Arya language, Indus or IVC seals and script

[shaberon]

Bull





Bos indicus is a Zebu with a humped back and upright horns.

Bos gaurus is a short-horned species, which has a back that is humped, in an overall way, not like a camel's protrusion.



The oldest copper art relic is the Mehrgarh Wheel ca. 3,000, and the second one is Nausharo Bull Ns-1. This "identifies" IVC in the mind of Parpola:


The origin of animal motifs on Harappan seals and pottery can be traced to the
Indo-Iranian borderlands. From Nausharo I B (c. 2900-2800 BCE) in Baluchistan
comes a compartmented copper seal representing a humped bull and loop on the back
(Ns-1). Such seals with geometrical and animal motifs come from female burials of
the "Shahi Tump cemetery culture" of the Kech-Makran coast, period IIIa (3100-2800
BCE)


Mehrgarh specimen:





Slightly later around the "dawn of script", ca. 2,600, is Nausharo's painted use of the Grand and Rare Zebu comparable to artisan-level seals:






What is notable there is the Bird, which, I would suggest, is metaphysical. It is determinable from that and related jars and seems to be Indian and permanent. Zebu is the only icon to have a pair of scripted birds.


The terms "bull" and "bison" have been slung around for generations, confusing two entities. The Zebu is Grand because he does:


nothing.


He changes collars a few times and that's it. He doesn't have a trough or not. He doesn't look around or move.

Judging it more strictly may reduce the number of claimed "Bull" texts, but won't affect the underlying fact that he does something to the script.



Banawali shows his basic arising with Spear and Fish:




Caged Fish M-1118:




This being the only one of its kind, H-1953 with U II and Horizontal Fish:




Flat Crab with Ears in Mallet:






He affects Wheel in a certain way starting from items that are broken:








with Mirrored Rakes:







facing:




Copper object H-380:





Only *one* other thing even resembles this, Five and Inverted U on H-413:




That is to say, an overhead arch shape, and that only some "round" things actually are round, whereas most Wheels are almond or mandorla-shaped, as if by compression.

Whatever it really is, has an aspect that is strongly conditioned this way by the Bull.



He has various texts with low internal consistency.

Flat Crab or Striped Bowtie M-1116:





Three Mountains and X M-261:




X and Striped )) M-1111:





Winged Man between Posts on M-1107:





M-1115 with basic throne or hut:





Lothal Bull Text 7074:


"Rainy Nine" -- pseudo-Crab -- two "Quotes" -- Crab -- "Pinwheel"


Montage that easily shows two Wheel shapes:






He has cordoned a perimeter, and there are some easy reasons we can see how he is the platform upon which Four proceeds to Five.

First of all, he takes the most powerful one of the Ivory Rods:

There are just two signs other than “quotes” and “posts” that repeat four times in a row: QUADRUPLE CEES (M-136) and QUADRUPLE TRI-FORKS (M-1123).

M-1123 is a graphic design with a large "Bearer" and four diminishing "Branches" as they run up the hump of a Zebu.


He has got the Four Branches as from the Rods where they are going from Three to Four, and he, geometrically, makes them go uphill. Is this what the Bearer is bearing?

The next transition, however, comes from a collusion of shapes formulated elsewhere.

The Bull acquires its net result, which is Tau with adjoined Enclosures, as can be seen elsewhere but not with animals.

M-1202:

Tablet H-219 with inscription (right to left): BARBELL ON POST /
5 POSTS / RAKE. The first two signs often occur together, but no
other apparent numeral appears with BARBELL ON POST like this.

Then, the completed symbol is fortunate or favorable to Five.

It is not common with any imagery.

Zebu M-1112:




M-266:




The thing he has got comes from the domain of multi-faceted objects.

That means that explanatory remarks are found on the edges of objects.

It's misleading to describe them in any way other than number of lines per face. Auto-generated concordances usually lose the details by combining lines. At other times they are simply ignored.


M-326 begins with a line similar ("))") to five-sided M-495:


BOAT / PINCH // POTTED ONE / FISH UNDER CHEVRON / DOUBLE CEES // POT /








The thing most famously called a "Cube", M-326, would definitely be a tale of One Branch beside Person holding "U":




Well, if you notice, towards the upper right, face "C" has not been documented anywhere.

It's a Branch and, maybe a person saying something.

A Banner has been added, as if from a Rhinoceros text, and, something is going on with that symbol. No Five is there, but, there are what look like components of evolution.


Are Upper and Lower Branches the Asterisk of L-66?




The full symbol has continued and again there is "))".

The term of a six-sided "cube" is misleading, because usually only five faces are inscribed because one is left blank having the boss.



Although we are disinterested in most of these comments, in this case, it recognizes the "headless thing" as frog, while associating this symbol with Tau:




However, we would suggest sign 408 has some assembly required.

A special relation to Branch and the narrowness of this field are immediately obvious from the concordance of Five:





Branch is at the top of the whole thing, and again with Person holding U beside a sprout-like Coil and Conjoined Enclosures.

I have speculated that Conjoined Enclosures with Slashes are showing rotation, which, when it levels out, forms this horizontal bar, and extends and separates them.

Only two of those references are to a single-faced object. Five prefers to be something like a typical U III text, or, an elaborate version of it.

Consequently, it has an affinity for the Bull above and beyond other animals. The Unicorn is like a vessel, the recipient of text generally distributed from everywhere else.

The Bull does have Three and Two with Bird-face Goddess, but, unlike others, he uses Four Branches and a particular Five.

That's not ordinary counting, it's something like a bottleneck where low numbers have to be used in certain ways first.

It may have to do with Five Rivers, or Panchajanya or Five Tribes, or Indra, or the Pathani Damb version could easily be the Bull of Heaven. It may have multiple meanings, it could be five sciences, metals, ritual steps, food, or even something directly apparent in the seals we have not figured out yet.

For the time being, it suffices to say that Bull and Five is a fairly specific sub-genre, which would be hugely inconvenient if they represented common, mundane aspects of speech, such as five cows in a tax or trade context.

[shaberon]

Elephant



This may be the last of them who still has a grip on reality in the objective sense.

What that means is that the remaining animals seem to be almost immediately converted into a "script topic", that is, an idea, or something mental, suggested by them as a metaphor. The Elephant however seems to cover a vast span, from something that represents his ordinary material existence, up to a high level of expertise in the IVC script.


Physically he is definitely a frontiersman, having a seal at Gonur Tepe where he certainly does not naturally exist. They seem to have reached the point of importing ivory blanks to carve it themselves. We found his icon has a low-level association with Person wearing Comb.


Undoubtedly there is commercial interest afoot; although I do not agree with Mukhopadhyay's interpretation, she has a couple interesting examples of Elephant seals. These are just basic texts. But they have unseen features.

M-1912:


Spear -- Fish -- "Three"

over an Elephant that appears to have "Wheel" directly embossed on it.


M-294 believed to be from a jeweler's shop:


"U-shaped" symbol -- Fish -- "Three"

which is again an Elephant seal, but this time it has a Tiger Chimera over/mounting/riding it.



So, her case builds somewhat of a critical mass because something like the jewelry workshop is usually pretty easy to distinguish from its surroundings, and, some of these are loaded with loot. I would look more towards basic colorations, i. e. such as Elephant possibly for Black or Anjana, which is Collyrium as from Antimony and Galena, but that's just because the Large Elephant Plate uses Lead, and such ointments probably were also a valid product at the time. There was a limited number of lead objects. So there is a lot of room for black substance to be in place.

