole Star. The effect of precession on the sky picture was also felt as recorded in the Maitrāyaṇīya text, where Dhruva was observed to be drifting away from its original position. Notwithstanding such natural effects, the formality of showing the star Dhruva has continued in Hindu marriages over centuries coming down in the same form to this day as a ritual, even though everyone may not know which star was originally invoked by the prescribed hymns. But the orthodox successors to the Vedic tradition have preserved this information quite correctly as will be seen later.

Maitrayana Upanishad says it is "drifting", not where to. Later, he means the correspondence in Brahmanda Purana:

Listen to this explanation of mine which is real and observable but mystifying people. He, who is at the tail of the 14 stars looking like a śiśumāra; Dhruva the son of Uttānapāda, has become the main pivot of the pole in the sky. Verily, he rotates the sun, the moon and the planets continuously. The stars follow him who is himself circling like a wheel.

His (Śiśumāra’s) upper jaw should be understood as Uttānapāda. Yajña (Kratu) is known as the lower jaw and Dharma as the head. At the heart is Nārāyaṇa (Sādhya). The twin Aśvins occupy the forelegs while Varuna and Aryamā are at the hind legs. Samvatsara is the genital and Mitra occupies the seat. In the tail are Agni, Mahendra, Mārīca-Kaśyapa and Dhruva. The (previous) four stars of the Śiśumāra never set. It is remembered that Dhruva is the last star after Agni, Indra and Kaśyapa.

Well, if anything, the first change that was made was from Thuban to Kochab:


Kochab was known as the pole star and sometimes called Polaris between 1700 BCE and 300 CE.

The star we call Polaris did not become the North Star until about AD 500.

Uttanapada is:


the star Β in the little bear


which is Kochab.

That name is not present in the Aranyaka, where it may be that Abhaya = Kochab, the Pole Star, Uttanapada.


Rather than forcing the literature to be earlier -- taking it to mean Thuban, as Iyengar seems to do--it seems to us that Astrology has had to re-define "Simsumara" as well as "Dhruva", to account for *three* pole stars, or two changes of them. IVC would not refer to Kochab or deal with this aspect of the legend. So I think the early Rg Veda is establishing a civil calendar on a "new" Sisumara sign as recorded later. As for the name of one of the stars involved, we are directed to a comment on X.72:


the term uttanapAda in yoga means with feet upwards, but is also
used for a woman giving birth, the mother goddess often depicted in early
sculptures.


It may also refer to the Renuka form. In another translation, it is a region. In the Puranas, the region would be of Vishnu and Ganga. In the Brahmanda, Uttanapada appears with the generation of Prasuti and Akuti, which is the Vyuha, or subtle divine creation prior to the material world. The verse cited, Brhaspati X.72, is a "Deva Creation".


It is Brhaspati with Laukya Aditi Daksayani. There, we get the interpretations:


“In the first age of the gods the existent was born of the non-existent; after that the quarters (of the horizon) were born, and after them the upward-growing (trees).”

“The earth was born from the upward-growing (tree), the quarters were born from the earth; Dakṣa was born from Aditi, and afterwards Aditi from Dakṣa.”


WD:

3. in the earliest age of the gods, existence was born out of
non-existence. after this the quarters of the sky were born from her
who crouched with legs spread.

4. the earth was born from her who crouched with legs spread, and from
the earth the quarters of the sky were born. from aditi, dakSa was
born, and from dakSa aditi was born.




Until someone would install Kochab as the new pole star, previous civilizations would have watched Draco crawl over it:


Iota Draconis Edasich 3.29 Draco within 5° used to be the North Star at about 4,420 BC

Alpha Draconis Thuban 3.65 Draco within 0.1° used to be the North Star at about 3,000 BC

Kappa Draconis 3.82 Draco within 6° a near-north star, shares timing with Kochab



Thuban was the most accurate, but rather faint. Not that the others were much better. Starting from Kochab, Indian lore does track the path of Dhruva, which is Axis Mundi.

If, then, the Rg Veda processes a new star sign, IVC would probably refer to its precursory background.

Because the Sisumara sign is a Crocodile, it is associated with Varuna, which is probably an ancient Arya term prior to Sanskrit.

It is possible that nothing actually changed, that in IVC Draco was always Draco and then Sisumara was "fixed" simply by naming Kochab as Dhruva. If Varuna were defined as the Dhruva deity, then Varuna would move. The oldest texts do not use Draco, so, they are not that old, but what they are using could go back well before when they were written. It is like someone calling Kochab "Polaris" and it quits working, and, there is nothing, until what we call Polaris comes along.

That is reinforcing to the chronology if an early Vedic event was valid around 1,700; leaving a couple of centuries for its inherent backstory. The "fixing" is a mantra, that has nothing to do with Vedanga Jyotish, which is an issue about seasons, not the pole star.


Now, here is one of the most impish physical facts.

True then as it is now, which was first brought to my attention by Buddhist mantra. It isn't Buddhist, it is inseparable from any Indian linguistics of any epoch. Here is a riddle for the seals -- what is the Moon?


The Rabbit.


Anyone is welcome to go and check and see what I mean. But in the seals, this thing is hidden. It comes out in the Mohenjo daro Copper Tablets, hides itself in script, and turns into some kind of a Mega Glyph. If this is for the purposes of Archer Deity, it is possible he is on a rabbit hunt.

3 x 3 x 3 = 3 ^ 3 = 27 Nakshatras, approximately.


Have I, personally, seen something more suggestive, or, found any reference from someone on such a blatantly obvious subject?

No.


Did this mark appear suddenly or change significantly since the Ice Age?

No.


Because the Copper Tablets have Mriga -- Deer, is this Orion's head?


Possibly.

If that was a known "Age", I'm not sure people would pay that much attention to it centuries later. Archer Deity is Rudra-esque in that he is a Soma deity, which is Medicine, consisting of Moon, Waters, and Plants.

Rabbit in the Moon is one of the most permanent and ubiquitous natural works of art in the cosmos.

I would guess the script would discuss fortnights and quarters before there would be a star-per-day. Or, Sukla and Krsna Paksha as "two halves" is an underlying metaphor in practically all Indian thought, which is again similar to the way patterns are made in the Copper Tablets. Waxing and waning. I doubt that explains everything, but it is a likely candidate for "dualisms" somewhere in there.


This gives us some linguistic and physical parameters that are important, but not what I want to dwell on. There is a lot of material about the seals and script.

One of the first stumbling blocks in the attempt to form an IVC concordance is the human being. The script is largely based in the use of very childish stick figures. But then they have various tweaks and poses. And so it was attempted to read these sheerly as script, without any context other than projecting pre-determined ideas at it. So I think we will begin a few posts to simply feature the person as seen. The sources we have for Animal or Zoomorphic iconography are actually quite good, and nail down 80-90% of what can be found, without any stray, misleading propositions. Just needs a bit of touching-up. The human subject has not been anywhere near as effectively written up. Referred to, partially suggested, and heavily interpreted, many times, but never really displayed just-as-they-are.

And so as we are able to get better looks at the visual imagery, you will see the script also has "families" or "dialects", that the glyphs are not homogeneously distributed, but that certain kinds of statements are emphasized in certain areas, and oblivious elsewhere. This, combined with the fact that the writing is not strictly linear, but occurs in various geometry, seems significant.

Also, this gives us a "higher ranked" batch of things I might call "instructional or definitive" are more important than a short, common piece of plain text that may have been found in thirty-five copies. For example, if a Donkey or Deer is a very basic creature only found in one area, it was assigned to do that, according to a set of universal rules.

[shaberon]

I am going to try a refreshing look at this not by trying to read the people in the script, but by seeing how they graphically interface with it.


We will try to start with "generic person", not knowing if the reader, or writer, may be intended here, but that they are their own class as distinguished from "characters".


It's immediately inextricable from almost everything about this whole script.


Decisions about people have caused concordances to be formed in ways that are arbitrary and inaccurate.

This is a false text as returned by the concordance:





There you have a plain Person between Posts. It's recognizable in several other texts. But notice, compared to the original, the concordance has severed Endless Knot and Tree.


M-1425:





Those were rejected since it was assumed they are pictures or images, not glyphs.

Is it not likewise a "picture" of a kneeling person holding U?


This is an existential statement.

It is, I think, the only time that a glyph has interaction. The person seems to be offering it to, or taking it from, an Acacia (sami or kino) tree.

Such surrounding pictures convey meaning.

Endless Knot and Swastika M-1356:





makes sense.

But "U" is not a "picture" of anything, it is certainly a glyph, even though it has entered the visual field. It often seems to be some sort of a numerical qualifier; here is a rare moment of its activity within script. "U" in A-symmetrical Three M-952:





I don't think anyone can tell me how a realistic "cup" or "basket" gets lodged in a "third brick". Something is taking place in the abstract.



There is such a thing as Person holding U entering the script. According to Sign Design, there are one "wobbly legged" and two seated figures holding "plain U", contrasted to the normal stick figure.

H-346:





That would seem to be purely text, although it looks like they are on stilts or maybe have animal legs. Due to this, it is considered a "different" glyph than that of a "normal" person holding U. Likewise, something more illustrative has been filed that way.


The main example is from tablet M-478:





This is the most aggressive scene of them all. Bangled Woman is shoving the faces of two men who have uprooted some trees.

The end of that line is something that has been called a "Linga" or "Stupa", but, on a comparative basis to most of the rest of the tablets, it appears to be a pair of Reversed Cobras surmounted by Facing Birds.





Its suggestion does seem to be at least the stance on the ground is the same as in the tree, it being the same (kind of) tree. These are all pointy-tipped Sami Trees, not Pipals, this distinction being very obvious. If there are other specific tree sub-divisions, they are far less apparent than this fundamental and persistent one.



The second example of Person holding U is less visual and more script-like, M-481:





The bar is slightly twisted; Person holding "U" is beside Winged Man, who is between Posts, Parentheses, or "S"s somewhat ambiguously.

The tiny detail on the reverse is a singleton of an enclosed "Comb" and Enclosure. The accompanying "Horn in U" 341 is rather powerful. Tablet M-481A does not have an image field; in which case the figure perhaps has "entered the script". The reverse does:


"Serpent, partly reclining on a low platform under a tree".

Because this side is half an image, it is possible Person holding "U" might still be an image. This is quite possibly the largest serpent in the corpus. This tablet actually has six sides.


But that was enough to conflate it into a standardized definition and call it a specific article of writing. If one were to consent the second example really is a glyph, it isn't used again. The tablets are copied, which makes some of the cited examples repetitive.


This brief concordance shows copies of the "false" text, the better second example, and adds the form where he has stacked bangles, on the reverse of a more familiar text:






The basic version is what we might call a "U IIII" class of texts. There is one Comb, and, it moves to a unit of "grammar", the second example with Flattened Crab and Pinch. Finally, the glyph is augmented in a certain way that is familiar to me, personally, because as you can see, the appearance of bangles corresponds with the appearance of Stripes on glyphs being enhanced from plainer versions.



This is shadowy, difficult to identify if the kneeling Person with U is a picture or piece of script, or who it is or what they are doing. The kneeling pose is used by Man-in-tree, but does not belong to him exclusively.

Meanwhile, the Tree and Swastika are both para-script -- although they are always "pictures", there is a usage of or interaction with them.

We will have to pass U and its structure on to another post; it is almost like a set of gears.

As for this, a kneeling Person with Bangles and U is arguably beside a rampant Goat:




It has two sides:





and also appears to be used the same way twice:






What is a plain Person, with just nothing.

Some of the humanoid glyphs are not completely sticks -- in some cases they are rendered with a more realistic round head at least. We started by finding this on Three Tigers as well as the Rakhigarhi Illusion or Bull of Heaven.




Round-headed Person as an object on Unicorn C-17:




Chanhu daro has 2/33 "glyph conversation" seals. The simple one is where the faced glyph is "Round-headed person" and the output is "U-shaped" symbol and Winged Man. The other is the elaborate exposition of Shield.





Some of them may also have Feet.

From Unicorn with two Wheels B-1:








Between Procession and Bearer on Tablet M-1405:




Here we or they are in script form on Boat M-1429:






I don't agree with most of those blog rebuses so I ignore them. But it gets a crisp image where you can easily find the person in a very "balanced" text. You can pick off the first bit as a "grammar unit", and they are in a mirror image with Fish, who has obviously "entered the script" from the third side. The grammar is uncommonly using the main symbol of India, which implies the "core information" would be meaningful on its own, and may or may not work with various prefixes.

It has been argued the glyph does not represent a Fish, that it is a looped cord from weaving a rug or something, because fish don't walk on their tail fins. This has two objections. It's primarily a Sky Fish; and, in a way like the mirroring in this statement, it is destined to become the torso and legs of Compound Bearer.

There might still be Loops on some things that have a tassled look, but the Fish is vertical for a reason. There are only two exceptions.

The most likely scenario is that IVC was built by fleets of river boats hauling timber and stone from the highlands.

The exact nature of the Birds and the strange cabin is not something we should just run with anyone's definition of.

A barge is the most likely inspirational model, but that does not mean it is not an imaginary Sky Boat.

When I saw that impossible sculpture, I thought it might be half of this. Perhaps there was another side with a large man attended by females. If you fused the two boats as we see them, you would get Birds on Bull.

IVC script has effectively palindromed Man and Fish. Then, at first glance, the Fish is apparently subject to Varuna. It is difficult not to see this as a metaphysical arrangement of that nature.



Here is a Person similarly balanced with a Donkey on Tablet H-1934A:





Alright. Following that same design principle -- what features something that seems to be a generic person, largely devoid of "characters" or anything else more dominant, what do we find.

Well, that would be sex on Prism M-489:





It has been argued the second felid is not "identical" to a tiger and might be a leopard or something:






Overall, that has a mix of something that is real with something that is imaginary. What happened to the script? I am not sure. The Procession nevertheless probably has an orchestrated meaning.

There are Crocodiles with and without Fish. So, this is an example of a dualistic statement, with a third or central synthesis.

One knows the "flying thing" is not a chicken, so, it is maybe a little weird. The seal is rather worn. In other areas we may see serpentine "flying things" but this almost looks more like a flying squirrel. Tree with Goats is realistic, Chimera is not. And, that's just it, there is a couple in the middle of all that. Indistinguishable from "anyone". No names, nothing is spoken.

If we were going to "read" this, this is what happens. In the late period, there are four animals on "wagons" that seem to be companions for a person. I am not sure they are exactly part Cobra on the Daimabad Bronze Chariot:





It has Four Cobras on the top of the equipment and:


3. Pair of black drongo birds perched on the axle rod; 4. Jackal standing on the rod which links the axle to the harness.


The birds face opposite directions. Even this appears to be in the era of solid wheels. If there were rosters of people hammering wood or sawing nails, we could post that. But no one has really been seen engaging in such customary affairs. Not a lot of statuary either. In fact, we barely find anything else that may be showing some ordinary person.



Unicorn contest with a standing person with wristlets in the middle. Harappa tablet. H97-3416/8022-50





And I think most of the rest of the imaged people are subsidiary to something additional. Most of the rest of the tablets use one or more characters. If we come across anything else very basic, it can be added here.



We have seen them personally objectified as if turned into animal food. Subsequently, a plain Person glyph is relatively common.


Going to examples of the plain Person glyph, Zebu and Person between Twelve:









What we are calling "U" is an inversion of something that commonly travels (in multiples) with Person across an array of objects or tools.

Various other objects were similarly inscribed, in the order to be read normally as they are.

Chanhu-daro, Pl. LXXIV & Mohenjo-daro: copper and bronze tools and utensils (an inscription line mirrored on a zebu seal)...

applies to the first one of these with two Wheels:






It may be a chisel; it has what would amount to a typical, average, common IVC text, except it has done something unexpected with "U". Consequently, this type of usage is fairly standard on inscribed objects.


Plain Person is a terminal glyph 75-80% of the time; here are some examples where it is not.

Buffalo M-268:




The unusual tri-gram re-appears at Khirsara.