By the time we find this, it is up to a "family" of things that are "on" an Elephant:


Bird-face Goddess, Tiger Chimera, Person wearing "Comb"


That is because this has been previously mis-reported as a Unicorn, but it is not.


For the references given, M-1912 is posted along with a "U-shaped" symbol with two "Quotes" text, where it turns out that two Elephants have glyphed ears:




A similar "Wheel" on shoulder is found on Unicorn M-712.

These are similar to what the Bull does, except the Wheel goes directly on to the creatures.

M-1912:





Here is a slide with two examples, where we can tell a trunk means the broken M-294 image would not have a Unicorn head:






This Elephant Rider would be a full, or perhaps partial, Chimera; examples of "partials" are:


"Type 2" Elephantine Chimerae (M-303, M-571, K-85)


Vidale says that because a Chimera usually has a Unicorn body, it is normally male (whereas Greek chimerae are female), and we see a comparable text relating it to Bull, that would seem to say "male chimera". Is elephantine chimera a girl?

As a matter of degree, M-303 just has an elephant head and dominant trigram:





K-85:





Traits of the strange one allow us to conjecture there are female chimerae:


toothed horns, elephant's head, zebu hump, no penis.






It's anomalous, the only one with the hump or elephant head.

The other references are just Horned Elephants.

One of them is in the Copper Tablets. The true Elephant there starts a series of texts based on "))":






However it has the defect of perhaps being connected, similar to a crescent moon, making a solid shape rather than two curves. It goes on to further adaptation by Tiger or Horned Tiger:




Scorpion:








It turns out that he is marginalized from facing glyphs and basic arisings. It takes some work, but we can extract examples from a page of 85 Elephants, which, unfortunately, mashes the narrative scenes into the parts about the animal itself. We will try to sift through and arrange some of it.



Total vacuum on Jhukar 1:






basic H-93:





which he quotes later:





Branch and Eight M-283:




Conjoined Enclosures:





Plain seat or hut M-284:



M-1155:




One and Person wearing Comb M-1160:





Spear, Fish, and punctuation M-1912:






Rake:




Lowered Rake:





M-281 with Three Mountains:





There are several more, so, for the purposes of posting, we will push out the more comprehensive texts, and reserve this space for the simple and visual variety.

He absorbs the Conjoined Enclosures glyph, which was "developed", so to speak, by the Rhinoceros.

In turn, the basic "seat or hut", is going to be propelled into an incrementally-increasing process.

[shaberon]

Elephant Concordance



The largest creature doesn't face many glyphs, or any kind of object. It works physically slightly differently than most of the other animals. External referents "come to it", magnetically, and ride it or mark themselves on it.

Something perhaps misrepresented as a "beard" in some reports is really a trunk, which in turn seems to be the arm and hand of Man-in-tree. So it is high power in terms of Illusion. Rather than remaining as the mannequin for Chimerae, the Elephant distills into a certain feature which is of a cryptic nature. For one thing, we found this arm as one of the most meaningful graphics-to-script implications by forming a U, and, it has this other function as well, in the fusion of composites, because it merges with the trunk.


Here we will corral his more powerful glyphs and peculiar dialect of speech.


Pinwheel M-1390:




Three Mountains M-281:










Three Triangles under Sky:




Sky Mountain M-285:





X under Sky M-1145:






Scorpion M-286:






X and Z M-1156:






Conjoined Enclosures M-1915:




M-1152:







Bird-face Goddess and Conjoined Enclosures:





Carpet Rake H-90:








Sloped text K-40:







Bow with handle and Caged Dotted Fish H-89:








Bird-face Goddess and Fat Chevron:

[shaberon]

Tiger




This is where IVC is on its own to assert identity and meaning.

Tiger is used differently in Avestan, and is essentially skipped by the Rg Veda. So here, our root linguistics do not converge particularly well, even though the narratives nearly compose a national epic.


Well, if they did anything of the sort, you'd expect cascades of references by the main character about the beast. There are not. By our method of comprehension, the Contest Animals are connected to the Contest Heroine in very limited circumstances.



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


And within the script:


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


It is this bi-gram which goes on to multiple functions:


Striped Horn 205 has the ability to append itself directly to Tiger text.

Bird 76 has Tiger text (M-366), Bird and Fish in Parentheses, and Bird-face Goddess.




A few more visual cues:


C-27 with Tiger

(broken; no script is visible, but you can tell the Branch has turned into the Bangled Arm/Trunk illusion)


H-182 has Tiger facing Person wearing "Comb" followed by Conjoined Enclosures

M-486 Tiger faces Human glyph

M-486 is a prism that also has a Tiger on the third face, which is difficult to tell what accompanies it; M-487 is a copy that is in worse condition. The first Tiger faces the trigram:


Person -- "U-shaped" symbol -- Grid

and the middle face appears to be a Bull with:


Spear -- Fish with Chevron


Most of them are in the scenes. Consequently, there are precious few Tigers that roam on their own.


Person with Enclosed Enclosure H-94:





That is repeated by a Unicorn.

With Donkey glyph M-290:






But its main encoding is closer to M-2047:





In that way, it has more or less its own library. We will get back to that pair.



Visually, in the sense of variety, this is probably among the most important of all the seals, facing Inverted Tau or Gharial glyph, with lowered Round Wheel and Two Bearers of Striped Mountain singleton on M-288:





That is perhaps the most intriguing "conversation facing a glyph".

It is as if a Gharial turned into a symbol and was grounded.

This moves in to the third dimension.

Rehman Dheri Scorpions have a strange, headless companion, which is believed to be found on edge as the One Frog on M-1923:


S1 F1 Tiger +
S2 Frog X
S3 Gharial

M-1923 is a Tiger with an Eight-rayed Lozenge text, and some quite curious edges on three sides. The edges say:

Gharial, four-footed headless thing, Caged "Two".

You can mostly make it out here, where it should be apparent the "Frog" is not "Water":







Parpola's Crocodile claims it is on "both sides", I guess meaning opposite edges, we are not shown a copy of, which may make it with and without Fish. Moreover, Caged Two is a singleton and probably not even detected in some counts. The Frog "reverses" it. This is a critical design. The proximity of this one Frog to the Gharial is like its proximity to Rotating Tau in the old seals, which, circularly, appears informative to that shape as a Gharial glyph.





Numerologically, that just helped the Crocodile achieve Two in a way that seemed to have been difficult passage for it.

But it may pass right along to Three.



So far, the Tiger is the only thing to have a triple self, as in the opening post. This icon joins the Illusion by proving the Rhinoceros to have been temporary and the Crocodile not:

Gen 1: three tigers join to a plan view of a central axis on
M-295+similar.

An animal joining its own type three times
over is exclusive to the tiger in Indus glyptic art. On M- 441,
1395, and 2015, this motif is the obverse of the gharial-centric composition on the reverse (see Fig. chart 7). In this
arrangement on two-faced seal-impressions, the gharial-centric composition adapts to show just three surrounding components instead of five as in cases where the gharial-centric
composition is on its own on a uni-faced seal-impression
(M-439+similar). Such rejigs make it clear that the joined
tiger motif was not just decorative, and that it has a design
motive with a specifc communication intent.


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.

It was unnecessary because it's not part of the thing. For that reason, you could say the backing of Three Tigers "purifies" it. They do nothing else. These tablets are really worn out and hard to see. Not as appealing as the big solo unit. Those really have a beautiful, unmistakable interior Three Triangles, but we observe that in their accompanying script, Three is rendered a-symmetrical:







What I realized is that the "Pashupati" or "Aryaman", etc., yogin, is not really directly fastened to the Illusion, since the animals are different. For instance he has a Rhinoceros. The Elephant is above the Tiger. None of them are doing anything weird. Instead, Three Tigers is the alternate face of the Illusion. M-1923 foreshadows this with one of them.

Now, you will notice that two Tigers can do Contest or Empty Niche, which is a slightly different track than One and Three Tigers, which evoke this Illusion. And that behavior somewhat resembles the behavior of the number of Quotes in a U-shaped symbol.


There is actually no way I can say an Enclosed Enclosure makes sense to me. It does not seem to foster Conjoined Enclosures because those are of equal size. It certainly doesn't run any course of texts. And so I don't know how to use that or call it a Tiger glyph.


The thing I call "Tiger text" is not literally true, but only as throughput.

To be precise, one would have to say the pair of Three and some kind of fancy squarish pronged thing was used by Rhinoceros and Unicorn. In the Copper Tablets, this is forwarded to what may be a Horned Tiger who in turn quotes the neighboring Elephant.




There are ideas it is a bed of multiple reeds, and all I am really saying is the Tiger "does more" than the Rhinoceros, and so it seems to be commandeering this glyph (or pair) as part of that animal's fadeout.




Here is a concordance for Tiger text, which includes a "beginner level" or "four bare prongs" variety that is handled by Bird-face Goddess.

It is my personal suggestion the shape is enhanced, then flipped and extended into a Quadruped Rudiment, which is then completed according to various terms.

When ending with Comb on a Unicorn seal is the only time it is not enumerated by Three:










Here are examples of the "pre-Tiger" glyph.

H-271:




M-1203:




M-356:




The decorated version with Three has a couple of formulaic instances, and then an octopus-like outreach towards a considerable variety of things.


As to whether that should entirely correspond to actions or influences of the Tiger, I am not yet sure, but this basic pairing certainly has its personal sphere which is unlike that of Five and its associated glyph. It culminates with the dominant tetragram under the aegis of a Buffalo:






On the other hand, the Copper Tablets also have a Half Horned Tiger using Conjoined Enclosures with Slashes:





Everyone keeps saying these animals come up to a feeding trough, but, where's the pile of hay, where's the carnivore's stack of meat. What if it's that unusual vessel we posted recently and it's his weird water dish. That way the same kind could be common to any animal.

Perhaps humans were only different by dipping a cup in it.

Certainly something about the regulation of water must have been significant in IVC thinking. Still, nothing in a mundane or overt manner connotes water or a well, etc., particularly if you start to consider the Bearer as using something like Tau with Enclosures that may coincide to a yoke with jugs at a certain level, but, is metamorphic.



There are no horns, and it is hard to know what to say about this recent recovery from Banawali:





This cat has little independence, is almost always purposed by, someone.

It seems to bear the point that "Horned Tiger" is more like grades of a particular Chimera that has far more than one admixture.

The Horned Tiger is the one stock figure in the Pathani Damb retinue, but, not only are they all striped, there are extra sets of stripes filling in the background.

None of those individuals even approach the copied-ness of the Three Tigers, which is why I figured that glyph is often accompanied by Three. Or why they might be the source of Three Triangles. These ideas are just leads that may bear out over time, or, they may be irrelevant. Aside from the script, obviously, visual tigers are quite important. But there are precious few texts to attribute to them specifically. And, I don't think anyone has considered whether Tiger Centaur is only a step on the way to Tiger Chimera, which, in full form, has a human face. And so if they are different, it is probably because of the horns, not the concept of tigers merging with other beings.

You could perhaps claim that certain Horned Tigers have Zebu horns and nothing else does.

The other reason I thought a four-pronged thing fit tigers is the idea of claw marks on trees. That's a form of "writing". It would get your attention if it suddenly appeared overnight.

It may be the doughnut-like glyph of the basic Tiger is reduced to "Dotted Circle" or "Enclosed Quote" in the script. You'd have to rationalize it.

Some things, I think, are singletons, because they are the finale to some type of lesson. Obviously Tiger's Kiss is among the most self-suggestive finales ever. That is to say that most of the script has momentum and direction, that it is a cumulative progression. I almost take it like a curriculum of multiple arts and sciences, mixed with philosophy and mysticism. Like a combined Agricultural Magic and Astrological Yoga.

[shaberon]

Buffalo and Bison


These can be combined for the sake of brevity.

Also for the technical difficulty.


I personally only use "buffalo" for "Water Buffalo" which is not a Bos.

This is supposed to have the distinct wide curving horns.

At least one reviewer was astute enough to compare it to that animal of the mysterious Todas of the Nilgiri Hills. They don't drink water. They only drink buffalo milk. It is a clan of healers.


In the field of IVC scholarship generally, "buffalo", "bison", and "bull" may have been applied rather loosely, and the Gaur, whereas its own species, has an appearance midway between Buffalos and Zebu, and it is more numerous in the seals.


So far it seems correct that the "combat" involving a spear is with a Buffalo, while horn-clashing is Gaur.



As its own individual icon, the Buffalo's head is raised.


Aside from appearing in scenes, they are not much more fluidic in their seals than the Zebu.

What I find fascinating is that we are right around a hundred years of studying this stuff, and it is brand-new all over again. Like being on the cutting edge of something over four thousand years old. Especially in terms that nothing we have been told about the script is really correct. Only things that amount to accurate statistical patterns are. Since we know nothing of what any of it says, it perpetually has this air of newness.


Due to this, let's start with the more powerful versions of these horned creatures first.



The ambassador-level Buffalo comes from Rakhigarhi with a Soma Filter under Conjoined Enclosures:







Gaur have a special presentation. There is a clash on a faience tablet, but, this scalloped emblem has Two Twelves and possibly the most outrageous Sky Tree ever:








Comparatively, this has the two side by side, where Buffalo is using a Bird-face Goddess text:






A report on Farmana 2020 electron scans the large Buffalo and compares two more low-order seals of it. This meaning the region of Rakhigarhi, has, like the one posted, several animals going the wrong direction. It is considered from level IIIA, ca, 2,600 - 2,450.






The number of Buffalo images is quite low like that of Tigers.

facing A-symmetrical Three M-1918:





with probably the most common prefix of grammar on B-7:





M-268 similar to Khirsara tablet:






The Buffalo does one specific thing in the Copper Tablets, which is to "Pinch" Tiger text to the dominant tetragram.


M-1475:











That bears a focus.

It seems to shape the entire basic form of the script.



Now as of yet I had not considered "bison" as a distinct iconography, but, I think in most cases, we can tell it apart.

Gaur has some quite unusual basics.