Buffalo M-1918 facing A-symmetrical Three and probably a form of Girl-in-air:





C-8 with Double Carpet Rake singleton:




M-26 with vertically-joined Flat Crabs:





In many occurrences, it is along with Winged Man or other factors. We may find and add other examples of Person where they seem to be involved with the core.

I think it probably does emanate from U and Tree with Endless Knot. It may be this actor is supposed to be scripted as Person between Posts, like someone experiencing a palindrome.

The selection of plain Person as just given will probably show itself to use slightly different language than found elsewhere.

[shaberon]

So far, we have found that IVC does not really use people in normal worldly activities. Instead, it looks like U is very important to them.


They are glyphed as if doing something, but that can rarely, if ever, be associated with anything obvious. Rather, they simply appear to be attached to symbols.

We cannot be sure those are their swords and shields, or picks and spears, or make much of any easy assignment. In a few cases, they may even have a pair of things such as Posts, but it is very rare to find something such as this non-matching H-1506:





If U is a story in four chapters (at least), then the Enclosure is likely similar.

That, and perhaps a few other examples, are so strongly tied to something in particular, we may relegate them to that place in the thread. Right now, looking at the script broadly, the question about people with other "items" easily returns a quick comprehensive analysis.


For example, there are two kinds of "One", a Post and a Quote. There is an example of a person with each.

First, here is a trigram with Post on H-72:






There is a shape that has been called a "Mallet" -- just a square with a "handle" on top -- which affects the behavior of Branch.

Here is a somewhat "balanced" text using the "Mallet" shape in an enhanced version, between a Person with Post and another with Quote.

Person with One M-519A:





That is important.

Is it input and output? Mirroring? It's balanced but not very symmetrical. Not quite a palindrome. But not entirely different either.

I have taken to "Checkerboard" to refer to a full dozen hatched units. There are several other sizes called "Grids". In this way, you can find ten in Indus numerology, but so far there is no such thing as eleven. There is Twelve, which in this form is the most common pair, in fact it is rather rare on a solo basis. Moreover, it is the major basis for Dilmun script. Whatever is going on in the "workshop" above is of high significance to the total IVC corpus.


Now, we will make a visual association, and bring up a person with something else. First of all, the intricate design on the U IIII Tablet is like a doubling of something from a more basic configuration.

Simple Endless Knot M-507:





The soft, abstract form is suggestive of the "solid" Shield shape M-592:





Although there, it is a drawing, there are also tablets physically cut to match it. They come in squares, bars, circles, and not much else except this peculiar thing. Not only is it tangible, but, it seems to have an extensive verbal component as well.

Shield over Ibex and Person with two Bows C-23:





There is a Person with Bow, and, occasionally, with two.

It's not realistic. The arrow is only notched as if being carried slackly in stalker mode. It's never drawn and aimed at something, never has any tension on the arrow. That certainly seems to be what it is a drawing of, and, it is not ever brandished as a weapon as far as I have seen. So who are people with Bows?


They are able to do something strange.

The Indus script, the Copper Tablets, and several seals, converge on a statistically-dominant tetragram. There are five-glyph sequences that are repeated, but they do not have stand-alone meaning. This set of four glyphs based on Scorpion, Z, and X appears by itself, as well as in various places. It dominates by a ratio of 16 : 9 to the next most common tetragrams. So, the majority of the script is involved in the composition and elucidation of a small set of these.

There are at least five kinds of Fish, but we usually see three main ones.


Here is a combination of this dominant tetragram followed by India and Three Fish on H-12:




Using the tetragram, Person with Bow does something with Two:





And then they produce two conjugations by Pinch, apparently forming a Double Fat X in the tetragram:





The colorized blog I am taking these from, ran for three years and ended on a challenge question for this tetragram -- "Merchant of the City" or "Master who collects Lightning" as statistical versus phonetic attempts to render the script. That last update was over ten years ago. I'm not sure anyone else has harped on it. Only thing is a better set of statistics so we can get a sense where the combinations are coming from. That makes it curious that this particular Person has an effect on it.


They appear again in what I call Table of Contents M-314:








This is something I, at least, take as declaratory about fish families, not an ordinary sentence or form of record-keeping. It seems to be a collection of subjects, which have their details elsewhere. This is the type of thing that makes it least likely that glyphs consistently represent a single sound, and probably not a single word either. Their groupings and pairings do not support that.


Simpler on M-129:







That burst of humanoids and shapes all blends in the layering of the Copper Tablets. From the Person with One text, you find a Unicorn paralleled to the shield. There is also a shared portion of the text visible at lower and higher levels:



















You get a sense that Three Mountains are being "raised" there.

You get multiple senses of how a statement was "dualized".

If we surmise that not all of the script is "about" this, a lot of it is, and *all* of it conforms to or is instructed by what is found in these related patterns.

Dilmun script is practically authored by Twins and pair of Checkerboards. I am not convinced that their later developments strictly followed IVC rules. So I quit trying to peruse it for a "Rosetta Stone". Dilmun and Jiroft are like the middle eastern libraries from Ebla to Ugarit. These are all fairly recent discoveries and they are massive. One of the more interesting finds was in Kanesh, which is a big mail bag. You could send cuneiform mail from lower Mesopotamia to Syria. It's personal and makes them sound like real people of today.

That's one of the few things you find from around 2,000 or before, that isn't a royal dynasty or receipt for taxes. So, IVC seals are probably not a personal conversation, but they don't have to be those two kinds of very objective literature either.

The Unicorn at the top of the post is like saying "Go" to the entire web of Indian involvement with the Persian Gulf up into Syria, for centuries, resulting in the oldest written attestation of Sanskrit around 1,400 in Kikkuli's Horse Manual. It is so well-made, some of it is still considered perfectly acceptable to modern trainers.

In India, it means something more like whatever is going on with the "Mallet", and,...Turtle.





The next significant "item" that comes to mind is Person wearing Comb. There is a ligature where they are holding it, or it fastens to their arm, or it may be a Bent Branch. But this is a rather unusual display of anything, and, one will have to judge for oneself if it comes from Rock Art:






In IVC, it has a tablet, such as this broken fragment:





of H-182:








Talk about pre-empted from view by five Swastikas. One might try to say, well, maybe it hasn't got teeth -- but yes, it probably is what is being used as seen again here under the exact theme of human-to-glyph interface. It's potent enough to be described as the pinnacle of grapheme documentation M-488:







There is a march towards a Unicorn, but then that would mean there are human-sized glyphs, Comb, Scorpion, Z, and a few other things. A Swastika in a box has taken the place of where a Rhinoceros probably was. There are additional human characters and both kinds of Trees.

This however is not exactly a "character" and does not ruminate all across the texts:

Another anthropomorphic Indus sign is COMB BELTED MAN (XII 15), also known as KP22 and W20. This rare sign occurs four times, always at Mohenjo daro. In each case, the feet of the anthropomorph are shown, a feature rarely seen in other signs. The “comb” element in this case protrudes from the waist of the “man,” with the prongs descending. In one instance, there are two “teeth” on either side of the body (M-831). In the others, there are three “teeth” on each side. This minor difference may not be significant.

Here is the primary association.

Elephant M-1162:





Unicorn M-831:





M-142:





In other words, it appears to be an "Elephant family" subject, which is passed on to the wider script and the Unicorn. Moreover, the Comb by itself follows a ruleset about Two and pairing that also determines a huge portion of the corpus.


Finally though I believe its destiny penetrates another layer of script.

Asterisk wearing Comb:





It's a weird shape, thought to be X on a Fat Post or vertical Rectangle.

There are a few approaches on such a six-rayed figure, including as the glyph of Compound Bearer.

This does, of course, to the human form, resemble a six-headed Hydra.

It may be that the Winged Man fuses into the Asterisk.

Those texts begin with the same four-character prefix. The shorter one has attached a common trigram. This progression of texts replicates what I just suggested based from geometrical observances such as M-79:






I like the name, but, I find it next to impossible those are wings, I think their head may simply have turned into a "W". The humanoid head can become a "U-shaped" symbol, or a Triangle, in a way that is unclear whether it is changes to a person, or different people. But if we are under the proposition that the system is trying to teach a Sanskrit knowledge base to "you", then, several messages are probably individual or personal. Even if sealings tagged goods, the actual seals were quite possibly amuletic in nature, and some of the texts are as likely to be akin to Vedic prayers for protection as anything else.


If you think the best way to figure it out is by straight data analysis of the quantity of texts, then the dominant tetragram and "Comb-belted Asterisk" will subsume almost the entire volume of material.

By thinking the appearance has something to do with it, by emphasizing geometry, I get the same thing that the algorithm does.

There is more about how Person with U launches it. That will take a separate post, and then we will work on dossiers of those people who are visual characters in narrative scenes.

[shaberon]

We posted on people with a few different items, but U is one that is too big on its own, to fit.

I am looking at this as a descending priority stack.

Person with U on the Endless Knot Tablet has something almost unique. A similar design like half of it, is seen, and appears to be encoded as a shield shape. The full Knot is not copied and used in seals; possibly on pottery. In terms of the script, it seems to be equated with Swastika. The connection between the two may become apparent, if we look at the Swastika geometrically as the negative space between Crosses:





Such things are also accomplices of Rotating Tau:




And, while we are there, Nausharo has the same kind of circular pattern we have seen elsewhere:





Here, at Sibri, we find the pattern has changed, and Person with Quote has something not found elsewhere, Lozenge on Post:





So, there are tablets with one up to five Swastikas, which are perhaps summarized by the Endless Knot of Person with U. Although these look the same, part of the schtick to the script may be that "identical look" is not "identity". The identities -- or strong parallels -- seem to be placed on double-faced items, or, perhaps, by interchangeable glyphs.

This U frequently has the purpose of a numerical indicator by Posts. The "U-shaped" symbol uses Quotes. The "numerals" also act independently. In the previous post, if a Person can have an Enclosure along with U, we might say Empty Enclosure is the story of the Copper Tablets. They don't use punctuation, and they lack parts of the script. I don't quite take them as the final word. They do however seem to be a main part of the beginning. It doesn't have U. So they are very selective, and are probably an exposition of Archer Deity.


We found some human-sized glyphs, and some issues about whether pictures are script. The series of things that use more imagery don't have much text.


Arguably, the plot on those tablets washes over into another kind of instructive or authoritative media.


Ivory Rods also have U IIII -- Person between Posts, similar to the Endless Knot text.


Text no. 12 (M-2104) closely resembles the text on
the obverse of the moulded tablets M-478, M-480 and
M-1425...





These are made of ivory, and, they use Comb in a more highlighted way that Copper Tablets.

Traced through seals and tablets, there is a motion of the Comb pertaining to U IIII and U III:


In these tablet parallels we observe the variation between the
presence and absence of the comb-like sign no. 107 at the end. This sign no. 107 uniquely ends the text no.
7 (M-2109 and M-2111), while without this sign no. 107 the remaining part of the text no. 7 occurs on several
incised tablets from Harappa: H-938, H-939, H-1284 and H-2145 have VIIII on the reverse.

...in the tablets H-940, H-2147 and H-2148 the
reverse has the sign no. 41 (‘a [kneeling] man holding a pot’)...

Excepting this initial [Fish] sign, the remaining part of the text no. 5 has an exact counterpart in the moulded
tablet H-1151 from Harappa, the reverse side of which depicts a sacred tree, as well as in the moulded tablet
H-875, which on its other side parallels the final four signs of the rod text no. 1. Without the final comblike sign no. 107, the
text of these two moulded tablets occurs on many incised tablets, the reverse sides of
which have VIII (e.g. H-326, H-924 and H-925).



That is to say, the Ivory Rods are strongly inter-connected with tablets using visual imagery, in more ways than just this.

Comb and U obviously really do condition all of the syntax going forward, although the reason for doing so, can only be described as those scenes already posted.

These rods are cylinders which means glyphs like Comb get a wavy, feathery look, and so numbers look like rain, and this effect is imitated on some of the flat articles.

It will take a large post or even multiple posts to reverse-engineer that collection. The report is very interesting, but, it's also really difficult, because it is all verbal descriptions of statistical common ground. And again, these probably don't give the ultimate statement of the ethos, but they do convey the bulk activity of something that is like a form of grammar. What this means is that directionality -- such as palindromes -- is irrelevant to the meaning, but the order of the sequence is. Such as when we see three kinds of Fish adjusted by Two, it's not a mere addition like "Cod Two Bass Halibut". The ideas are probably not minor logograms, and the "addition" is more like a reference to a sub-genre of literature.


So when wee see the Ivory Rods share text with Person holding U from the visual tablets, this must be a very basic and fundamental meaning that underlies all of the work.


There is also such a thing as U IIII text not involved with art.


H-951:




H-912 specifically adjoins "Fish" to it.

H-910 and H-928 have it complementing two intermediate texts.

H-892:





H-952:





Numeric indicators with U are something like chapters or categories. I don't think it's accounting or prices or quantities of things.



People hold or use various glyphs, but not with any fluidity of motion or graphical interface as compared to U. In turn, the U is also retained in such a way with the plain stick figure.

Here this is clearly script without any kneeling on Unicorn M-67:





L-26:

The sequence [CUP / MAN HOLDING CUP] in the broken seal inscription 1165 [CUP / MAN HOLDING CUP / BI-QUOTES // BELTED FISH /...] is paralleled by the sequence [TWO POSTS / MAN HOLDING CUP] on the reverse of tablet H-247.

H-771B right to left FOUR POSTS / CUP

In other words, if you want to say plain Person with U, that has at least some instances where we would say yes, obviously that is part of the script. Here it goes to Nausharo:






So far, at least, there is not any kneeling figure used in such a way. Perhaps when converted to script, he stands.

As for what are they using, there are a few cases of a rare kind of example, Triple U.

H-764:




M-495

Occasionally, a sign is tripled, as on two tablets from Mohenjo daro and two from Harappa, each bearing TRIPLE CUPS (M-494, M-495, H-764, H-765; also in graffiti on Rhd-53-56).

That says it is a Rehman Dheri = Kot Diji = Kunal symbol.

The following has a "compressed" concordance because the prism has five sides, with one whole line being U U U Branch.

Text 2847 m495; 1623 m494:





as reduced from:

([side A] CIRCLED FORK / CRAB / HAIRY HUNCHBACK // POT / BEARER /// 3 CUPS / TRI-FORK /// [side B] POTTED ONE / DOUBLE CEES / CUP / CARTWHEEL / 2 POSTS / PRICKLY CORN HOLDER / DOUBLE CEES / RAKE / WINGED MAN // POT /// [sides G-B] SNOWFLAKE / ANKH / POTTED ONE // BEARER WITH SHOULDER YOKE /// BIRD BETWEEN PARENS / OVERLAPPING CIRCLES / 2 POSTS (with 24 signs covering three sides of a prism-shaped tablet, this inscription – or these inscriptions – form the longest Indus “text”)

That is no longer true, although it temporarily was.

Also missed by formatting is the singleton Snowflake X:





Last line of M-495:









From its low-order beginning, U -- Bow is a basic pair with Elephant:




which he quotes later on in a longer text:




That is how the script mostly seems to work, by pairs and n-grams, rather than as a sequence of individual, independent units. Everything seems conditional.

We just found Bow as something rather primeval and nearly omnipotent. Like Comb, it is heavily characterized by Elephant.


In its other basic pairings, this Elephant is quoted by a Unicorn. There is a U -- Person with Bow, and U -- Fish without any imagery, and also a U Fish tablet with dotted circles on the reverse. Otherwise it has over a hundred pairings with numeric indicators.

We just saw the Person with Bow accompanied by three kinds of Fish. So, I don't think the basic pairings are disconnected.


Now, let's compare and contrast the Wise Elephant with the statistical method. What he just said is perhaps more important than this whole chart, but he is not on it.

From what we have already posted, we can see through this, and exceed it.

This is a list of the most common pairs, as found at least ten times.

The first one is part of the statistically-dominant trigram.

You soon get to two Checkerboards we have already discussed.

Then you have Mallet and Branch, which we are aware modifies the behavior of the "numeric" Branch.