Enclosed Quote and Scorpion on Post M-415:





Comb and counter-intuitive person H-584:






one of the best visual and human-sized glyphs:







at Sibri:








Winged Man H-76:





Belted Rectangle M-240:





"ears of grain" K-28:




L-45:




Pinwheel M-244:




L-46:





Twelve and Detached Flat Crab M-1081:






Three Mountains and Striped Mountain M-245:





Four-pronged U M-1091:






Here, I am not sure the comparison is relevant, but we find Gaur H-80 as the most intricate "manger":






All sorts of glyphs get a split or forked tip.

That's too weak of a case to propose it as a "U-shaped" symbol. The 'jar" is probably Reversed Cobras and Kissing Birds. But, yes, the trough has been affected by the hatching and forking that takes place in the script.


He is the recipient of the linking glyph Fat Flat Crab M-234:






leading to Furry Friends with Three Triangles C-76:




I would think it almost has to be a conclusion, parallel to Tiger's Kiss. In theory, it's what the horn-clashing was for.

[shaberon]

Bird



This has to be salvaged.

First of all, it is not in Conversations Facing Glyphs, which is unfortunate, because the only known iconic bird is facing a glyph. It's broken, but there is enough to tell this for sure.


L-50 Bird facing Y:





Otherwise, there are a few times it is found as an artistic image without script, or, as a support animal in a procession. The most important role of Birds seems to already be given when they are with the Boat. That doesn't mean they are lost at sea. But it is about the closest thing to them being involved with anything.









They're not quite the same.

The ones on Daimabad Chariot have been called "Drongos", which is unclear, because this bird has two main traits, they are mostly black, and it has a distinctively split tail. The ones on the statue are in one piece. The one on L-50 has a slightly weird tail, which, i. e., is not symmetrical, and therefor not clearly a drongo either.

And so in the "tax stamps" argument by Mukhopadhay, she says birds are gemstones, which could be great and really convenient if the interpretation could be nailed down, but it cannot. Her main evidence is that Persian and Sogdian use pigeon for "blue".


I would like to think that colors are accessible in the script, that it would be hard to filter out lapis lazuli and blue, and there are in fact Indian birds (mostly flycatchers) that are closer to the right tone than a peacock usually is. And if you are trying to signify sky blue, or azure, after this rock and a few small birds, nature does not offer many other suggestions.

One record from Ur III refers to "multi-colored ivory birds from Meluhha". That perhaps is Indian. But there are also birds from the Rg Veda; if anything on the seals seemed to match up, that would be a lead. But they don't.


Rather than color, the first thing that presented itself to me about it was rotation.

There are quite a few things, not just a bird, that deviate from normal by being turned at right angles so they are vertical.

It wouldn't be important that this is plainly obvious in the script, except there seems to be text concerning itself with both states.


This is the only known depiction of Bird-in-flight with Combs for wings on M-411:





The next curious thing is, that it frequently appears in parentheses, and, sometimes it is not alone.

Standing Bird with bird and fish in parentheses M-107:




Bird in Parentheses with tetragram:









Bird L-50 is arguably not facing a glyph if that thing is not a glyph.

It's not.

The only way we can take it is if we argue the glyph is flipped over. I don't like to make an arbitrary idea, but, this seems possible within the script.


Bird is with Inverse "Y" 126. Its simplest text is:


Person holding "Quote" -- Spear -- Inverse "Y" -- Bent Branch


Then it is with triple Bows-with-handle from Harappa, and a couple more detailed scripts from Lothal. One of them includes Bird 77 (split tail). This form has only one other text where it is simply with "U-shaped" symbol. But it most closely resembles Inverse "Y".

So, it is arguable if the text wants to say "drongo", it can. At the moment, I can't come up with a good reason to pick it off something that seems to emphasize the same feature.


Although there are some slightly different varieties of realistic Birds used as glyphs, they are nowhere near the amount of Fish.

The "tax and gemstones" paper just seems to use arbitrary examples, but lets us know the small number of Birds gets "U-shaped" symbol with two "Quotes" twice. It's in a bunch of ther stuff but for instance it lists Inverse Y with three Bows with handles.

Parpola has another report where Bird encounters Rabbit glyph in U-shaped symbol. Called a "cylinder", it is really a penny, and a really small one, 1.4 cm across. It is thought to have perhaps come from Shortugai. It has come from Afghanistan and gone to a museum in Finland that does not offer any viewing of it. The fact that it contains Indus script came to light when it was sent to a coin cleaner. He thought it was probably not a seal, but a "weight or game piece". Whether it was a weight could be verified. The small size and simplicity of it have caused it to be ignored.

Of course, he wants everything to turn into Bactrian Eagle, or, be under its dominion, and so his vaguaries lie along these lines. It's actually mind-melting when you get to where how this little token explains the unseen. He was pretty good at recognizing how the Ivory Rods mesh with what he had been doing for forty years, but, his analyses tend to be insufficient and trails go cold.


And so we don't really have any more birds to post. It flies away. It might be the only normal thing that is in the sky in the Indus images, but it never seems to do anything besides fly around.

We could say that people take on bird-like faces, although they don't wind up flying, turning into a bird, or make any kind of bird-based gryphon. Even when we go through the Copper Tablets and see additional types of composites other than what seems to be the "mainstream", I don't recall anything that was even suggestive that a bird part could possibly be in use.

I would say its prominence on Jars and that it is often over, or perhaps lands on, animals, and, it is often of the funereal kind, attests to a metaphysical aspect.


Conversely, it has a good template for when we get to adding concordances that aren't available online.

I don't like doing this, but, the point is, we can go back and add in whatever is missing, unlike Parpola's descriptions, which will always leave us in this state.


The primary birds used in the script are 76 which is walking normally, and 78 which is vertical. The distinction in the two main Bird-shaped glyphs is they are at right angles. One is walking naturally, and the other is turned so it walks up, is not realistically a "perched" pose.




From the concordance, Bird 76 has Tiger text, Bird and Fish in Parentheses, and Bird-face Goddess. There is a pair of them before "X" in Lozenge 284 on a Bull seal, which we have already posted as unique for its kind.
.

Bird 78 has the Four-legged Square "A" 188. Its "U-shaped" symbol with two "Quotes" is on an "H"-based Rhinoceros seal. Then it has the odd pair of Winged Men with Bird-face Goddess from Chanhu daro.

The other "U-shaped" symbol with two "Quotes" is Wing-raised Bird 80.


81 in Parentheses has a more normalized appearance of developing a "conversation" like several other glyphs or animals. It has some trigrams, does a few different things with a few grammatical connectors, and attains a few longer texts. Notably what is in it is Rectangle and Mirrored Flattened Crabs. There is also a realistic Donkey.

It has Bird-face Goddess three times, including a "Twelve" statement. There is another one that shows a pair of "III", where it would be good to see if there was a lacuna or some visual thing so it is not just "Six" (Unicorn K-4 has no separation). She has Bird-in-Parentheses on a Buffalo text.

Not being sure what Parentheses mean, we may note for Bird it is exceptional, since this version begins no texts, but terminates 5/24. The main birds are never in the end, and 76 is usually a beginner.


There is at least a structured behavior here. The naturally-walking Bird has a pair on a Bull seal, the rest are Unicorns or plain.

Bird 76 is almost always at the beginning of texts (10/14), and, it modulates "U-shaped" symbol in three modes, empty, with one, or three, "Quotes".