Then there is part of the dominant tetragram. A few spots later, the red "F" marks "False", because it is not an independent pair, because it goes in that tetragram. On the next line, Trapezoid and Seven is an important part of the Copper Tablets and Ivory Rods. Further along, Person with Post is "False" because that is a trigram with the first pair that is really a doubling. Then there are numeric texts equal to Five -- Bull and Three -- Tiger, and then you get the sense Three Mountains is a behind-the-scenes worker four times:






The chart as a whole over-grabs numerical indicators and parts that are just pieces. It is unable to tell us anything about pairs that may only be published a few times, but are more important.

The real way to learn it is similar to this, but concerns pairs that are more important because they have to do with the variety and format of the script.

From statistics, I tend to think there is a "public" script that could essentially be read by the "illiterate", or foreigners, or in a sprachbund, based on the ability to recognize ten or twenty symbols, and a more intricate version with many kinds of modifiers I don't think anyone could learn without some lessons.

I am going to put that off for a while, because the statistics are semi-inflexible, depending on what is counted as a glyph or a variant, and resources used for the input. We'll create that focus on humans and animals that may simply help show us what they say. In the long run, the forum is a more powerful format than anything else, because we can live-update it with anything valid, and it will be there at the touch of a button. Published articles and static web pages aren't going to do this, while we can boil them all in a cauldron.

[shaberon]

The reason for this post is spontaneous from studying what is available on this topic.


It's from something I had originally held to the side as a "walking pipal leaf", and there was a huge digression due to similarities in Dilmun. And I'm just going to cut that off, and say, well, we can be pretty certain that Dilmun changes a few things in their own way. For purposes of this thread, I'm not going to step-by-step refute all the proposals that have previously come forward. I'm going to reverse that and start from alternative findings.

This is because the figure in question affects the Ivory Rods. These do use punctuation on "U-shaped" symbol, and, the symbol is common in the rest of the rods. Although it is typically a terminal glyph, on the rods, it is always followed by Comb.

There are not many "people" scripted into the rods.

Person with Flattened Crab and two Checkerboards is involved with the "punctuation". This crab is quite possibly the "result" of the Copper Tablets.


These are the other humanoids:


Caged Mallet -- Compound Bearer -- Comb

U IIII -- Person between Posts -- Bearer



and finally there is a "walking pipal leaf" attached to a common trigram.

Coming round again:


A -- India -- Compound Bearer


seems to be a repetition, and the last of twenty-four rods to involve a humanoid glyph.


I called it a "leaf" because a lot of times, it looks like there is no head. Different styles of "handwriting" make it unclear what it may be supposed to look like. And then in this collection, we find it as a variable prefixed to a common trigram:

...text no. 14 (M-2097) has numerous exact counterparts among the incised tablets of Harappa (e.g. H-311 to H-318), the
reverse sides of these tablets having the signs VII, VIII or VIIII...

True enough. The presence of this among the rods simply alerts us to a wider correspondence. This is what we do not know is spoken elsewhere:

Text no. 13 [M-2098] is identical to no. 14, except that it is preceded by the sign no. 9, which often
begins sign sequences, but otherwise never this particular one.

The concordance shows around thirty copies of this trigram, which for some reason is not found in the statistics. And it is otherwise connected to nothing.

It may be backed by a variable U-class, but is not otherwise written.


It's like the rod of authority by a ticket taker. Something was very heavily mass produced. Probably multiple somethings, because the same basic unit has three levels or designations, each of which could be a bundle of literature.



It turns out that the "pipal" glyph ("9") has been described as "hunched person with a bow slung on their back". We can't be sure it's a bow, but, the person always has some kind of distortion resembling something being carried that way.

Next, it turns out the figure does have a low-level visual origin, in the "human-sized glyph" class -- which makes it akin to, in fact, it is the character beside Person wearing Comb on the tablet resembling a Unicorn Parade.

Many times, figures are ambiguously male or female. I have the impression that it means the story given by a man or woman, can be repeated by a man or woman. There are probably some texts that are fixed one way or the other, and others where it doesn't matter.

This glyph origin is "ambiguous", but, I take it to be the Bird-face Goddess of the visual tablets.

It is believed to be derived from Ivory Plaque M-1653:









So, it has been accepted as "sign 9" (Parpola concordance), it's no longer a picture of a person, it's that glyph. The Mahadevan concordance posted represents the fact that the piece is broken in such a way that there probably was a second glyph.


The accompanying glyph has been called "Bow with handle" or even a "Boat". I don't know what it "is". But it as if it belongs to that person. And, as we start going along, this is entirely correct. That plays out in the script in a way that does not amount to exclusive ownership, but *does* amount to a strong personal association.


The ambiguity of the script is exactly the way it is written in Dolls. These are Mehrgarh women of ca. 3,000:





These are Nausharo men ca. 2,700:






That is why we would suggest the Bird-face Goddess of IVC tablets is in something like a "leading role" intended to be followed by others. She's not really a "heroine" in the sense of a super power to do something you can't do. It may be a Soma rite or something magical, but you can do it.


Additionally, her concordance is among the best and strongest, if not the most robust of all.

Her library is at least ninety-one texts, with a remarkable degree of pattern development, and a low amount of copying or repetition. They range up to some of the longest lines in the script.

If we look at animals, a few of them might make it into the 20s. Most glyphs that seem important in the process of n-gram building have a developmental course of maybe a dozenish texts. And most glyphs that are of a high frequency are numerical or very redundant. Most humanoid glyphs occupy a smaller and less-discrete concordance. So this Bird-face Goddess glyph is very high quality with respect to the total corpus.

So far, we have found three things that are "on" an Elephant as if riding it:


Bird-face Goddess, Person wearing Comb, Tiger Chimera





This really is a big personal library with hardly any repetition, and multiple examples from low to intermediate complexity. It doesn't do everything. But it does a few things powerfully. Primarily this is by using "Bow with handle", whatever that is, we aren't sure. And we should recall what one of this character's main attributes is:


Zero.


As much as "Animal Contest" may be a regular feature in all iconographies, this one reverses it, with Empty Niche, in Samyoga H-180.


This is a very important tablet, with some ambiguity. Due to wear, it has been suggested at the top, she has braids. The lower figure is obviously not the braided yogini. It is an "Uttanapada" form, which I am guessing causes confusion, since the intimacy is with a Frog, which has the illusion of being two creatures, Scorpion-or-Gharial, depending on whether it is going up or down. The Gharial has a sexual meaning going inwards with its snout, whereas the other has the meaning of birth. Therefor, my sense is that it is showing two things at once, via the same text.

It seems possible that glyphs do the same thing (inversion), that what happens is there is the flipping of a four-pronged "thing", which makes it have a quadruped shape as if on four feet, and then this is further modified until you have a glyph of a complete animal.

The blog used "Bed" for what I think is a Quadruped Rudiment:

Our next sign is FAT TABLE (or SQUARE AY WITH DOUBLE LEGS), enumerated VI11. It is much like the previous sign except that the second horizontal joins the tops of the two outer verticals. It only appears elsewhere as KP295, not in Wells’ or Fairservis’ lists. In my database, it appears only on one tablet from Harappa, although it is on both sides (H-180 A and B). Whether it is truly an independent sign or a variant of the BED is difficult to determine from this single appearance.

It may be an inverted four-pronged thing. If one was to think about vertical mirroring, it would be here. Flipping and Zero.

So it's the same text on both sides, and it is a Branch and "Mallet" statement:





There is not a suggestion these people are glyphs.

It seems to me the inverted figure has "bulbous" hair and yoga arms.

This is using the Rhinoceros connector to stick in its own something.

Person holding Lozenge 30 uses Rhinoceros-horn-on-a-stick to connect to Three Circles. But that is all this Person does, is these two copies of Unicorns. This seems minor, but I think the point is that it requires half of the Copper Tablets to transmute a Rhinoceros into glyphs and enable that "connector". Therefor, this is a sidebar to Bird-face Goddess; that would be typically Indian, not to directly teach something, but presume you to get it from somewhere else. These messages are probably full of send-and-return like that; probably has a lot to do with how "connectors" work.



The dualities of that tablet are about to magnify themselves.


Her most prominent representation occurs in several copies. It took me a while to understand this. What it means is that she is the front face of copies that have two different reverses, but, the reverses really connect together into one scene. As separate halves, they feature three different characters and some animals.

This is visually the same as the idea that the Copper Tablets feature "two parallels and synthesis".

Five tablets all from around the same find have the same face, Contest Heroine. Three of them have the same reverse, a Buffalo combat with spectator. Two of them, recorded as 1973 and 1974, instead have Man-in-tree in such a way that he is keyed to visually attach to the Buffalo scene. H-181 is effectively a third of them:












Perhaps the two Tigers are like palindromes and other types of cleverly and metaphorically related statements. The same Contest has two kinds of reverse, but they are connected.

It seems to be the semantic equivalent of a drill, which was a well-known and heavily-used technology.


Her most heavily-used icon has to do with one glyph and one animal:






Is this meant to be graphically parallel to Unicorn Contest, or Men with Trees, I am not sure. I tend to think it is inspired by, and a change to, Luristani Master of Snakes. And, she goes directly to the field signs of the seals.

M-308:







M-306:















We see a glyph considered Inverted Person-on-base.

She has a Tiger Chimera on an unfortunately broken text, but, it may be this Person on Base has a Round head and Skirt in B-17:





The original is fairly high quality believed to have come from a jeweler's house. Banawali primarily has a series of low-order seals, and this is still only a trigram.


She does not really have much further development in narrative scenes. And can be somewhat ambiguous. This is recent and relatively basic, but seems to lack braids in the Ganweriwala Tablet:






The remaining possibility is she does something in costume.

The main distinction is that there is another class of yogini with very long hair. I don't know if individuals are ever meant, but, they seem to be classes, Without that being present, then, a short-haired yogini may still be this same character in various guises. It is possible she puts on a headdress. And this is found in what seems to me like mock combat in She-Devil of Mohenjo daro:




She has horns, hooves, and a tail, as well as a "Bull's" ears. The Tiger has "Feathered Horns".




There are not many "human" seals at Dholavira. And again it is very unusual:




Yes, she is holding two children or people. On that side, like holding tigers, it is with the ringlets or bulb hair.

She "fights" someone else:





That is supposed to be a male figure on the right, and, this is between Gharials, the one on the right probably descending, so they alternate.

I'm not convinced that is combative.

This looks more like reversed horn play from "Girl in the Air". It's not a human fighting stance. It would be about useless except for the horns.

By her form, the first is the tiger-holding goddess, and the second is the tiger-fighting goddess. These could just be the same. There is possibly something slung on her back.

None of it is realistic; it is rather the finding of horns on beings that do not normally have them which is curious.



This is the main character I want to dwell on which is why posting it first. It has been obscured by ignorance and false leads. It has not been evaluated as its own entity. And, as it turns out, this is among the -- if not is the -- largest concordances of any humanoids.

I'm going to post that separately and leave this for any more image-based material.


This group includes the previously-missing M-307:





The British Museum has no thumbnails on hundreds of items, so this easily stands out which I thought was someone's hands over their head in a prayer gesture. But it is like "handwriting". That [I]is[/I the head.

So it's the same character. They don't like hotlinking their images, but this is how they describe the unusual person:

Bronze figurine, standing female on peg (broken); nude, very long legs, very small head, large feet, large hands on chest and stomach.

She's 81 mm tall. This means she is effectively standing on a nail with a broken point. At that size, it literally could be, a nail. One might tend to guess it's probably not, maybe it was intended for bore holes in pre-determined terracotta objects, maybe it worked similar to game pieces also believed to have been found, i. e., it moved.

The only way it could have stood is if it opened back like an "I" shape with a base.

[shaberon]

Right now this will be rather dry.


Over time I plan on figuring out problematic cases of missing examples, which can basically be uploaded and then just used the way blogs have mostly done. This post will probably be over-textual and under-imaged, a blueprint to be updated at some point.


I was intrigued that what I saw as a repeated human character is very directly transcribed into glyph form, and, all the attention on this glyph has been to its "variants", that is to say, loose penmanship that makes the head or pipal shape look larger or smaller. The reason for the shape is the arms akimbo of the basic or passive design. It is possible she puts on horns and hallucinates or otherwise triumphs over some kind of mental or cosmic power. She, as a human-sized glyph, follows a Unicorn. Nothing realistic has been done by her. Seems the very opposite.


Not only is that a bit remarkable, but, like a novel, she hogs a tranche of the entire thing. Because this has been overlooked, I'm willing to highlight it and put some time into it.


What I'm going to do is start with a "description" of her library, and, over time, I am going to figure out ways to upload tiny bits from the Concordance and the Corpus and fill in some rather blank reports. I am going to use IM77 numbers, for no other reason than it is the only thing we can access, and, you're going to want to feed it these numbers, because the click-through feature freezes it up.






Bird-face Goddess 17


She is in several basic trigrams. Her fundamental pairings are:


Before "Pinwheel" or after a sort of Fat "H" 186 (as in the trigram Person holding "U" 32, "Mallet", "H") -- this is the triple-barred "H" same as in Contest M-308 just posted above. Person with Bow also has it, but, largely, this is is her domain.


She has another couplet with Fish with Slash, which only re-appears two times in her library (ninety-one texts). This one has an illegible field symbol.


Trigram with Backgammon Board:





She is on the "Six Heads" image with unknown (due to breakage) other glyph.

She is on a two-headed Chimera as well (unsure -- "unidentified" animal may be meant).

She has a tolerance for "One", Lozenge, Chevron, and Caged "Mallet", while placing Scorpion with two Grids. That usurps the common Person with One that usually has this pair.




Bird-face Goddess does not have any "U" text.



She has Bird-in-Parentheses on a Mohenjo daro Buffalo text, a Lothal Unicorn impression, and on Unicorn K-4.

She has Caged Fish and "Battery" on an Elephant text.

Bird-face Goddess text from Chimera M-1173:






That one is damaged; has Unicorn livery, but two horns.


She uses Three Mountains to make the Fat Chevron in Branch-tipped "U" singleton. This detail however is uncertain for K-18:

...identification of the element inside the TRI-FORK TOPPED POT is also uncertain and may be a CARTWHEEL...

That would of course parallel what the Rabbit did at Mohenjo daro. But I think it probably is a Chevron.

You can see Three Mountains "going up" on K-18:






That is not the only time this glyph is sloped.



She has the only Rabbit-esque "8" (or "B") with something hanging out of it, as well as "Eyes with lashes".

Singleton of ")" with a "nose" on H-5:





So there is a more realistic glyph of a Crab, and, this is the only one with eight legs. In India, it's not really a coastal creature, because it inhabits rivers. They come out around sunset and are then nocturnal, which is the most direct implication of "night" that I've seen so far.



Triangular Mortar-and-Pestle M-74:




She conditions several glyphs that are rare and singletons.




The "subjugation" method used is:


Bird-face Goddess -- Bent Branch -- "Pinch" -- Tiger text (plain script from Lothal)





"X" and "Pinch" places her with Tiger M-1165.


In other words, the Pinch is some kind of grammar or punctuation. Not a very large amount of texts use it. There is one speculated as a "Co-ordinating" prefix, with most others considered to "Subjugate" the contents. I don't know if that's correct, but it seems roughly to be the case this is a semantic operation in some way.




She strips down the Tiger glyph twice to four bare prongs 189, which has only two other texts, also with Striped "Mallet".

Tigercorn and "four-pronged thing":








She has two instances of Person wearing "Comb" 38. This Elephantine activity is not employed by, or associated with, anyone else. There are four other texts of it, but, among humanoids, she is the one involved with the activity, state, or idea represented by the wearing of it and growing feet.