As trigrams, the empty form comes along with the common "Comb", whereas one "Quote" gives to its text the bizarre ligature of Flattened Crab with Three Branches or "Combs".

The three "Quotes" version then interiorizes the Bird with Tiger text (M-366).

The series then moves the empty container beside Branched Crab just mentioned.

It uses the common trigram with two kinds of Fish (M-631).

It culminates in a nine-glyph text that places Bird-face Goddess with Conjoined Enclosures with Slashes.


Bird 78 re-iterates the long text, changing some of it for the pseudo-pairing Winged Man -- Winged Man between ")". This is on Ch-1 which has an older, primordial figure, an elongated Unicorn with no Object or livery.

It begins only one trigram, with Branch-tipped "U" and "U-shaped" symbol. It's a brief, simple series. It uses the symbol empty, or with two "Quotes".


So, I would say, Birds at right angles have specified different uses according to the number of "Quotes" in "U-shaped" symbol. They do.





The closely-shared text has another version where there is no Bird and no plain Winged Man.

This is not abundant enough to be considered a "tetragram" (nor does it have its own static existence), but, there are three cases of:


"U-shaped" symbol -- Bird-face Goddess -- Conjoined Enclosures with "Slashes" -- Bent Branch


having zero, one, or two Winged Men.

Two of the statements are headed by Birds using the Rhinoceros-horn-on-a-stick connector.

In the longest text of Conjoined Enclosures with "Slashes", in this pattern, Bird-face Goddess is replaced by the Asterisk with "Comb" 145 singleton.



That's really difficult to comprehend coldly, but, I think it will bear out a substantial association of Bird to what I have been calling Bird-face Goddess. It will show something in this direction, which will be weak or absent towards others.



That a Bird character not only existed, but, was influential, shows in the reverse of "BMAC dominance", that it was more at parity. It's not out of the question that it influenced IVC slightly, but, it is pretty remote once you consider the flow going the other way around. In this case, an Indus Bird appears on a Bactrian copy:

Breaking one of the most important iconographic codes of the Oxus seals, where birds are usually eagles or vultures, it recalls in fact the characteristic ‘peacocks’ painted on the purple-red surfaces of the Late Harappan pottery of Cemetery H at Harappa during to the first half of the second millennium BC.

In that sense, it could be emphasized that, although it is not the only kind of bird in the depictions, Peacock is the Bird of Death perhaps exclusively from Nausharo onwards.

I haven't gotten the sense that the seals are actually dealing with death. They don't seem to go on to heaven and hell. They perhaps deal with Trailokya or Three Worlds, in the normal, manifest sense, at least to the mind. This would, of course, be a total mistake if it was a Pitryana, or, that is, figures appearing in leafy U-shaped objects are ghosts. Although that is a valid possibility for beliefs and practices of the era, I'll just say there isn't a lot of traction to read the narratives that way. I think they are about something else which is extremely weird until you get it. However, it's not possible to refute that chance entirely, unlike so many others that are outright deniable.

[shaberon]

Deer and Rabbit



These are extraordinarily small collections and closely related in the Copper Tablets.


The Deer is explicit or perhaps exoteric and the Rabbit is not.


This Deer does nothing else other than give us a clear illustration on what I would call the major basis of how the script operates. It is often threefold, bearing two similar alternatives and a third summation. It's a building process, usually with parallels, attachments, or outside references. The Copper Tablets contain about four or five packets of this sort of thing.


This is the lesson on Belted Fish beginning from one of the three "subject headers":






The Deer is identified by its branched horns. This trait is not shared, passed along, re-used or even re-represented in any way I can think of. It is here in two kinds.

Six plain:




One superscripted:







Then it partly disappears into a Hybrid:






The text continues.

It joins an important-looking unique glyph of Mohenjo daro. The kind that looks like the cumulative destiny of Archer Deity and all that other stuff. When it does so, it gives the plainest kind of positive - negative duality.


Palindromes:







Those mirrored statements have another dimension, wherein the glyph gains an unusual pair of Chevrons and intercepts the tetragram, which it got from the Buffalo:





This started from the same beginning with the Crab, which has its own story.

As for the Deer, it might be said that its superscript gets an honorable mention:





otherwise I believe it exits recognition.

It is simple enough to see that a type of triple animal coheres to a triple text.

Two things that look different are the same; two things that look the same are different.





The Rabbit himself is not personally a secret, this having been re-iterated thirteen times. He has attached a bit of personal information, what I would call Quadruped Rudiment on Post, to a wider subject, Conjoined Enclosures with Slashes:




It's not from a "root" level origin, but, from two kinds of Simple Endless Knot:






They move through this Half Horned Tiger with that necessary tool of the other story, the Crab:




which only then attains the famous Crab-in-fig-tree and Archer Deity:





and again that use of Crab has palindromed supporting statements. At that point the Rabbit appears to have fashioned another special glyph of Mohenjo daro:




It's not impossible that represents the Full Moon.

It's the only Wheel in the Copper Tablets.

In the corpus, there is only one other instance of "quadruped rudiment attached to Post".


And there are not many Rabbits. We found one beside Yogini on a tablet. In that instance, nothing apparently would relate it to the moon, unless it was from prior context.

Rabbit and 8 H-95:




His glyph travels almost nowhere, such as:




and on a pot from Rehman Dheri, Rhd-211.


It does, however, commence the "art of ligature" rather plainly.

Rabbit on Post H-144:




412 is a Rabbit glyph with an attached "H" that subjugates the tetragram. 413, Rabbit on "Post", has no additional uses, although this one is copied.



Here it is in the expected position for "Bird" on M-446, and it gains two...legs?





So, if one begins to count ligatures, this one has a heaping ton of variants, coming under the rubric of "ant", "eyes with lashes", and things like that. It doesn't really come in the category of plainly arising with a creature. And, I think it would prove its point, that, some of those intense combinations are incomprehensible without whatever this first conversation is about. This one seems to be hinting the answer is not all in these tablets, but, to browse elsewhere. That is, for Conjoined Enclosures and why they appear to rotate with belts or slashes. In this case, Shield shape is pan-Indic rather than special to Mohenjo daro.

As to whether the Shield and Conjoined Enclosures represent a rotated 8, it could be.

Otherwise, departure of the Rabbit from anything other than parallel texts to his speech, means you spend most of the time looking for him, which suggested the lunar cycle to me.

Or, we might say, figuring out those parallels composed of basic glyphs have prevalence over finagling with four or six "eyelashes", or legs, or other attachments like "H", which may be a later, secondary script not intended for foreigners or a sprachbund, but possibly some kind of personal details or other nuance confined to Sanskrit, or actual language of the script if it is something else.

[shaberon]

One Realistic Fish and Sky Fish




I have seen one skeptical argument that the IVC Fish glyph is not a fish, because fish don't walk on their fins; it is a "looped cord" from rug making or similar art of weaving.

The fundamental flaw here is the counter-proposal that what it does is show rotation from "reality" to glyph form:




It shows pixelation, or hatching, similar to the scales that a fish actually has. Then it rotates to a blank outline. And the embellishment of the script is to incur this hatching back into its outline and linear forms.

There are not many two-headed Chimerae, and here we see the level part is a realistic Gaur, and the vertical part is unrealistic, imaginary, or mental.


If you compare that idea to the most famous Bird-face Goddess image, her Wheel is not only not round, it is horizontal.