M-142:





With Branch and multiple frills on M-115:





Heading the shaded statement:


Bow with handle, Striped Chevron, Striped "seat or hut", Striped Mountain, Three Triangles under "Sky", "Comb"


That's noticeable for the congruence of that many hatched or striped figures. We have started running a postulate Tiger Stripes -- Bangles is the ultimate or high-power ideal of what is happening, particularly because of the Chimerae. It gets bland to speak of bangles as "wealth", well, blah, what if you like the bangles because you believe copper assists friendly electricity. That's what I find intriguing here. We still do this. At least I like them. I have a far higher personal value on semi-precious metals and stones, and the concept, "gem", is hardly to be found in any of these digs.

That one made it to Parpola's second color photograph. It's very well made and near mint condition.

M-1271:






This has a near-copy in the Large Copper Plates.

It is probably the most charged-up statement about Bangles -- Stripes.

She has "X" under "Sky", twice, and Three Triangles under "Sky", once. The latter has a basal existence with Pinwheel, and here, it is behaving very differently from all its other examples, which are as a leading glyph, or subjugated to "Wheel" with Winged Man. She is the total mistress of this glyph in the mega-stripey statement.

Similarly, "X" under "Sky" may be lightly related to Person holding "Quote", but on a character basis is mostly in the hands of Bird-face Goddess.






Her most effulgent texts land her between two "Wheels", or, before two "Bows with handle" and Spear. This comes in two varieties, with "H" or Square "A" and additional text.

There is also a more basic "Wheel" between two "Twos". That in turn is a stand-alone trigram as well; hers is prefixed by "Five" on C-30:






On her behalf are mostly Unicorns, some of whom have no Object. There are a number of Bulls.

She is with one Elephant, one Unicorn with trough, and one Tiger with trough. Those plus the Chimerical ones would be the most "mythic" instances of this glyph. It's definitely the Tiger Chimera and Hydra, and we will have to track down "unidentified".




She has only a single mention of the hoof-like glyph 341, which I thought might be like a Rhinoceros horn falling in a "U" and deforming it. This one is sort of a workhorse, and sometimes visually striking with elongated flairs, as if the "U" were stretching or falling, so it looks like a fireball or comet.

Bird-face Goddess's Branch enumeration is "Five". There is also the text "Five" -- Bird-face Goddess -- "Wheel" -- "Two".

Her Winged Man is usually accompanied by "Three", except in one case where Eight-rayed Lozenge is present. She also uses the pair Lozenge -- "X" under "Sky", from which, it figures the eight-rayed thing is also simply like a Lozenge covering the main middle part of "X".




She is "subjugated" in a few ways; when "Wheel" does it, it is with Enclosed "Quote", Caged "Mallet", and "Twelve".


This would be her incremental advancement from being "subjugated" with Person wearing Comb 38:


Person wearing "Comb", "Comb", Scorpion, "Z", Stacked "Six", two Grids


So that is an alteration to a trigram she already has, the Scorpion with two Grids. She brings in the Scorpion, re-iterates it, and that's all, very tidy. Exactly two known times. The longer statement has Unicorn with trough at Mohenjo daro.


Text 2802:










The Winged Man texts are far more repetitive, formulaic, and less interesting, but would power a lot of statistics. It is when he is "between" something, such as, e. g., ")" (9), that he is a little more interesting. Bird-face Goddess pairs him with and without ")" together.

C-1:










The use of Conjoined Enclosures is up her alley.

Her Tiger Chimera is a use of it. Elephant does as well. Here, comparatively, we see two more Chimerae using "Wheel and Pinch" grammar. M-300 attaches it to a "Mallet and Branch" statement. The other one is a unique Mohenjo daro Elephant Bull, which uses the same prefix on the most common trigram:





Her Elephant text with Conjoined Enclosures is outside the usual stream at the Guimet:





Fat Chevron text on Elephant M-280:









Her "Sky" glyphs are certainly suggestive. Her first pairing of "X" under "Sky" is with Lozenge. It re-appears in one of the most unusual texts on M-634.

When subject to "X", she has Stacked "Two"; and she has one text of Bent Branch and "Four". There is also a "Four" text with the two kinds of Winged Man. Her personal strong suit is "One", "Two", and "Five"; Winged Man supplements "Three"; this "Four" is somewhat meager at 3/91 texts.


I note that because "One" is surprisingly sparse and particularly tracked in the material.

Here, for example, is One Quote. This is unregistered, but suggested as a Rakhigarhi find. This perhaps is also her, with a unique feature, Bangled Legs:







It's a unique composite animal, perhaps having a bird face itself.

Again, I'm not sure that is realistically combative. As a technical aspect, that is a boar spear. It has a cross-member because otherwise, a boar will run the spear and still kill the user.

You could try to say she's stepping on it so it will jump and impale its neck. Or, maybe she is the one who is going to jump, and the "weapon" is like pole vaulting.

You can't hurt something that is imaginary, anyway.



Among her wordiest utterances is one recognized as a long inscription of Mohenjo daro:






The broken ivory perhaps had a pair as above.



For the extraordinary segue'.

She has Three Triangles beside something similar to a Crab with fat pincers, or a triangle with sideways legs.

This is actually on the famous "Pashupati" seal, which begins, Person over "Quote", Flattened Crab, this thing.

The glyph has three other existences, total is five.

One is with the Flattened Crab with "ears" that comes from inside a "Mallet".

It has another remarking it is of the Branch and "Seven" caliber on a Harappan Bull seal.

Also it has the phallic person. It has one peculiar text, "Four", Ithyphallic, Fat Crab (?), Caged Conjoined Enclosures. This is a Mohenjo daro Bull seal.




What is notable about "Pashupati" is that he contains two "Quotes" in a "U-shaped" symbol, and a rare glyph of a Fat Crab.


M-304:






Upon further reflection, I might suggest "Aryaman" for the figure, since there might be more reason to suggest Mitra as the Ibex at his feet, because associated with the Sun.


Firstly, his script takes the "U-shaped" symbol with two Quotes, which is in a minor league, does its own thing. The similar container with one or three Quotes is more abundant and more plainly cross-related to each other. This one is a bit shy. But it is the one used on this very famous seal.

It has an origin.

The M77 concordance uses a perhaps default image of braided yogini to give us the following information:


Standing person with horns and bovine features holding a staff or mace on his shoulder.


This is what we find for two "Quotes" in "U-shaped" symbol Text 4305:


three-sided Harappa tablet







So, consider the arms.

Otherwise, not particularly good pictures, are they. It's understandable you could probably make out the detail on the original piece in good light. But, there it is, this glyph falls into the visual field in the given way.





There is a *second* cue glyph involved, and here is how this Fat Crab appears in an extensive text.

M-234:









However it becomes the *central* character in the scene of horned figure, kneeling figure, procession of seven devotees. This is what was returned first by the concordance as having Flat Crab with ears and unknown:









Bird-face Goddess uses Fat Crab 229 in a Kalibangan Unicorn text.

Hers is the longest text of it, and, it is one of the three and the longest of them that places her at the end beside "U-shaped" symbol.

It is in Kalibangan style where it is like her hands are jammed into her armpits, making her look like half-Winged Man due to the protrusion. With this clarification, she is on Unicorn K-7.

It is beside a Flat Crab, or, perhaps, shares this pair with the yogi seal.


Those are probably the two most famous IVC seals and I don't recall a discussion about this common glyph and its limited extension. Two Bulls and Bird-face Goddess over Unicorn.

I remember some self-convinced statements about human sacrifice, that I just don't see as taking place here. Not to mention multiple schools of thought assigning later Indian literature as the source for the images and script. I am pretty sure that a tree does not normally grow in a "U shape", and that the most basic folklore is about making offerings to ghosts.

Generally, that might give rise to someone teaching similar offerings to Vedic deities.

That is to say, if I presume "Varuna" to have been meaningful at the time of the script, it does not necessarily mean he would be venerated in the way I have learned.

That still leaves a good chance that offerings or even Soma Offerings may have been practiced. It could have been very close the the Veda, as logically we can only exclude its particular ritual, or, more likely, the one with Apri Hymns as a mnemonic. At its time, it indicates that some people praise the same deities through less-viable means.


It remains inconclusive whether the exalted figure is a yogini, deity, ghost, or other explanation.

It is a class of braided yoginis, some of whom are plumed, some have horns and triple branch. That seems to be a detail of the script. A "W" is really a W in a W.


We will touch this up with more texts in the near future. It seemed to me an obvious choice as a tutelary deity since it automatically summoned those well-known seals.


She is also on an unusual "container amulet" from Gola Dhoro with a pair of Bows and Caged Fish with Chevron:







Marshall found one of these in the 1920s, but it was too worn to read. It still had its "lid" attached.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by shaberon (here)

Right now this will be rather dry.

Yes. (That prompted a wry smile )

[shaberon]

Aryaman



This will be relatively brief.

The term "Pashupati" is not particularly Vedic, nor truly an iconographic match. We are looking for the same guy on M-304, the famous one on whom so many ideas have been foisted. It is notable for the fact that animals -- terrestrial ones otherwise used to show the flights of things like fish -- are themselves stacked with his image.


And, to be conservative, we will not simply assume he is Archer Deity of the Copper Tablets.

He is a watcher of Buffalo Combat, which we will post elsewhere.

So, if we pare it down to those figures closest resembling the famous "Pashupati", what carries forward is floating hands:









There have been proposals like the hands are "resting" by thumbs propping them on knees. Always something contrived.


There is another post where he will re-appear. This character is the veritable master of the Large Copper Plates, having a speech of forty-three glyphs.


However, the form above is quite restricted as from the list of yoga arms (eight by that search).


In one of them, he is framed by Serpents, Gharials, Fish on Prism ("Eamd13"):











It just gave us the other Bird-face Goddess and Person wearing Comb, with a Tiger Chimera I don't think has been featured this way.

From the same M-2033:






Flanked by devotees and Expanded Hood Cobras:






Near a "reed house or shrine" and possibly perched birds:




Talk about "on your toes". Maybe these yogis are levitating. I start to whenever I read this stuff. Makes typing a little weird, and doesn't help decipher the script, but we find multiple scenes of what seems to be a seated meditation. It may be surrounded by something about trees, or animals, but usually one or the other.


You could just say, well, this is the Winged Man. His head is a "W" if there ever was one. But that's not quite what we see through his script.


The glyph is probably derived in conversations with Crocodile.

If it works that this character does that, we will have to figure it out.

It is a more pressing question if he works with the Illusion. I'm responding to that because it is something others have described from attempting to examine the iconography. I think this is of greater value than trying to guess what is written. By taking a similar approach, the idea spares me from having to press some outlandish delusion. And in this case, it seems to have been seen correctly.


I don't know what the Copper Tablets "say", but the Large Copper Plates are Alchemy and Soma. If he does not own it outright, he at least has the most to say about it.


Aside from yoga, he was called Ghost or Devil:

A seal with a ghost or devil was recovered from Indus valley. This is a puzzle for many research scholars. Indeed all the gods and goddesses are puzzles and not yet explained satisfactorily. Many seals with tiger goddesses or half tiger or half woman also remain a puzzle. Marshall and other westerners mislead the entire world by introducing Aryan-Dravidian division in this field. Had they not introduced any absurd theories like that scholars would have solved the puzzle by this time. Scholars would have deciphered the script by this time.


Since scholars have discovered new gods such as “Proto Shiva”, “Murugan before Aryanisation”, “Skanda after Aryanisation”, “Rudra diluted into pacific Shiva”, new scholars also fell into this blind alley and are struggling still. Some scholars even discovered “Dravidian structure” in the script and by publicising this theory, mislead the entire world and not a single inch of progress has been made because of these absurd statements. With all the powerful computers in the world and all the discoveries available via google at the press of a button or by the movement of a computer mouse, we have achieved nothing. Reason? The same old Aryan Dravidian absurdity.

When it comes to Indus Gods they keep quiet, because they can’t see any Aryan or Dravidian in the tiger Gods or Goat faced or Bull faced Gods. When it comes to the camel skeleton discovered in the Indus valley they turn a blind eye. It is said that the early discoverers did not do the job properly. They did not record the layers from which the artefacts were recovered. If one is able to explain the Indus Gods and Goddesses satisfactorily, without worrying much about what is written on the seals, then we can claim some achievement. But whoever reads all the books by the so called scholars on Indus seals can see they still do not agree on gods or goddesses.

I believe there are some stray images similar to that. Standing there.

The text contains the trigram from the "Five Swastikas" tablet, and possibly other connections.



Since there is no bow, it is possible he has become this Banawali Chimera rider, which we will see repeated at Dholavira:






Strictly speaking, you could only be sure he is a different person from Man-in-tree. He could be the Archer Deity, or he may not be.

That is to say, are the Copper Tablets and Large Copper Plates about the same person/deity/ghost, maybe. It's not horns or headdresses that are able to distinguish characters. The bow might.

Most everything else has something additional and we will see him conveyed, but in terms of script there is not a whole lot expressed here.

[shaberon]

Yogini


This post is for the long-haired kind of woman, as seen on the famous "Procession Seal" already posted, which, upon further research, strongly resembles Iranian metal work that is centuries older.

I don't have a Sanskrit suggestion, since the Tiger is likely from native folklore that is not used in the Rg Veda. That does seem a bit odd if they are geographically both emanated from Haryana. The Rhinoceros, Elephant, and others also fade from view. It keeps a few basics, but, otherwise, appears to have no effort to revive, continue, or manifest the same lexicon as IVC. Although Bull of Heaven, Goat, and Crocodile are perhaps the same, it has more to do with Horse and Syena. A suggestible name might become more apparent if we figure out any other connotation of her.


With respect to Iranian archeology, these sites are all practically brand new from the 2,000s. The discoveries are astounding, and, while there may be some edge of Iranian hopefuls who want to push the grandeur of it back another thousand years. even if we do not take an extreme view, I think it is safe to say there was a vast "international network" before the advent of writing, and somewhat ahead of Indian brick city culture. I don't expect we can ever explain or know that much about it beyond accepting Ibex and Pipal leaf, etc., as having originated there.


The similarity really proves nothing other than the similarity.

As soon as anyone else notices this, they will prove something, but I don't think anyone has. I spent a great deal of time wondering why I should have to refute Bactrian Eagle out of IVC script. I don't have to. There is not enough to imply that whatever has been found along those lines, proves somehow that Bactria dominated IVC. That's just a dirty way of thinking. Bactria had supplied the Camel as far afield as Mari around 2,300, and all ancient references and remains of Camels are Bactrian, because the Arabian Dromedary was not domesticated until 1,000. What I find more fascinating is that they were able to do this in the first place, rather than trying to determine exactly what caused sites to be abandoned.



The next reason for breaking the iconography up into family trees, is that, compared to Bird-face Goddess, the script used by this character is observably different.

"She" is certainly not an individual, for instance in the lower register of that thing is a line of ladies who could be represented by the glyph Seven.


That seems so self-suggestive as to be rather banal, however, it may be supported by the numerology. Generally, low numbers up to four are like a bag of lessons, upon which stands the Indus Bull on the platform, Five. Six is usually two threes. Seven, on the other hand, is bold, a unit that seems like a power nodule. It's noticeable. And, the devotees in the lower register are not unique there, it is a troupe of yoginis, such as in a similar scene in the upper register of the Pathani Damb retinue-like seal.


From the view of yoga hands, she has a Five-pronged Bent Branch Crown, which is different, perhaps a Sami; the male figure posted above has a Three-branched Pipal Crown.







The question is usually if we are supposed to be seeing "stars" inside that headgear.


The horns identify characteristics or attributes, but, it may be that one class of person collects them all. Goat-horned Goddess with kneeling devotee and Goat:





One of her sittings is beside this same kind of structure which I would say is a glyph that exists in a series from basic to striped:






It may be possible that some IVC city towers were shaped like that. But the thing we are looking at is not that big. I haven't noticed any imagery that could be called urban.


These come from two-sided tablets:





The seven girls appear with human-sized glyphs to invoke Mortar-and-Pestle.

This also has Triple Rectangles, Rotating Tau, and possibly a form of ")" with "ear" on H-97:









This is something that also does not "prove" anything, again, I take it as something imaginary or symbolic.

Leg up on C-76:





It was edited.




Perhaps the "combat" was play?