Although it is difficult to validate what wheel- or spear-shaped glyphs might truly "be", the fish is a fish. Its glyph is caught by a Gharial:





So the proposal comes round, the Gharial eats every kind of Indus fish, he contains or represents them all. I am not sure. He is a binary With or Without Fish. Although they are realistic, they take imaginary positions in the Sky. No one suggests the Crocodile might be Azure Blue. Maybe it has to do with day and night. Nothing normal is afoot here.


Having found plausible grounds for continuity to the Megalithic Culture, then, the least-contaminated by later literature are the more remote tribal ideas such as of Gond and Khasi:

The living megalithic culture in India provides strong hints regarding the belief systems of prehistoric megalithic people. “The Gond people believe in life after death, they believe that every human being has two souls: the life spirit and the shadow. The life spirit goes to bada devta but the shadow still stays in the village after the erection of stone memorial. Gond people believe that the first and foremost duty of the shadow spirit is to watch over the moral behavior of the people and punish those who go against the tribal law,” notes a paper by S. Mendaly on the living megalithic culture of the Gonds of Nuaparha in Odisha.

Banded agate beads with eye patterns have been recovered from megalithic sites. These were generally used by them as protection against evil spirits, a belief that survives to this day in India in the form of nazar battus such as amulets or strings of limes and chillies.

“Sangam literature has a few mentions of the soul reaching the upper world out of three worlds,” says Selvakumar, who has excavated several megalithic sites and studied references to megalithic culture in Tamil Sangam literature.

Their belief in the three worlds can be deduced from a peculiar object recovered from an excavation: a tripod made by three copper rods arranged conically on a circular base. On all three rods, the figures of deer, bird and fish were fixed on the base, middle and on the conical top, respectively, representing the deer on the ground, the bird in the air and the fish in water.

“This item must have had some religious and ideological connotation of life or death as accepted by the megalithic people. According to Mohanty, findings of such item from burial may have significance on their belief system of the dead travelling through three different worlds,” notes Dilip Chakrabarti, emeritus professor of South Asian archaeology at Cambridge University, in the third volume of his History of Ancient India.

But while no material remains of the fantastical palaces described in the Mahabharata are to be found, these unfussy megaliths have managed to weather 3,000 years of tumultuous history.

But wait a moment. Water doesn't float over the world. That only makes sense if it is Waters of the Deep as per metaphysical cosmology.

Otherwise, water is at a lower level than the ground deer stand on.

But that is the meaning of the IVC procession animals, isn't it?

Why Bird and Fish are together in Parentheses?

What they call megalithic recoveries are very similar to IVC Eye and Fish.


In philosophy, the Eye isn't really any different from the Sun.

The human eye projects whatever you are actually seeing.

The yogic eye can see the solar corona.


It may be possible that various Birds and Fish have to do with colors or gemstones. I get that from "scales", it is realistic, when they gleam in the sun, it diffracts colors, and this is found in the related di-chroic ware with fish imagery. Hues dominated by red and blue resemble the beadwork jewelry. I'm not aware of a second "theme" like this.


Rather than assigning meanings to the many kinds of fish available from the seals, we can find how an aggregate is handled by the script in Bhaskar's Anisotropy:


An Indus sign that doubles uses a differential marker
when it singles out in context. The more plural a sign,
more its differential markers. For each plural sign,
there is an Indus seal that declares the plurality.


A sign that does not double needs no differential marker.


There are a few exceptions, such as Mortar-and-Pestle and a couple of the "notched" glyphs, but otherwise this behavior seems fairly consistent.


As distinguishing marks are applied to "Fish" 59:


There is one formative sign,  59, and seven marked
versions each with a different intrinsic marker. If the
formative sign recalls the the fish-eating gharial as initially suggested in Section 2.3, the reptile must have
been a collective noun for every type of fish in the
Indus signary.

It may be contentious that I have left out two other types of
fish,  finless fish and  winged fish. A classification that
can lead us to a new sign list is an ongoing exercise. The
point of note here is that in the Indus sign system, there is
a formative sign and versions are created by using intrinsic
markers. The number of intrinsic markers vary as needed.
The manner in which a formative sign takes on an additive
intrinsic marker follows a design logic...

Gharial denotes fish and vice versa

Proceeding from animal gaze, the sign in front, and their
combined behaviour, we can see something similar for 
59 and gharial, a similar pattern of pairing with a mnemonic, and eventually, independent usage of the sign.

59 rises
from the reptile’s snout, lifts to an aerial sign, doubles,
repeats, varies, modifies, forms pairs and triplets, and
takes a central position in the Indus sign system.




The single "Quote" is called an "etcetera", a cue or summary for some appended material.

Going from the text with one and two Checkerboards, he gives a similar view on "triplicity":


Some Indus signs triple, and one of them quadruples, with adjacency. When a sign and its doppelgänger single out and move apart, how do we tell which one is which?
The question carries with it the assumption that when a sign
doubles, especially within a line, it is not merely a repetition
but an assertion of the sign’s duality.

These two
instances present simultaneous evidence for how a sign double deconstructs to become a single and how a single sign
doubles. From this, it seems reasonable, even obvious, that
when a sign has an adjacent double and also singles out in
usage, within a sequence or elsewhere, there are actually two
of them. Let us deconstruct every double, triple, or quadruple to a single and see how the single behaves on its own.



The behavior is expressed pre-eminently by -- Parentheses on a cube:


From one seal we get the full picture of the behaviour of (
299 and ) 287. It singles out on one face in right orientation
(. On the opposite face of the seal it doubles, opposes to left
orientation, and flanks a single sign )  (, and on a third face,
it doubles and trails to enclose two signs in between (   ).
This sign order and orientation are reversed on a
Banawali tablet.

A sign
system cannot make it more obvious. Indus is telling us
with utter clarity that ) 287 sometimes becomes ( 299. And
1471 and 9211 attempt to explain what happens when one
becomes the other. Significantly, ( 299 and ) 287 never
double to face each other, this combination () does not exist,
except as an enclosure.


There, we shall keep in mind Reversed Cobras, )(.

Instead of simply saying ), (, and )( are "different" signs:


...n. 9211
and 1471 think differently. Each is a point-of-view narrative. Mohenjodaro tells it in one order and orientation, and
Banawali the other.


And yes, we already covered palindromes.

This behavior is completely obvious, whereas some others have to be painstakingly broken down to see the "duality". Now that I have seen this, it's not going away. Is this like a "Balance"? A center with two arms? That would be the closest corresponding actual relic that comes to mind.


It is said that "Comb" can be "mirrored" to make a difference to itself, while signs like "Branches" are symmetrical -- and these are the ones that use various things that have been called "Connective" signs, such as Two Quotes, Pinch, etc., which mean these different signs are version markers of Branch #1, Branch #2, and so on. Although a "Comb" technically has been doubled, most of the characters in the "triplicate" explanations are symmetrical.


Now to stride between glyph and reality.


Here is a quick insight from Vidale's Chimerae concordance, which considers this a Pair of Fish M-2033:





This concerns those creatures which have one head. And their jargon is a bit similar to the Ivory Rods. Expected humanoid glyphs are a minority and there is no Winged Man. It does however feature some that are the same on its instances of "doubling":


Bird-Face Goddess and Conjoined Enclosures M-299

Bird-face Goddess and Person wearing Comb ending on two Checkerboards M-488

Pair of Fish ending with Bird-face Goddess and Person wearing Comb M-2033


The Three Triangles as per the final example traces back to H-593 where it is with Three Kinds of Fish.