We will repeat this important one, because she is on M-488 with Human Markhor:








The Catalog also refers to the yogini at:


H-858 (head-down combat on a prism)


H-1934-5, 2023-4, 2026-31, 1971-2, M-2033 with Composite- Horn/TailZebu/Snake, 453-4





The character is fused into a Female Sphinx with a Three-pronged Sami branch and a scripted Branch and Four statement. The important part is to notice the arm, i. e. the reversed type of arm is an additional "yoga move" on Centaur K-50:






In fact, the arm will come right back to us, proceeding from Kennoyer, Master of Animals:


Two distinct horned deities are found in narrative scenes carved onto seals. One figure has relatively
short horns emerging from the top of the head like those depicted on the humped zebu; the other has
wide, curved horns spreading to the side, characteristic of the water buffalo. Both often have distinctive
broad beards and shaggy or long hair. On some of the smaller carvings, details of the faces and the
difference between the two types of horns are difficult to distinguish, but the wide, curving horns tend
to occur with a central component made from a pipal tree branch (Ficus religiosa), which usually has
three highly stylized leaves reduced to three projecting lines. The horned figures are shown in many
different roles that range from images of adoration, worship, or passive observation to active worship
or aggressive attack. These images may actually be distinct forms of the same deity or totally separate
gods, but the details cannot be determined without decipherment of the script often found with the
narratives. In all these roles, the human (male or female) figure is defined primarily by the fact that it
is wearing a horned headdress, but occasionally the human figure is depicted with animal legs, hooves,
claws, or a tail; the deity combining human and animal features could be either a Master of Animals or
an Animal Master.

The short-horned figure is sometimes depicted with the tail of a bull, and on copper tablets from
Mohenjo-daro this type of figure is shown carrying a bow and arrows.


In combat scenes dating to the later part of the Harappan period, the motif of a human fighting with a
short-horned bull suggests that in this new narrative the human was in fact in control and dominating the
battle. The scene is most commonly found on molded faience tablets from Harappa, dating to Period 3B,
circa 2450–2200 BC. This depiction of combat is actually part of a longer, four-part narrative that is
found on two-, three-, and four-sided molded tablets.


A more accurate way of expressing it is to say that this four-sided tablet has reduced versions of three or two sides. That represents the "genre", or, some, if not all, of the prisms work like this. Also, the "beard" is likely an emergent trunk.

This script is not commented but it may begin with a Donkey. The motif suggests to me the antics of Person "fighting" a Horned Tiger, I think it is play, or a drama of something, in the equally unrealistic Bull Combat:




In a montage, it appears that Donkey is correct rather than Goat:





So, the arm in her profile seating is happening in some particular manner slightly different from how these typically sit.



Comparatively, with the Buffalo, the spear fight is in front of a Cobra:





It's the third side of M-492. This tablet is on the right here, where clashing bulls evoke two glyphs, and, there is a Trapezoid text:





Admittedly, in some cases, the braids are unclear, making it questionable if this is really the same person.

The slide is comparing singletons, and the one on the left has been called a Lyre by some. I'm not completely sure that's what that is.

Statistical analysis of the glyphs on the right shows they may act as if two Bulls. Two different kinds of the same thing.

There are two bar tablet clashes:


M-1367 is Bison x 2, also on M-492 B.


According to Ameri:

To date, only one incised tablet this type (M-1367) can be identified as having definitively been used to create a molded tablet (M-492).

They also have Empty Niche as considered by Zoomorphic Avatars. Or, not quite. They are not rampant and nothing is between them (unlike as the Tigers are posed with a gap) on M-492 because they are horn-clashing:


On this seal impression, and a seal (M-1168), the facing bisons are accompanied
by two signs (from right, IM-201 and IM-267). It is easy to
suspect that each sign corresponds to one of the two facing
bisons. If this be true then it must be imperative that there is
no seal-impression of a single bison that can then have both
the signs in any position in a sequence. This is verifably so.
In fact, only IM-267, occurs on a bison seal-impression.


That's...not quite right...it's not M-1168 and it's sign 277. The pairing of glyphs as on M-492 is copied/repeatable, but not by other creatures, nor do these signs otherwise repeat together. There's no "niche" space where it looks like something was or would be. But it is two nearly identical creatures perhaps represented by different glyphs.



Difficult Combat on M-1430:





That appears to have ladies in skirts on the line with the fight, which does not ensure the combatant is female, but could be.





Next is one of the most personal moments, where the script literally interrupts a procession.

This has a definitive male and female, in the sense you can still see the braid while she is bending over, and, the typical male hair style is a "C" shape representing two knots on the back of the head. Man-in-tree has this. This might be him at two moments. He seems to be putting something in her dish. Or taking it. It's like the U and the Tree. Could go either way. Considering those may be real objects and not glyphs, this may be the only close to normal, possible human behavior to be found. This and sex. Maybe the same two. It was well worn.


M-1431:





It's a One and Pipal text:












Following is the closest thing to a chrysalis or metamorphosis. Kalibangan has a basic stamp seal, and, the Akkadian technology, cylinder seal, used for the same character. There are only about nine cylinders in all India.

This has a Branch and Three statement, and Sky Trees.

The spears have become unrealistic. That's no way of holding a "weapon".

From the view of yoga hands, it's pretty easy for me to see what's going on here:







So, Kalibangan has this, scene, which is almost sexual groping, although it still has the vibe of yogic heat. And, Kalibangan nominally represents the "rebirth of India", from which spreads the cultural influence into all "mature IVC sites", and probably the iconic and scripted ruleset.


Almost being a mascot, Tiger Centaur is not repeated heavily like the substrate of Tablets and Ivory Rods. In fact, unlike the corresponding "narratives", she is hardly seen again. However, prominently, she goes to that apparent replacement for Mehrgarh, Nausharo. These two stamp seals are the westward projection of her:


M-311 with two Combs and Coil:





Ns-9:









M-311 has a different arm pose than the others, where the one over the body is cupped towards the script, or, on the cylinder, a Tree.

We would probably have to take her as "distilled into the script", and consider, maybe, her counterpart is the recently-discovered "Chimera Rider". He looks a little bit like a "Centaur accident", being perhaps built into the thing from the opposite direction.




Despite a few uncertainties, we can tell, relevant to the script, exactly what she is serious about. It is the mysterious pair of Wheels, which likewise follows a very restrictive usage pattern we will come back to later.

First, for the human-sized arising of it, she is just standing there between a Buffalo and a "hut" and the text seems to be just "U-shaped" symbol -- two Wheels.

Then there is a Hare, and she is seated on a "Table" or "Sky", if not levitating over it. As in many cases, the guy in the tree is just there with no distinguishing features.

On this, we don't really have to vouch for linguistic continuity; the Hare is the Full Moon. Anyone can see this. The question is if the IVC seals are using the animal in this particular metaphor, and if so, where is it. This would be that.

Possibly there is someone seated in the shelter on H-176:







From the list of "yoga" imagery, this one in particular shows the practitioner at two moments. It's a binary of standing/seated.


On H-176, the Catalog calls this a "Temple", an icon which does not occur again.

It adds a "Trident Post" beside the Buffalo:









On the opposite side is a Markhor turning to look in the yogini's direction, another table-like divider, and a Hare.

At first she is just standing between a Buffalo and a "shelter", and some human-sized glyphs.

The black-and-white photographs have better detail. The thing is like a "Checkerboard" or Endless Knot, attached to "H" and Square "A" and other things. Maybe a reed hut with a wooden bench.


Enlarged:





With more detail, it becomes evident there is not exactly a "Trident", but, a "Post" involved here.

The "crescent standard" is visible in Dilmun. Otherwise, it is said to be used for animal sacrifice or for carburization. To some of us, it is symbolic.

It most resembles Person holding Post with "Checkerboard". Strictly as graphics, if you can imagine grabbing that "Trident Post" while near that "shelter", that of course does resemble the script very strongly.

It seems undeniable there is such an object behind the animal, which does not have obvious signs of being tied to it, and it is not entirely clear that it would be sturdy enough to restrain a large beast. But I think it is there and it looks more like a "crescent standard" than a "trident".


It does associate Buffalo to this character.

Is the grid-like back half of it the same as the stand-alone "shelter"?

Has the "temple" been "completed" by some feat?

Does the duality of the tablet imply same-but-different Wheels?


From heavy perusal, I would have to say the Rabbit does something extraordinary to the Mohenjo daro Copper Tablets, while it is literally true he vanishes from view and "hides in the script".

This last tablet is the only place I found him.

It seems to be the root source of the glyph pair that is from the original argument that the script is probably not syllables or words. Although it has a very peculiar behavior, it is among what must have been one of the main criteria for "public literacy", the Dholavira Signboard. It has two Wheels and other Wheels. It's unresponsive to normal cryptography. Moreover, it is unusual for this to be preserved at all, because it is wooden. That raises the possibility that it was not the only of its kind, or, there could be scripted statements on perishable media. So they perished.

The main reason it is a bad name is because spoked wheels were not known.

Therefor, from the author's point of view, there is a near certainty it is something else.


Four long-haired women and pottery:

[shaberon]

Man-in-tree


This has been identified by some as a Puranic character who hides in a tree, but, the problem with that is, he's not hiding.

We posted Tablet M-1431 that has him perched in a Sami or Acacia tree, while facing human-sized glyphs including One and Pipal Leaf.

Notably, he causes the Tiger to turn and look, and, this is a fundamental question in the iconography -- what causes, or what does it mean, for animals to have a reversed gaze? It is consistent in this scene, whereas it is found elsewhere, e. g. such as Markhor looks at Yogini in the post above.



He doesn't have horns, so, he strongly resembles the "contenders" for the yogini on the Kalibangan Cylinder. Just because he is found in a tree, does not mean he's not also found elsewhere. Nor does it exclude the possibility he is the same guy that just puts on various horns. We want to categorize them mostly separately, until such time as we find a reason to identify or distinguish them. It's simple, in imagery, if you see two in one place, they must be different, but if they are on two sides of the same thing, it could be before-and-after. The other side is like a meet-and-greet with yogini, where goats and tree are shown in the same way as they are on the sexual image M-489. The tree is small and has a bulbous base, sort of like a planter bag as if it were being re-planted after being uprooted. That, of course, is a strong suggestion it is the same couple.


One of the statistical publications fails to notice this certain pair of goats is repeated.











Secondly, the answer about whether a person "changes" probably *is* given in the script itself, but this takes more work to trace.

On M-488, he lands between a Swastika and a Chimera. It's a bit like glyphs interrupting the procession on M-1431. The Chimera is not usually part of an Animal Procession.


One of his wordless appearances is more or less facing Crocodile:








So here, I am not sure whether to call this "basic or plain person", because it might be this guy in a conversation with Goats using a Fish:





From what I have seen, his arm is possibly the clue. The figure seems to tell a basic-to-intermediate level story by graphics.

There are some versions of him as just a figure in a tree, without anything additional or noticeable modifications, so they may be superfluous.


He incrementally adjusts is a way that is at least easy to see. So far, this does not have any "human-sized glyph" activity, but, he does issue his own variety of texts.


This is a "One" text. Notice the guy in the visual field is reduced to nearly a stick figure, his arm is straight, suggestive of "one". The male trait is a back knot of hair, or, it is supposed to be doubled. And his glyph-like head looks like this and a Fish is right above it with a similar...shape. His distinct hand gesture is...mirrored...by the "lambda" right above it on M-309:






We take geometrical positioning as a likely indicator of meaning. His hand is perhaps transmuted into Lambda or even the Pinch glyph, which is sort of like an inversion. A Fish right over the head is probably not a stray chance.



Here, this is detailed enough to see the guy's hair is in two knots, which, when in stick-figure-ese, looks like "c".

"Window" over the animal's back and "Fat Chevron" over its head with "Quote" on M-310:






What is that? There's a form of One, in its "conjunctive" mode, as what would be in the line of regular script. Then, yes, of course, we should consider a class of texts which utilize a particular glyph "riding" an animal.

Because even our word chevron still has the meaning of "horns", that may be possible here, as well, as if it were becoming a Horned Tiger. Appropriately enough, that mythical creature will back this up by using the glyph.







This is a "Bearer" text where the guy has "cupped" his arm into a "U with Three". He is drawn in slightly better detail, and part of that, is that the limb of the tree mimics his arm and actually grasps the Tiger like an elephant's trunk on K-49:




The gesture is the closest possible explanation of "U in a Tree" so far after, a whole lot, of immersion.

Why "Seven" is between him and a singleton of an "Empty-loaded Bearer" is unique; it would be axiomatic.

Why those are "rainy" while this is far less common for "Seven" than it is for "Six", I am not sure. Observe that this "wavy" effect gives this image the only appearance that the Tiger is roaring the thing being "spoken".

If the arm moves in this way, does it not seem like beckoning?


That's what the arm does, but I'm going to suggest it is the Hand that is important for several reasons. For one, this would be continuous in Sanskrit, i. e., "Hastin" for "elephant", because the animal's trunk is like a hand. Moreover, this can be followed through the imagery and script. It may explain "branched tips" or even "two tufts" as on the "U-shaped" symbol.


This is a comparative chart of "kneeling", such as he is not the only one doing it, but, it has the, I find, almost humorous, very basic version:








He has many instances but evidently a singleton finale.


At Chanhu daro, 11/70 finds from there use a "Double Pinch" that is neither found anywhere else, nor related to "Pinch" -- it has *one* medial placement, and prefers to be at the beginning or end.

The general sense is this is The End of the sequence, Tiger's Kiss:






That perhaps is the creation of Sky Tree, or, at least, we can assure ourselves that scholarship has ignored it as a glyph. Here, this "object" has forced a "real" glyph onto the Tiger. The Bearer's "things" have been attached.


So for example, Chanhu daro Double Pinch is also on Bison in Heat.




Here is a comparison in one frame of a few of these. The one with "nothing" is very different, when I first saw it, I thought it was a skateboard advertisement. The branch changes with the arm. These are some intermediate ones and Tiger's Kiss where none of them seem to be "roaring" as it is with U and Seven:





There are only about sixteen individual Tigers in the IVC Corpus, meaning some of these are already his. This is a manual extraction of Man-in-tree from the Catalog. It's the way to count the material we already have, from whatever else may remain. There are around twenty, with the missing ones marked up.


Multi-valent appearances:


H-176 -- Two Wheels scene

M-478, 479, 480; M-1425 narrative (U IIII and Endless Knot)

M-1431 narrative (human-sized glyphs)

M-488 narrative (between Swastika and Chimera)

H-181 with Tiger and Elephant (Contest Heroine)

H-1973, 1974 with Combat (as H-181)



Solos:


H-716 with Bison (damaged but looks like he is on the ground beside the tree)*

H-2002 with Tiger (unknown)

H-163 with Tiger (no script; straight arms and a straight branch like a diving board cram him "onto" the animal)

M-1184, 1185 with Tiger (damaged; has a humanoid glyph, maybe a plain Person)

M-309 with Tiger, straight-armed with text

M-310 with Tiger, similar with altered text

K-49 with Tiger, the one with "U-shaped" arm

H-715 with Tiger (has something like a tree on a square base and Pinwheel text on opposite face)*

K-152 with Tiger (unknown)

C-27 with Sky Tree and X over Tiger




That accounts for half of the Tigers, meaning not that many are out there independently from him.

The tree, per se, is like a vehicle for a greeting and speech or even conversation.

I would say it is a geometrical standout of the entire Corpus that the Tiger appears to be roaring Seven.

Although there are a few bits of supplemental information to be desired, it looks to me like a self-implicate sequence of "moments", corresponding to the usage of various texts, that has a formal conclusion or happy ending. The lacking articles are unlikely to break this framework.

I don't really have any idea why he would not be the origin of Hand and U-shaped glyphs and further symbolism.

It seems almost superficial, however, the seven yoginis may be the product of this Tiger's speech. It looks to me like the Man is making a U-shaped container of three Quotes to listen to the event in order to perhaps re-tell it.