It seems there is a type of human funneling here. This would be appropriate.

From Zoomorphic Avatars:

Visual units that are purely anthropomorphic—H-1934+and
H-178+—occur only on seal-impressions with equal space
and weightage for animal symbolism. Arguably, an iconographic basis for communication that is purely anthropomorphic barely exists.

Right. There is no sign of mundane activity. The interest in objectivity ends around positing it as a basis for symbolism. The Chimera is fiendishly clever.


If this may have been an Iranic Fish, it is the same in the oldest references.

Avestan:

masyô [masya]
10 (N) m. fish (k401)


No other synonyms.


Neither it nor Rg Veda has a "min-" stem for "fish". It does have "matsya", and, there is nothing useful about them. In fact, the most interesting "fish" is this Sage in the Kanvas' Book:


Ṛṣi (sage/seer): matsyaḥ sāmmado mānyo vā maitrāvaruṇirbahavo vā matsyā jālanadhdāḥ


It's multiple names. His last version is Fish and Net. His first version is giving two lineage names:

manya or maitravarunabhava


Here, just like the IVC seals, the Rg Veda is telling us to think about something imaginary. Vasistha and Agastya are not ordinary human beings. It literally says their sires are Mitra and Varuna. Matsya is carrying this into the next generation, because he is specifically a follower of Agastya.

You can tell this directly from the mantras of Vasistha:

“Consecrated for the sacrifice, propitiated by praises, they, Mitra and Varuṇa, poured a common effusion into the water-jar, from the midst of which Māna arose, and from which also, they say, Vasiṣṭha was born.”

Māna: a name of Agastya with reference to his being of the measure of a span at his birth; udiyāya tatoagastyaḥ śamyamātro mahitapaḥ mānena sammito yasmād mānya ihocyate, thence arose the great ascetic Agastya of the measure of a span, as measured by a measure (māna); he is therefore, called upon earth, Mānya.

That is why my sense of the text is that these Ikshvaku in the east have wholly assimilated Mitra and Varuna, who might have come from Hamun Lake. This is early Rg Veda in the time of Sudas, making it indeterminable how long "Maitravaruna" may have been valid considerably beyond the fringes of IVC.

Rakhigarhi is off the fringe of older maps.

I can't come up with a reason that even further eastern neighbors might choose to adapt a linguistic continuity that would require they build brick cities. Interaction is evident in Agriculture which involves the expansion of Gangetic rice which took place during IVC. The Rg Veda depends on rice offerings, so, it rides on these coattails. Linguistically, this is not essential for Mitra and Varuna, or Matsya.




For Fish, as a rule:

... the common terminals, POT and SPEAR, do not occur after CAGED FISH while both do occur after the simple, non-caged forms.


By the way they are found in combinations, and 16/20 possible non-repeating pairs have been discovered, they are unlikely to be a regular part of speech.

So, it is unusual to have "a pair", but frequent to have two kinds of fish.

I don't think the modified ones ever have a place in the Sky. But such plain images are widely found on pottery from an early time.

Sky Fish over Antelope:










Barakat Gallery has a huge collection. You can tell they can easily make a Cheetah or Ram in the way we still immediately recognize, but, neither one has a single example in the IVC seals, except perhaps in Procession. Among it is one of the more personalized things:




In total, if there was a pan-Indic mythos, you would probably need all kinds of those pottery wares to reveal it, because it would all be one thing.

It is possible the IVC script contains complete stories, which leaves it unlikely that it contains all stories.

Speculation can be reduced because they contain molecules:

71% of the vessels yielded appreciable quantities of lipid. Lipid profiles revealed the use of animal fats in vessels, and contradictory to faunal evidence, a dominance of non-ruminant fats, with limited evidence of dairy processing. The absence of local modern reference fats makes this dataset challenging to interpret, and it is possible that plant products or mixtures of plant and animal products have led to ambiguous fatty acid-specific isotopic values. At the same time, it appears that urban and rural populations processed similar types of products in vessels, with limited evidence for change in vessel use from the urban to the post-urban period.

Elephant grease? That's a fancy way of saying they did not drink milk, even though they had livestock for it. Or, it was a minority or niche product, rather than completely unknown.

It could be some sort of tallow lamp, or maybe a coating to hold something else. I have not gone through it.

Anyway, the point is a Realistic Sky Fish would have been a universal norm by the time it was carved into a seal. The vertical glyph would be a new contradiction or discrepancy, but it wouldn't be anything different if it was simply understood as the one from the jars.

It may, therefor, be saying something about rotation, because it has no need to explain itself existentially.





Compared to Sanskrit, it does. Like the Tiger, it is simply mentioned in the Rg Veda without any hint it carried any significance. So far, on pottery, it seems quite free without a Crocodile having anything to do with it. Instead, it remains horizontal, and can be found over animals. Or, at least, this happens, and so we know association with Sky is not new from the script.

We don't specifically see an association with "star" or "gemstone", but, there is a lot of this stuff, and, there may be different information out there somewhere. I notice from what we are shown that "Red and Blue" has a twofold meaning, rather than "purple", which, I think is a technical difficulty in some ancient translations. If a text actually said Red and Blue Fish, you would be told Purple Fish. There is a similar bleedthrough between Sapphire and Lapis. For example, it's not really possible to say exactly what was on the Aaronic Breastplate. There is already difficulty underlying old paradigms of color.

As a family of icons, there's nothing else to do with Fish that I know of. It may or may not be in a Gharial's mouth. Other than that, I am unaware of it doing anything but support in the background.

[shaberon]

Sky Gharial


This is different.

This does have propensities for connoting an Astrological meaning.

If so, the underlying significance is "North", and the constellation is probably Draco.

If not, you are left with a Primordial Leviathan in the Waters of Chaos.

Or, because these people were clever, it might be both.

It is featured on a prism also bearing a Boat with Birds, or, possibly, a Sky Boat or Solar Barque. It goes to a quite balanced text with Fish.

It may be the most mystical IVC creature. It appears to be a necessary first step in the Illusion. It operates in low numbers and a limited vocabulary.


In Zoological Avatars, Bhaskar's base-level Crocodile is not one with an individual glyph or two. It is M-292 with a brief text. There is a good image of it from Frenez on p. 171. It uses Bow-with-handle, Pinch, Three, Branch.

In Conversations Facing Glyphs, there is Fish "below" Ibex and Markhor, then, presumably, "airborne" with Gharial (which can go either way). So its simplest text is geometrically different from all others, who look like they may be representationally feeding on something provided to them; this one is fairly natural, aside from the "location".


What I mean by "numbers" is that what got me here was my question about the elusive One.

It can be unraveled from Crocodile 2011.



Their dialect is similar to Ivory Rods:


Gharials H-879 to 882 are backed by "Comb", "U-shaped symbol", "Branch-tipped U", and its own.


which resembles Ivory Rods text:

The last three signs of the text no. 9 recur as the last three signs of the text no. 10 (M-2113), where they are
preceded by the sign no. 147 (‘single long vertical stroke’). There are many different cases where the absence
and presence of this sign no. 147 varies at the beginning of stably occurring sign sequences (see Parpola
1994, 80 with fig. 5.2). 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.