I would also tend to say he doesn't live in the tree, that he probably could be counted as a person on the ground with similar hair. The Goats and Tree tablets certainly seem to suggest that someone makes friends with yogini. Again, these are the two realistic-like-a-soap-opera moments. Almost everything else veers from weird to impossible. It may be that these two put on various guises, or, there could be dealings with ghosts or some external subject.

[shaberon]

Girl-in-air and Arch Goddess



These may simply be aspects of the yogini. However, they are distinct iconographic entities.


We aren't sure if someone is being gored to death after a failed buffalo combat, or, it's an athletic feat where the performer vaults off the animal's charge.

There are not that many of these. There are two examples from a page on Korravai:





It's a "conversation" seal facing Spear and One.



There is a clear, additive image from Pathani Damb, facing Leaf-tipped W:







And there is a poor quality remnant, facing another glyph:

m1406 Field Symbol 102 Group of persons vaulting over an uncertain bovine animal. Variant of endless knot motif is twisted, plaited threads or strands of rope.

Now, of course, we cannot really say the glyph is braids or rope. It's just there. It could be more related to circles and lines than to Endless Knot.

The passage of Acacia -- Khadira to Vana Durga is plausible. To us it would have a meaning of refuge. It is plausible that such values reside in this IVC script. So far, this is the result of "combat", if that is what is happening here. There are no known images of the animal actually being speared as in Durga iconography.

Because it is thought the "Minoans" did a similar kind of "bull-vaulting" sport, this has been conjectured as an actual practice of peoples. There is enough reason to suggest it may be an intentional act, and she is Shcrodinger's Cat in this mystery called Alive or Dead, in which case the only real suggestion is that we see the animation of a single figure, rather than the trampling death of a crowd.


Because this is (a) partly imaginary, and (b) she probably connects to the other yogini scenes, I think she made it, but one could argue they are speaking to the ghost of the woman who was killed here in the same breath.








As for this other class. The famously-published seals often show someone in U-shaped branches, which does not realistically resemble a tree, although it has spent generations being relegated to that nomenclature.

The Arch, on the other hand, is something highly visible throughout all Indian iconography, and, probably *does* "enter the script" and cause effects. This will come back later.

It could be said that an Arch is simply a "mirrored U", and, that may be the strategy here. Something is collected in U and inverted. Or, perhaps both are true at the same time. At least, the character in this case is very crisp:






Here, she is compared to close variants such as H-179:





An additional glyphed variant and the front face of H-1951:





There isn't anything more to H-238, but, on the neighboring H-242, Arch Goddess in on the reverse of a Swastika at the center of circular script. This is followed by a few examples of other circular patterns, although this is by far the most striking.



Facing Markhor on H-177 with U III text:





H-175 is probably her with text. H-177 has a One and Mortar-and-Pestle text. H-178 is Goat-horned Goddess possibly solo. She is two-sided, having the powerful trigram, Horn in U, U-shaped symbol, Comb. And three-plumed H-179 with the Arch has the common trigram, Four-legged Sprout, Winged Man, U-shaped symbol. Branch-crowned H-1951 is similar. This is something we can probably patch into the post here. This character, or, episode of a character, is quite expandable from the current state.



With Horns and New Arch of Horned Cobras:





Heavily worn, with mostly the Arch remaining:

[shaberon]

Having brought forward the Indus people on stone and faience items, we have some other things that are powerful classifications of, if not outright textbooks for, Indus script.


Moreover, this is also recognized by others as a strong character stamp of humans and animals, and therefor is like a bridge that should help explain the relation in their thought.


Firstly, there is a codex that really bucks a hundred years of academia since its reporting in 2014. It's much better than the phrase written in stone. And yet this one is very succinct, no merry-go-round of chasing and associating this and that, because, like the Pathani Damb yoginis, it is very nearly a classical rendition of a pantheon or retinue on:


Nine Large Copper Plates




This brief collection is quite primordial, to which the Copper Tablets are an analogous elaboration.

Now as to who is at the head of this thing, if you ask visually, it is female, and if you go by speech, it is male.


Yogini is just her form. She is empty-handed and there isn't anything else there, except possibly a "Finless Fish" or "Loop". Obviously she is far brighter than the rest of them.

This set lacks any Unicorn that may have matched; it has a Fake Unicorn over a Pipal Leaf. The only Chimera is Horned Tiger with Pipal Leaf. The male deity has no Bow, but appears to be meditating around the base of a Soma Filter. It's the longest text to date, forty-three glyphs.


A fairly good job has been done to allocate the closest examples of seals and tablets to the Plates. To the upper right is a plain text with Bird-face Goddess, which, as we will see, most closely matches her Striped statement:










The Horned Tiger actually has a strange Cross, like Three Triangles mounted on a Lobe; both of the stand-alone scripts are using Three Triangles. The creature is compared to a version with Fat Chevron, i. e., a glyph we have just seen operated by Man-in-tree.


So, there is a strong chance that we are looking at the first printing press, because most of it still works perfectly well:






This Pipal and Soma speech begins with "Circle with Slash".

It's a "cursive" plain Fish, it seems, perhaps twice in the first line, and then again with a Crab and a "taprooted sprout", which grows at the end, and X under Sky.

I would tend to guess that the thing that looks like "SS" is the grammatical unit, two Quotes. Numerologically, the second line appears to class this as a U III text, while the first line associates Striped Mountain and Five to a form of W.

Most inscriptions are a form of cursive that, in some cases, is difficult to match to definite glyphs. That lends weight to the idea that some "minor differences" are just "handwriting". Despite a gray area, the bulk of the material is unaffected.





Metallurgical analysis of the Nine Plates is very interesting.




Large deity is practically pure copper, with no arsenic.

Cumulatively:


Horned Tiger adds arsenic.

Yogini and the plain scripts add silver, as if those are her words.

Bull, Rhinoceros, and "Antelope" -- Fake Unicorn add Tin.

Elephant clears out these additives and becomes the only alloy with Lead.



That summarizes the "yoga deities" conversation, as depicted on nine items noted for the script being in animals' character, i. e., these are taken as particularly "personalized" or individually-identifying, a very specific picture about distinct families of things.


The script is reversed, made for printing; the plates are robust. It is noted that the most wear was on the back of the Elephant, which sounds consistent with it being a softer alloy of Lead.

After doing this immaculate research, the subject of interest was more or less dropped due to "the prevailing notion that they did not smelt but cast scraps".

Well, if anything was intentional, the set of plates is a better candidate than a shovel. Why would you not suggest the alloys are the characters of the entities engraved upon them.


I'm not sure what screams "clue" more than:


Elephant --> Lead.


This Elephant has a minimum age of 2,000 B. C. E.. The electron microscope just found this to be 14% Lead where none was used in any other article. Further analysis limits its age to 2,600. It is imprecise, other than matching the whole IVC overall.

Until other information comes along, we are relegated to saying the First Printing was done by the First Leaded Copper, which remains unknown to its Wiki page.

It's inadequate for brazing/welding such as plumbing; it is mechanically desirable in such things as bearings. It may be tempting to use in your bangles. Then you would lose your Tiger devotion quick because everyone would get incurably ill. You can touch it, but, you really don't want to handle it a lot. There's nothing you can do. One can only hope they were astute enough to realize how toxic this is. If I had to guess, I would think, well, someone probably found this out the hard way and they learned how to handle it properly, and so its use in the plate is intentional.


The main advantage of Arsenic is that Tin is relatively rare. Unlike Lead, Arsenic will kill you fast. And so it seems that Tin from or shipped through Turkmenistan was very crucial, though not necessarily required for everything. If we think the Donkey is the "basic" animal about this transit, but, vanishes from most of the script, the Plates show the evident transfer to other animals who take over.


Contrary to some circumspectual remarks, Kenoyer is positive there was Smelting and all the rest. On p. 2, we see the relevant distribution is that India has one Copper belt, from Khetri across Rajasthan into the Aravallis. Tin is in the Helmand region, or, in the heights of the Oxus, i. e. Shortugai. The wider historical question is where Elam acquired Tin from -- Afghanistan, Turkemistan, or Uzbekistan. That is how they supplied the Assyrian Empire; the outcome is rather well known, but not the input. Similarly we are still left to guess if Gonur Tepe had a similar role with respect to India. The fact remains that use of Tin would be almost entirely by importing it, which would have relied on Donkeys until such time as Camels come in. The main difference for them is they are quite slow breeders and you get "numbers" of them rather than "herds" like horses or donkeys can do.


India actually has Zinc deposits, but neither this nor Iron is found in the work; what has been found in it includes:


hematite,
lollingite (arsenic and iron), antimony, cinnabar (sulfide of mercury), cerussite (carbonate of lead), galena,
and an unidentified type of lead ore


For various reasons, I'm going to call that the entire Alchemy.


The line of inquiry that has puzzled metallurgists:


arsenic-free copper used at Lothal and Rangpur


because that means it came from:

Aravalli or Oman



Lead was used on its own, e. g. weights, but is thought to have been extracted from imported minerals. Silver is of unknown origin, unless refined out of Aravalli Copper. There is a different kind of copper made in bas-relief:


So far this type
of engraved tablet is unique to Mohenjo-daro, but copper tablets with raised script were found at Harappa by
Vats (Vats 1940) and also by the Harappa Archaeological Research Project (Meadow and· Kenoyer 1994).


Those being two totally different techniques, suggests the Nine Tablets are of Mohenjo daro.


So Kenoyer lists a large number of Indus objects analyzed for their composition, and there is only trace Silver. There is barely any Lead over trace, it is in a small number of items up to 3.72% in a needle. The Arsenic levels are so low, it's disputed whether these are even intentional alloys. With a rule of thumb defining "intentional" at 1%, then, yes, some are, like the plates. And so out of that survey of everything, you are mostly looking at some Copper and a bunch of Tin Bronze, with, in a few cases, Arsenic.

Comparatively, the plates are extremely high in Tin. None of them are normal "bronze" by workable standards.

The others of them are ridiculous in Silver and Lead. There's nothing like it. Silvered Bronze is hardly found in other cultures. Elsewhere in IVC, the metals are made into their own distinct objects, but not into Copper alloys. This really sounds like bell metal or a formula for cymbals. Or a gong. But there is no way you can compare the Nine Plates to other tablets and hundreds of objects and not at least suspect the composition might be intentional.

Why would you not let the printing press just say what it is?



Secondly, the workshop residues reveal the use of Antimony --> Collyrium, and Mercury --> Cinnabar.


Yes, that sounds like a huge throughput to normal Indian culture, Kohl and Hingula. This is evident in the Nausharo Dolls.

I am not sure silvered bronze might have anything other than a musical purpose:


Silver was used primarily to make vessels that were similar to copper metal or
ceramic forms. Silver ornaments are also quite common and include beads, bangles, and rings, as well as
fillets and perforated discs.




The suggested explanation is:

extracted from argentiferous
galena.



The reason is that silver mines in Aravalli and even Afghanistan are not thought to have opened until post-IVC. This is geologically true in most places of the world, there are only minor amounts of usable silver ore often found with other ores. Rather than looking to our dismay for a "source of silver", it is more likely this technology was used, which again could have been Iranian in origin. Understandably, you might travel to train there, and come back to prospect in India.

That means it is the likely explanation for two metals, Lead and Silver.


However, it is not clear if Shortugai was indeed
a trading settlement for all of the different available
minerals (Francfort 1989). Lapis lazuli and gold working is evidenced from the excavated materials, but
there is no clear evidence for the processing of either
copper or tin.



This report is almost entirely physical science, and its further pursuit by others is not all that useful. There is no consideration about the presence of the texts used here, aside from the "comparative" examples. A few of the other Plates have been printed.


Bull:






Rhinoceros:








But otherwise there is no sharper analysis, concordance, etc., applied on what is found here. This is a lacuna if we are told "everything is strongly in character".

I think it is physically more important than the humble "report" can indicate. It will permanently withstand all modes of inquiry, and reveal itself as an intentional form of Alchemy, ranked among animal hieroglyphs.

It's all Copper with four possible additions.

I would not think that makes it The End about this hierarchy. It would be how they interface with this subject.

[shaberon]

Copper Tablets of Mohenjo daro




This is a quite large puzzle that reverses the trend of the Large Copper Plates.

This is about one iconic person, and a circus of Indus animals, some of which are not repeated outside of these texts.

Also, I think it is very, very heavily indicative of script logic.

It is *not* advanced in terms of the script, this is a "basic" exposition of it.


Although the majority of it consists of threefold explanations, it could be argued there are a few binaries, such as this iconic Rabbit:







becomes this singleton glyph:





The component "Flange-topped U" is fairly particular to Mohenjo daro, and, is part of the majority lesson in this set.

The Wheel may be explained elsewhere, but, this additional symbol is nearly the symbol of the Copper Tablets as a whole.





Fortunately, in this case, the logic applied in their layout is decent; it mimics to some degree the inherent self-organization in these things. It notes the sharing of texts in other areas. It *starts* with something obviously quite basic, a sprout-like shape on A8 in the upper right, which then makes a triple statement in the central column.

Among its rare and unique properties are the Rabbit and the Deer, the latter determined by branched horns, and actually some of the most realistic IVC art is this kind of deer painted on pottery. Otherwise it is not a "field symbol" on seals.

The Double Bull and Double Turtle are unique, whereas, with a few exceptions, most of the animals are modifications of their customary forms, they are not even normal composites.

You can see where Flange-topped U kicks in from B5 to B11.

The key to the whole thing, and, the one that instantly demonstrates the "trinitarian" aspect of the script especially here, comes after the Rabbit text at C3. The first reason to say that is because it contains the statistically-dominant tetragram of the entire corpus, backed by this local glyph and a quite unusual two Chevrons. Then on C4a-b, you find it is supported by palindromes.




















You can see the verticality of this thing by how this extreme glyph loops back to the beginning:







The broadcast nature of it is evident from at least sixteen of these local specialties:







B12 is what I refer to as Tiger text, the claw-like glyph and Three. This, elsewhere, manages to slip a Chevron into Flange-topped U in Text 7081:





The texts with Grids and Person holding One, we have already posted, and indeed that works its way into that turtle thing. Yet it is obviously based on a shared principle.


The set is originally in another Parpola article, although a page gives us an easy way to bear out what I was saying. Now, as to the design logic. The Sprout is thought to perhaps be in the damage on C10 at the end. It has this single beginning:




three entirely different texts:








and, so to speak, a U III "container":





which chains to the only thing evoked from the script:






In other words, if you ply the references, Double Bull is the only thing written/spoken by the plain texts.

Comparatively, the low-level animal makes two statements, without and with super-script at a 6 : 1 ratio:








into a unique composite:




to palindromes:






of the great glyph with tetragram:




The tetragram was acquired from a Buffalo with Tiger text:





That's a bit like Alpha and Omega. Under analysis, the Archer Deity text producing "Crab in fig tree" seems to be subordinate to the ultimate text of the special Mohenjo daro symbols. Therefor the subject is something more like "Rabbit Hunt" than the hunter, personally. In that case, there may be lunar messages of fortnights and quarters. In other words he is hunting the full moon through its phases. This would not be an anachronistic form of Astrology, but, a likely and expected topic to be found somewhere.

Do we see Bird-face Goddess here? Never. There is Winged Man, twice, but there certainly is no Person with Bow as if to objectify Archer Deity. It is mostly about Person with One, which leads to the Horn and Three Mountains.



And so it is possible to highlight those further annotations, but to do much more with these would take another post. Primarily we want to show the dynamics, which, I think, should be obvious by now. I don't really know a name for it, other than there are some obvious and some slightly obscure triple patterns throughout all this. It is congruent with the formulation of Sanskrit compounds, which typically express multiple meanings by the same words. I think it is like why there are two Wheels; one is not a copy of the other.



We will rely on this, heavily, like a stock standard, for the rest of the texts. For example, Rabbit Speech has the only Quadruped Rudiment here, in a particular kind of highlight:





That glyph is heavily evolved by Bird-face Goddess.




The engine behind the emergence of Flange-topped U is the englyphment of the Rhinoceros. Much like he appeared to get turned into a Swastika during the procession. Just as there is a Quadruped Rudiment here, he is a Quadruped. However, there are two, if not more, others.

Because of that, you can see how the Rhinoceros must be a specialist in explaining himself, which is why we will compile family trees for each animal. They have something like a dialect, wherein, apparently, *some* of it is mixed into the Copper Tablets, *while* they are pursuing their own formula.

These are non-Soma tablets where even the Unicorn has a trough, but the Rabbit is the only one that appears to be naturally munching on a bush.

The Scorpion was not considered a field symbol; it binds Winged Man into an Elephant text.





For a couple of these characteristic glyphs, from the concordance, Flanged "U" does not make any kind of normally-conjugated statement. It has a few numbers and does something with a Striped "Mallet" and that's it.


Chevron 54 moves from a leading to medial role. In fourteen cases, it has a peculiar affinity for "One" and plain Lozenge. It brings in its presumed relatives, Fat Chevron, Fish with Chevron, and Branch with Chevron. Its main use of the Branch is in attaching itself with one "Quote" to two "Wheels". Finally it is pushed to nearly the end of a text by two Grids.

In that way, it is more comfortable to suggest the Chevron is related to the figures that resemble it, than other cases which have more of a presumed nature. It has an "accent".




The text of the Copper Tablets has its own gist. It only has a Rake with Simple Endless Knot. There is no Straight Branch. This makes it correspond in a certain way to the statistically common pairs. If we trim them down to exclude numerals and redundancies, which pairs look like combined units of information? Here they are with the Copper Tablets' usage parenthetically noted:


Fish and "Rake" (A3a-b)

Two "Checkerboards" (repetitive)

Branch and "Mallet"

"Z" and Scorpion (tetragram)

Two kinds of Fish (Dog Rhinoceros B15-16)

Winged Man and "Rake"

Bent Branch and "Mallet" (A3b, C7)

Two kinds of Fish

"Bow with handle" and quadruped rudiment

Two kinds of Fish

"Rake" and Crab

Bird-Face Goddess and Bow with handle

"A" ligature


One might reason, text of the Copper Tablets gives us a look at certain fish families along with a select branch. The pairs that it is disinterested in are coherent elsewhere.


It may be about the Archer Deity, or, he may be a lesson stage, as the Large Copper Plates seem to be, while there is some ultimate goal that is script-only.



From doing this, we will see through lacunae and mistakes as variously reported.

Flanged U will inherently refute this infographic. It is an interesting idea, which is to take n-grams and then compare how they are augmented in other cities. And so we see this phrase from the Copper Tablets re-appears in Lothal, towards the end of a chart. The wrong adjustment was highlighted. That one was just made within the Copper Tablets. Lothal has added Bearer to it:






Its meaning is certainly not the "secret" of Mohenjo daro, but, something accessible to, and used by, others.

[shaberon]

Ivory Rods



These devices are similar to rulers about one to six inches long that work like cylinder seals. This is overlooked by saying India has nine steatite cylinders. These are in a league of their own.


We have already seen Ivory as an international receptacle of the Fish Eye design, however, in India, among the most valuable relics is something that may have had "ritualistic" purpose featuring ducks:






This enters the script one time, on M-1792 with Fish:







The primary resource has only been around since 2019. Ivory Rods p. 2 is its concordance we shall transfer in as an image. There are twenty-six texts, again all of a "basic" nature.


There is a page that catches their first discovery in the 1930s, and, over time, the trove grew until it was submitted to Parpola for response. It gives us a few corresponding images, but not the whole thing.




Compared to the Copper Tablets, this would be a Branch haven.


"Straight Branch" (91) is particularly prominent on the rods; elsewhere it scales:

...the whole inscription consists of the sign no. 91 preceded by number 3 on
the unicorn seal M-179 and on the large zebu seal H-585, preceded by number 4 on the unicorn seal M-749,
preceded by the number 5 on the unicorn seal M-224, preceded by the number 6 on the unicorn seal M-178,
preceded by the number 7 on the unicorn seal M-673.


These have a Triple and Quaruple of it, and appear to culminate with it in a Striped Mountain statement.


As for independent texts and numerical layering, we mentioned this factor with reference to Bird-face Goddess, who invoked the rods by acquiring a trigram that has demonstrated that the same text may be marked with U II, III, or IIII. The difference among the rods is her presence.


This repeats itself with adding Comb to the common trigram Rake -- Fish -- Spear:

...the remaining part of the text no. 7 occurs on several
incised tablets from Harappa: H-938, H-939, H-1284 and H-2145 have VIIII on the reverse...in the tablets H-940, H-2147 and H-2148 the
reverse has the sign no. 41 (‘a [kneeling] man holding a pot’)...

...with "U and Four" in H-1284 ...



These clearly deal with some kind of outbound information, some of which is enumerated by U, or, by two kinds of branches.



In several of its texts, one could rapidly say that Comb is a favorite subject here. Curiously, parallel to the main U IIII tablet with Endless Knot and Tree, Text 12 inverts the trend of the collection by excluding "Comb" or by changing it/replacing it with "Bearer".





Error in the standardized format shows "III".



You see an abundance of Combs, and evidence of the same kind of patterning from the Copper Tablets.


The major basis of "duality" is unearthed by none less than Parpola himself from Text 4:






The text no. 4 (M-1651 and M-2106) has an exact
counterpart on one side of the rare large type of
tablet from Mohenjo-daro (M-483, M-484, M-2030:
in these tablets the other side has another rather
long text); it also occurs on one of the three sides
of the prismatic moulded tablet M-492, where the
two other sides depict buffalo-spearing, and two
bison bulls opposing each other besides a two-sign
inscription (the two fighting bisons and the same
two-sign inscription constitute the face of the stamp
seal M-1367, which represents a very unusual type).

This text no. 4 begins with one of the ‘fish’ signs, no. 72, which also begins the text no. 5 (M-2107 and M-2108).





Excepting this initial sign, the remaining part of the text no. 5 has an exact counterpart in the moulded
tablet H-1151 from Harappa, the reverse side of which depicts a sacred tree, as well as in the moulded tablet
H-875, which on its other side parallels the final four signs of the rod text no. 1. Without the final comblike sign no. 107, the
text of these two moulded tablets occurs on many incised tablets, the reverse sides of
which have VIII (e.g. H-326, H-924 and H-925).


Labyrinthine, it interlaces the narrative scenes with some kind of tiered trigram progression.

That is, he sees the duality of Texts 4 and 5 sharing a few glyphs, but implying different supporting material.

This is in a crude condition, so, we will assess what to update into this post (individual text images and tablet comparisons), or, use in other areas, in order to see these vignettes.






At a glance, duality is riven fractal-like throughout the Ivory Rods:



Text 1 is an extension of Text 2.

Text 3 bridges together 1 & 2 with 4 & 5.

Text 9 is an extension of Text 10.

Text 13 is an extension of Text 14.

So is 20 to 21, and 22 to 23.

26 extends 22 and appears to end the process with "Branch and Striped Mountain".

With what is available, it would seem to "begin" on Three Triangles (H-1016), and employ at least some of the "triplicate" process demonstrated by the copper tablets. The first and last groups rather clearly. In ivory, the reading adventure goes from Three Triangles to Striped Mountain.

Or, to Quadruple Branch.



None of that was what brought me here. It was searching for instances of One and Crocodile.


This took a moment to become understandable, but, in an Ivory Rods text, One is a parallel for Crocodile from common tablets:


The last three signs occur frequently in the incised tablets which have the image of
a crocodile of the reverse (H-287 and others), but these cannot really be compared, since the sign no. 213
always starting the four-sign text in these tablets is essential.



That doesn't make sense. Of course they can be compared. The same trigrams exist with or without One. It's optional. I would suggest that's because it rolls out a type of blanket introduction which is temporary and replaceable.

If I tried to make the radical assertion that One is the Crocodile as far as the Ivory Rods are concerned, it would no longer matter, because it isn't used again. And so we might simply consider if one of its shorter texts is like a pronoun.


Text 10:





H-879:





That is the real Crocodile glyph, which is arguably Rotated Tau.


When this association with One is made, it is replaced by Two in the kindred text. Again it is buggy. Here is the error in Text 9 that extends "Crocodilian" in the Ivory Rods:




The number should be nine, and, it should also have the slanted/wavy effect:











In the sense that One or Crocodile is portable or replaceable, Texts 9 and 10 land right in the middle of this positional chart, adding Comb:








The version of Text 10 has few instances, but the format with Gharial is a dozen or more. Bird-face Goddess's Text 14 is considerably more than that. It's literally invasive to the corpus like a vine.




It is H-879 to 882 that have Gharial backed by "Comb", "U-shaped symbol", "Branch-tipped U", and Rotating Tau.

The text increases on H-912 by Branch and Fish, backed by U IIII and Fish.

This is how Parpola previously commented the relevant group:


On several two-, three- or four-sided
Indus tablets, the plain ‘fish’ sign occurs alone on one side
(H-288; H-350; H-366; H-849 to H -851; H-884; H-885; H-973;
H-976; H-977), as does the picture of an alligator on one side of
other similar tablets (H-287; H-846 to H-848; H-879 to H-883;
H-974; H-975). In some cases the other sides of these ‘fish’
(H-973) and ‘alligator’ (H-827) tablets share identical
inscriptions.



Just to verify again, that last bit is a typo, it being H-287 with the Crocodile tetragram.

H-973 is chipped and unclear it is a true match, and no other suggestions were made. He is trying to say the same tetragram is with Fish. I'm not sure that bears out.


If I follow the likely dualized statement in the Ivory Rods proceeding to Two, they won't help me. They have no other Twos and no obvious sign of porting something from elsewhere.


It seems to me like we're trying to pawn sacrifice a glyph, and distribute the meaning of "Sky Crocodile" wherever it needs to go. It is like a continuous flow of Texts 7, 8, and 9 have crashed into the crocodile. It is something like Comb replaces Person with U, and then the Crab comes out. You get a Crab, Striped Fish, and possibly Rain ramming into the Crocodile text, or, what may be a polite pronoun thereof.


If Text 6 were removed, the rest of the first fourteen would look like a related family. It's not insignificant:

The text no. 6 (M-2086 and M-2102) recurs in the last three signs of the six-sign text on one side of the
large moulded and twisted tablet M-1424 (the reverse shows the image of a bison feeding from a manger
and a different text of four signs).


If anything, it somewhat resembles the subsequent Text 15. If shifted to that area, the texts separate into two halves of thirteen.


The back half makes it obvious this is a Branch subject, and then we will notice it lacks any "Mallet and Branch" statement. It just has Caged Mallet one time. Otherwise that common glyph is not involved. On the other hand, Texts 7 and 8 show a transition to Caged Fish. That is to say, the only Rakes are found here, followed by Fish, varied by the Cage marks.

This would seem to fall in between those two texts on Tablet Rsr-1:




Also, the Spear having been involved, prompts this question of Cage marks on Unicorn B-3:





We are trying to hone in on what those four ticks mean or do. Somehow, what is in the Ivory Rods, must be compatible with these external referents. At the beginning, we said this Text 7 was a common trigram from the tablets. By this point, it's three progressive texts and a Crocodile pronoun. I suppose it is more like Crocodile blends with two texts, and the longer Text 9 is the result. Neglecting punctuation makes this the largest text present. Despite the overall fluffy look on these, this is the only one to have this kind of a "stacked, rainy" number.

From what I have seen throughout the seals, Nine under Sky is the thing that most looks like rain.

I would expect the Crocodile is being re-purposed into this Two statement, which adds Belted Fish or Fish with slash.


Now if you want to keep him at bay, we can just say the Ivory Rods are based on three common trigrams, one of which is also used by Crocodile throughout the realm, another by Bird-face Goddess specially here, and the third ending on Comb.


The Copper Tablets might be invoked right from Text 1 with "))".

It is far more heavily skewed towards the visual prisms.

They have parameters, such as U-shaped symbol ends a text only one time, because it is always followed by Comb. It lacks Mallet and Branch, which has the ability to permute this again.






Until updating, here is a design that continues to proliferate.

Ivory Cube M-1654:

[shaberon]

Donkey



This shifted my attention for a few reasons.

First of all there was very little "wheel" that had to do with the early spread of trade. We are talking about a limited number of mountain passes through terrain that is still considered inaccessible today. And although there might be slightly different varieties in different regions, a donkey would have been the pack animal from time immemorial through any kind of Tin Road archetype, not to be replaced by camels and horses until about 2,000 or, that is, *after* IVC script as a canon.


That means the most mundane animal recognizable to any foreigners is inculcated into a milieu of "exotic" species, and imaginary ones.

Also, it has not been taken seriously in the newer publications on iconography and animals, etc., I suppose because it is less abundant and lacks glamor appeal and just doesn't receive any interest. This seems to me backwards, because, if anything, he would probably be talking about the most common and easily expressed things.

And yes, he will bear this out, in a curious way.

He has earned a place in the seals as Kanmer Wild Ass:





Here we are in Gujarat and find one of the simplest pairings of glyphs.

One is weak, there is not much about One, to find it we have to specifically sniff it out, and there we go. He has it with Spear. We just found Spear involved with trigrams in sort of a counterpart way to Comb. It has just become fundamentally closest to Donkey. Something here must be mandatory to impute meaning into the trigrams and so on. He seems a bit like Prime Motion.

What is also interesting is, just like the character leaves the visual field and enters the script, we can watch his neighborhood grow.


Kanmer is a quite small site, not much more than 100m per side, which was all workshop. Kanmer is about 20km from agate mines.

The Kanmer mound is 8m high and visible from distance, but, from Archeobotany:

The Early Harappan (KMR-I) cultural deposit is found resting directly on the bedrock in the central part and on a 15 cm thick deposit of virgin soil in the western part.

It's almost crisply definable. The "Early" era had 90% barley production, and the "Mature" phase is marked by dual-cropping mixed varieties in winter and summer. The "Late" period shows a decline in barley. It's not a stone age refuge; the earliest charcoal deposits get to around 3,300, so it starts with and matches the "IVC periods" in near-textbook fashion.

Nothing unusual is found; it is in the quandary about how Gangetic rice spread westward around 3,000. And it is apparent that cotton was in great favor.

It probably was riverine and experienced a much more favorable climate than now. There are, for example, antelope remains, which require this habitat. And it seems to be finished or abandoned by 1,600.


Although that place was already in existence, all the growth was at other sites. Its neighbor Khirsara is twice its size and has seals of Unicorn and Bison, but is younger, ca. 2,600.

"roughly trapezoid in shape"


It looks like Donkey goes on a journey to Khirsara tablet:






In part of that, we find something that looks like a disassembled Spear, with an assembled Donkey.

That is why, it seems to me, in terms of the script, you start with something skeletal, rudimentary, which for example could wind up with Markhor horns and be an obviously different glyph.

That one is exactly a "quadruped rudiment" with some details attached.








Kanmer's trove is quite small; it has multiple tokens that place it as an extension of Mohenjo daro Elephant:








The "amulets" are formed by a seal impression, but, the reverses are low-quality scratched inscriptions, and all three are different.


It has its own animal; it has one Unicorn that quotes Elephant, both by adding One to another glyph. Those happen to be the significant indicator glyphs of some kind of semantic operation, that allows the order of script to change. It's statistically very significant.





Another broken Kanmer Unicorn reads:





comparable to H-156:





He's practically done. There's no family tree. Limited companions.

It is not just Spear and Quadruped Rudiment that Donkey brings our attention to; he may also qualify as Sky Donkey by remaining an image.


In this comparative chart, we see that Branch is almost always considered vegetative. Here, this author seems to think Bent Branch is a tail. We might ask if it could be both tail and branch. The main point here is that the Donkey enters the script on M-1097 in the lower right, giving us pause to wonder about "picture or glyph":






Yes, it is with the hand-like Lambda, as replicated on M-408 above it.


From that moment, he becomes more and more glyph-like.

Schematic variants of the Indus script sign 46 (in the sign list of Parpola 1994: 70-78) (from CISI 1-2)."...the ass and the rhinoceros. These two animals are associated with each other also in the copper tablets of Mohenjodaro. Identical inscription on the obverse links the Indus sign depicting the wild ass on the reverse of the tablets M-516 (see Figure 13 c-d) and M-517 with the rhinoceros illustrated on the reverse of the tablet M-1481."

What he's trying to do is force this to be a Donkey:




whereas the Copper Tablets identify it to Rhinoceros. They have something almost identical for a Bull. My thinking would be that a frame is being filled differently.


As nominally his own glyph, these are the "variants":






There is a quadruped glyph with chevron or flat "horns", which doesn't make much sense, unless they are ears. It "matches" Rhinoceros and then is "absorbed" by Bull text outside of here. But the Donkey probably has the normal or realistic ears.

So the onager may be performing as an "alternate rhinoceros" in Kanmer. Or is more or less a beginning of it. The point again is that Rhinoceros repeats this process at an intermediate level, and also vanishes. And yes, they have similar ears, that is part of the subtlety. That is, when realistically drawn, the ears may be the only thing on a Rhinoceros that resembles other species.


Naturalistic variants of the Indus script sign 46 (in the sign list of Parpola 1994: 70-78) (from CISI 1-3/1). This is comparable to Signs 182 to 184 (including variants) of Mahadevan ASI 1977 Signlist Concordance.





It's never completely identical?

"Handwriting".


The IM77 concordance only lists him as sign 50 eight times, inside the three shorter texts, beginning the five longer ones.

That makes the Khirsara tablet somewhat anomalous, although he is also beside a singleton of four Stacked Bangles. Everywhere else they are three.



Other animals face a Spear, but, I am unaware of another that uses it as low-level script like the Donkey.

It's a newish find that hasn't been part of anything, and it would appear to be an "entering wedge". It may fall into perspective when we complete the ring of animals featuring basic pairs or single glyphs. It's very much like he just says "Spear" and hands it off to everyone else. I'm trying to resist the temptation to say it's literally a directional arrow, except there is no good reason to say why they would not use arrows as pointers. But the shape could just be a Triangle on One.




These are other examples of scripted Donkeys.

Tablet H-1934A:





damaged M-120:





Tiger M-290 by a trough with Leg, Donkey, Comb

[shaberon]

Ibex



This is another animal that is not very replete in the scripts, nor does it have an ongoing adventure in the scenes. But we found among possibly the first painted pottery of this kind. It most definitely was significant in Iran for centuries, or thousands of years, prior to IVC. Yet they themselves lost it, and now we surmise things like it was probably the herald of the rainy season. It's not quite possible to say there was some specific Iranian meaning, and we are just left with India probably changed it somewhat.

He is not elaborate, but he really does have a solid low-level existence.


Kalibangan:





Iranian and Indian Goats are almost interchangeable:


Kalibangan (K-34 and K-37) depict a goat (ibex or markhor) with no inscription. Instead, they have a fish in the space in front of field symbol.

Markhor B-10 faces a Branch with "Seven" over him; Ibex B-12 faces "Seven" with a Branch over him.



Well, at the very least, Fish is a very important basic glyph that frequently accompanies Spear. This would already make one of the most important basic pairs in the entire corpus.


The next thing that seems peculiar is that the seals do not have anything prominently solar. You expect to find this, in any kind of writing or culture I suppose, and it is the main subject of Sanskrit in its earliest known form.

Dholavira with Fish Eye - or - Sun:





Looking towards Circled Cross singleton M-272:






It's nearly hopeless. That is actually one of the most common symbols from pre-history on multiple continents, and, in most of those places when meanings are deduced, it means something different. It looks like it might be the Indian sun, and then this common symbol goes extinct.

If it was similar to Sanskrit, it would have different names. This is a bit like saying "physical orb of the sun" and then contrast it with different properties, such as "drinking water" and so forth.

Cholistan:





I don't really know if that means a singleton has been re-glyphed. The most definite thing I would say is the creature is identified by the shape of its horns. So it is perhaps the basis for a Fake Unicorn:




That is again more or less commensurate with Pipal again being an Iranic antecedent and Sanskrit may be a voluntary response to it.

There are several ways in which the Unicorn is drawn improperly, as a composite, or perhaps different creature; one of them is as if Ibex horns bent forwards, similar to the above.

Along with Rhinoceros and Elephant, it has at least one use of The Object on its own, dawn-like from Lothal with Asterisk and Soma Filter L-48:








And we get to something fairly intricate from Chanhu daro C-23:








The thing we want to be Person with Bow is so unrealistic, it looks backwards.

And, this has its own glyph which is repeated, "Pipal with Ears".

He is looking at Shield shape, directly above Person with two Bows, which is even less realistic, and then there is the unit of grammar, Notched Enclosure or Ratti Seed, except it hasn't got the Quotes. Whether that means those "Arrows" become the Quotes, maybe; this glyph is not seen again, and it is not very easy for me to say this is about someone shooting a goat. I would think they might be communicating with or through it, and this is probably the main exemplar of the unrealistic "weapon".

The text begins with a symbol I call Neptune, which is used in the genre that raises Three Mountains.

Those people have got their Feet, which is like a privilege or something.



He is also on a famous seal, at the feet of yogin M-304:





From that point, it's not hard for me, at least, to mnemonic them as Aryaman and Mitra.

I don't know if it "says that", or if they "are", but it seems superficially ok in the common ground of Avestan and Sanskrit.

In terms of the script, it would probably require more transmuted meanings, although it is correct that the Rg Veda does not give more than eight Adityas. The idea of twelve or one per month is perhaps from the late Atharva Veda, but does not seem appropriate for earlier times. Three, five, or six might not be unreasonable, but if so, they leave no clues such as the Ibex appears to hold.

[shaberon]

Markhor



This is an Indian goat that would have to be considered a "twist" to its graphic precursors.

From the opening post, we found this is a bit obscured, while it is the backbone of cultural continuity starting at Kunal, in a way that is considerably prior to the seals and script:






The Blackbuck also has twisted horns, so, in itself that is not really enough to distinguish if it is a Markhor. Of course, it seems to be the shape that is of significance, and because this is uncommonly shared between a limited number of species, they may be treated the same. In any case, we need to be careful with older works, where reviewers have tossed around "antelope" and "goat" as if they were the geneticists, and just caused some confusion.


The above is, so far, the oldest cultural artifact of its kind. Moving on to the second one, next it involves Rotating Tau and Frog at Rehman Dheri ca. 3,300:







Although it still does not really look like Indus script, those two symbols I mentioned quite possibly are the basis of it.

However one supposedly has to wait centuries before that could be asserted.

Progressing through the limited amount of evidences for this early age, we again run into the similarity on the third artifact, which was also obscured by digressive remarks.

We were originally told at Binjor ca. 3,000:

On the back side in the amulet, a goat, a calf and a jackal are shown...

What? That's actually two mysteries.

The vertical animal is immediately detectable as something that is found in the script and has been called a "squirrel" among other things. But that's the form of it.

One could argue the Rehman Dheri design is slender like an antelope, and this one is stocky like a goat.

Otherwise, the figures are a bit imprecise to specifically identify as they stand.

Upon further reflection, from a small number of Banawali seals, it may be that an Antelope is distinguishable by upright horns, with those for Markhor being nearly horizontal or similar to the "wings". If so, the Antelope is very nearly limited to B-11 facing Branch and B-8 under U-shaped symbol and Lambda.



So, of the very little from India that approximates the older and larger craft development in Iran, these are the examples. There is something else weird, difficult to explain, found around the last image:






Then there is a pivot. Something happened to both Mehrgarh and Kalibangan around 2,600, and the revival came from the Indian side represented by the culture emanating through those relics, and the script matures into, currently, a puzzle.



What does this Goat or Markhor do for his low-level basic associations. Conversations Facing Glyphs is an excellent headstart, while it of course ignores "dorsal" script, which relegates us to manual hunting for that. In some cases, these have a value of Zero or, that is, with no additional text in the upper region.

In the saga of animals, Branch is somewhat ubiquitous. Many different kinds of species face this glyph. The simplest meaning would seem to be vegetation as food. I don't think I've seen an argument that it's not supposed to be a plant, and I don't personally see anything that would make me think otherwise. One might say a trough is domesticated, a plant is wild, but even that is not necessarily the case. However, we might suggest it scales through vegetation, so that it is equally capable of suggesting a flower as it might a tree.


Does it actually show some kind of trend here, yes.

The Goat has K-34 Fish and B-11 Rake. This suggests a different track from Ibex, Fake and Real Unicorns, which use Fish and Spear.

That has to do with the basic trigram series. Something is slipping around between Fish, Spear, Rake, and Comb. We will get back to this when studying the script statistically. But it is apparent from their points of origin.




We find another kind of reversal between them. There is an Ibex facing Branch with Six over him -- but this changes when we go up a notch.


Markhor B-10:







Ibex B-12:








Arguably, it is a realistic Sky Branch picture rather than a glyph. That again would have its furtherences in the conversations. This rather clear polarity of Seven is not imitated by other numbers, there is nothing to this until we can say, those two are just like left and right, or up and down, or maybe seed and harvest, but some kind of directionality seems to be happening.





So far, we found two different scenes that include two goats surrounding a tree. This, itself, also faces the script, with one Goat at a Tree followed by Pipal Leaf and U or U-shaped symbol on M-1430:




The plain text at the bottom is not part of it. There does seem to be a Pipal Leaf in the top line. Otherwise this is somewhat unclear and has not been used in the analyses. Actually, the Chimera Concordance from Vidale p. 14 clarifies that Pipal and U-shaped symbol are the text on all three sides.


The trees themselves don't seem to look like pipals, but, sometimes the pipal does not look like a tree. Here he is doing Empty Niche on M-442:





The Markhor, at least as horns, is always present in all the deific scenes.

They possibly become wings:




This shows up as unidentified, facing Bowtie and U-shaped symbol:







The story of this animal is not very much in the script. It is mostly visual. At this he is adept, being the only one to truly meld through all poses.

Reversed Gaze:

Tiger, Ibex, Markhor


Rampant:

Tiger, Goat, Snake


Facing:

Bison/Bull, Tiger, Goat, Human, Unicorn, Snake


Several animals come in pairs, but only these also face oppositely:

Snake, Goat



Contrasted to the narrative scenes, in the Copper Tablets, the Markhor only appears as a hybrid.

These happen to be unique. They plainly have dualistic statements and synthesis. In the first pair he is mixed with a Unicorn, and uses Tiger text, followed by Trapezoid and Seven, both of which are statements as developed in these tablets. Then when mixed with a Bull, he adds the arch-glyph of Mohenjo daro:










He is in this, in the Tiger Centaur, in the Chimerae, is a headdress, there is not much he does not encounter.

The trade seems to be, he does not have many of his own seals, they don't develop much of a scripted conversation, and so he is not that independent.

Vasistha describes Frogs as being two kinds, with the voices of Go and Aja, who learn to understand one another and live in harmony.

That seems close to the root of Goat as the vehicle of Agni or Speech in Sanskrit, so, that may be possible here.

I am not sure if it should be the Sumerian goat star Capella before that is consistently named Hrdaya in Sanskrit. Nothing from Rg Veda suggests that it would be, or, that the spring equinox was considered at all.


In the images he seems especially present with women and/or combining into them. In fact I am not aware of a likely-male character being involved, other than with two goats present.



The Markhor occasionally shows up as a quadruped glyph, distinct from a Donkey such as on M-1431:

[shaberon]

Rhinoceros



This hit me when I was looking for things less exotic than the famous ones, and I ran into the science of statistics this way.

That's because it's potently visible, but, also, begins a series of texts using additional glyphs and punctuation or grammar.


Now the weirdest and most blatant thing is Rhinoceros on M-488 becomes a Swastika.

The second weirdest thing is that the Rhinoceros (and Monkey) are expunged from the Illusion; they are present in the large version, but not connected to it, and absent from the small version:


In cases where the gharial-centric compound is on
the reverse of a two-faced seal impression with the joined
tigers on the obverse (M-1395 B+similar, Gen 2), the middle register (featuring the rhino, among others), is dropped.



Bhaskar says the Rhinoceros is detectable on a composite and:

Relative sizing finds definitive expression in gharial-centric compositions in which the rhino alone is sized down
compared to the other zoomorphisms.


And he finds it notable for facing glyphs and a Soma Filter:



On 6 bas relief tablets of
two identical faces, the rhino is shown overseeing a fish
and a fowl enclosed in brackets...the bas relief tablets with the
rhino + F1 open a fascinating window into an icon in transition to a sign.


H-88. b Animal faces a mystery object (F2)



It seems to me its numerology might be "intermediate", something like:


Two passes a Fish to Three, and then "X" comes out


Additionally, the Copper Tablets have one normal Rhinoceros, who is the substrate for the Mohenjo daro Flange-topped U:




Markhor Bull shares this trigram with Rhinoceros, which shares single Checkerboard with Bull, and this being the Tin class.



These I am not sure we have postable examples for:

Person holding Horn 37 is a singleton on a Rhinoceros seal, followed by "U-shaped" symbol, one "Quote", "One", Whiskered Fish, Spear.

Prism H-845 possibly equates a Rhinoceros to an Acacia, also having a Conjoined Enclosures text ending on Comb.

Somewhere are two.


He has a couple of basic glyph conversations. "Mallet" and Branch bi-gram, which is a "behavior modifier", is on Rhinoceros K-39 who faces a Rhinoceros-horn-on-a-stick "connector".




Also he is facing Bird and Fish in Parenthesis on M-2017:





Then we discover a Fake Rhinoceros M-1908:





And another basic form under a punctuation mark:





It gets intriguing because he seems to go beyond his normal frontier. Shortugai Rhinoceros with Tiger text identical to Unicorn H-48:





There are a few succinct images from a page of 38 Rhinoceroses, including both:






vertically-joined Flat Crabs:





with Conjoined Enclosures from Allahdino:







He even uses something similar to an Ankh, and does something with the two "enclosures" being joined by an "umbilical cord". We see things that seem vertical and aerial, so, perhaps this is the horizon.

And so I think he gets to the point of "introducing" complex Bull and Elephant text and then he is done.


Among further examples, in the lower right with common trigram, similar to the upper left:





Considering the Horn to perhaps become a glyph, there is another fake.

M-276:




H-1135:




So, in other examples, it is a short or smooth horn. Here, it is obviously increasing resolution. The change of body style to a Unicorn is notable, and, if this is so, it's a girl.

The IVC pachyderms are possibly both female.




M-1134 Rhinoceros with Enclosed Grid:




M-1140 Rhinoceros with "Window":





vertical bird M-274:






Trigram:




Branch and possibly a "Banner":





Vertical Three Triangles M-1133:





Triple Triangles and Mallet:




Round Wheel:






Horn in U:








Conjoined Enclosures H-88 facing Soma Filter




Dominant trigram L-28:





U-shaped symbol with two Quotes:




Three Mountains:




Trapezoid:








I did not know some of this folklore

We know the one-horned rhino is the state animal of Assam. As per a folk poetry in the Terai region, Vishwakarma created this beast by mixing elephant skin, horse hooves, crocodile eyes, bear brain, lion heart and a bull’s horn.

In the Harappan civilisation, which thrived 4,500 years ago, along the northwest banks of the Indus River, we find seals that show the rhinoceros. This indicates that the rhinoceros lived even in the western part of India in ancient times, when the ecology was very different. We also find the mysterious one-horned bovine or cow-like unicorn (unlike the equine or horse-like unicorn of Western mythology) on Harappan seals. While the rhinoceros is a real animal seen in nature, one is not sure if the Harappan unicorn was real or fantastic.

In Gujarat, there is a folk deity known as the Dhavdi Mata, who rides a rhinoceros. Dhavdi Mata is from the Gujarat region and the Harappan seals are from the same area. This suggests that the rhinoceros was a very important part of western part of India in ancient times, and these are memories from that period. Dhavdi Mata is worshipped even in parts of Pakistan and was sacred to local nomadic communities.