Of course they can be compared. The point is, One interchanges with Crocodile glyph.

Text 10:





H-879:





We expect the Crocodile glyph to be emergent from the "Rotating Tau" class, and is not widespread outside this particular text.

CISI is probably too picky:

Wells finds only two occurrences, both from Mohenjo daro. I think there may be more, including one from Lothal (L-112) and three or so from Harappa (H287, H879-882, H973).

L-112:






So we find this operation is possible, whereas One has no companion. It isn't with anything. We can go back to the "common pairs" chart and see if it starts with "one" and counts normally.

Not at all, it's not even used, unless you want to consider glyphs that may ligature a "modified post". One is not commonly paired with anything. What are some glyphs that are commonly paired with numbers?


Two: Fish, "conjoined enclosures", Caged Fish, "Backgammon Board", Mallet, X-in-Lozenge

Three: Mortar and Pestle, Bow, Fish, Tiger, Straight Branch

Four: Bent Branch, Straight Branch

Five: Tau and "enclosures"

Six: Fish

Seven: Trapezoid, "Battery", Striped Mountain


That largely summarizes the "numerology" or "Samkhya" available from the script. It certainly doesn't look like natural counting numbers or simple addition. It does look like markers to sub-chapters, addenda, formulae, or other means of data transfer.


To the extent it is used, One tends to be in texts with rather basic shapes such as plain Lozenge. The fact that it participates in a shared trigram is notable.

Here is another curious parallel where he doesn't express it very well:


The reverse side of tablet C-34 from Chanhu-daro
(Figure 29) shows several male gharials (with a
swelling on the snout), together with fish. The long
inscription on the obverse includes sign no. 354,
which is clearly associated with the crocodile (and
is discussed below), and a sequence of signs no.
340 and no. 91. This same sequence of signs is also
used to conclude the four-sign inscription on a set
of copper tablets from Mohenjo-daro (Figure 30),
listed as A3 in my classification...


Not really, because the Gharial has a Straight Branch, and the A3 "Shield" tablet has a Bent Branch.

His "91" is all branches!


What he has to say must surely be of the intention to cause headaches.

So by "354", he just means an Enclosure with something in it, and, he lumps together every kind of Conjoined Enclosures. C-34 appears to have Bird-face Goddess before Conjoined Dotted Enclosures. The texts he is comparing look highly digressive. I would respond that Chanhu daro has a preponderance of "finale" seals and this one might be called a Triple Gharial. The iconography is unique, and yes, it is a longer and slightly more intricate text.

Those three iconic examples will be observed to cycle between three modes, drawn with open mouth, open mouth with fish, closed mouth.

It is a type of paramount Gharial tablet, but the text -- somewhat faded -- appears to use Bird-face Goddess and Conjoined Dotted Enclosures.



There is another basic visual form besides facing or eating Fish.

If we go back to facing glyphs, Gharial and inverted Samyoga H-180 with yoga hands:






This has to be consistent with the following further detail.


Frog is the centerpiece of the Illusion that has Gharial as one valid result.

Rehman Dheri Scorpions have a strange, headless companion, which is believed to be found on edge as the One Frog on M-1923:

S1 F1 Tiger +
S2 Frog X
S3 Gharial


Although Crocodile seems to exchange for "One", on this piece it is with the unique Caged Two.

That plain Frog is considered to be decorated into a Gharial in the Illusion, M-2015, M-441, and copies:

P19 S1 Tiger x 3 +
P2 S2 Gharial +
P7 S3 Turning tiger
P12 S4 Bison x 2- facing
✓ S5 Elephant


According to N Ganesan:

This gharial as a horned deity is often portrayed in a variety of mass-produced seals, M-439, M-440, M-441, M-1393, M-1394, and M-1395 showing it is a pan-Indus religious deity. Gharial is shown wearing the horns of bison bulls (Bos gaurus)...The back-turning tiger in the Gharial seal below the “priest” sitting on the bough of the tree has connections with the scenes in seals...

But, of course, that's his assignment for Zoological purposes. Going strictly by imagery, then, it is almost indisputably a Gharial. But when we follow the script, the Scorpion will re-assert itself. For purposes of this thread, I think we have to call this creature "Illusion", which is performed on something that never has a realistic appearance, even though it is found before and after IVC script.

Because frogs have no neck in the visual sense, that would be the best name for "headless four-footed thing", whereas crocodiles are distinguishable in all places, until you get to the Illusion.




As his own plain person, he appears to have a retinue.

I, at least, can follow the dualistic principle and see Three Tigers, two of which are illusory. Seen another way, the Bull of Heaven.


Pathani Damb:







It may be a unique assembly. It is as if the Bull is bearing M-1923. Whatever this relationship may be, is not obvious in general. However, it represents artists in two different cities, and probably two different time periods, following the same rules.



In the wider array of possible things, "support animal" is the generic role. He has followed the Procession to Tel Asmar which is Eshnunna of Sumeria:









However he can also divide this into serried ranks or classes.


Bhaskar on the sexual prism:

87 seal-impressions are purely zoomorphic and pure zoomorphism is at its most eloquent in M-489, a prism seal
impression with 13 zoomorphisms on its three sides. It is the
most complete representation of the faunal range chosen for
Indus glyptic design and reproduction.

The first one has a Fish, and the last is with Fowl and different animals.




Upper and Lower with human mock combat:




He has phases, or states.




Here are some iconic Gharials.

Rakhigarhi:







Next is an enlargement of Gharial M-293.

It has a head problem.

On several tablets, "realism" is not a difficulty, the creature has an obviously-working crocodile mouth.

On the previous M-292, the head is little but a circle with a line coming off of it, like the "bird-like" head of the Pathani Damb composites.

On this one, the head may be little other than some illusory horns "pinching" another glyph similar to its own or to a form of "H" or "Ladder":





Its body is rather like Cross-hatched Enclosure, and the head is not much more than an illusion playing with some furniture it picked up from a tablet. Its feet resemble those of a Tiger. The back half is fairly realistic to what it is supposed to be, but, I don't think the artist had a "problem" with the face. It entirely lacks the main real Gharial feature, its Nose Bulb, which means it is either immature, or has been transposed with secret writing.

I would tend to guess most of the plain script was fairly freely issued, but most of the animals are a commission or design, that is, a designation by a central authority. There was some reason to let someone employ this particular Gharial which says "Square Q" that is unknown elsewhere.


Gharial is peculiarly fished out of a texted symbol that we have not posted the image for:

Usually the swastika appears on Indus seals that contain no inscription (as does a cross or “X”) with or without additional decorative elements.

Such is the case on most of the following: M332-348 (17 seals with no inscription), M419F (on one end of a cylinder seal), M435 (seal with no inscription), M443A (bas-relief tablet with “endless knot” on side B), M-482 (bas-relief tablet after inscription and plant), M-488A (bas-relief tablet among icons), M-1225B (seal with inscription and icon on side A), M-1238-1251 (14 seals with no inscription), M-1389A (round tablet with no inscription); H-104-118 (15 seals with no inscription), H-182B (bas-relief tablet, repeated five times following inscription that also appears on side A with iconic animal), H-242 (bas-relief circular tablet, in center, circled by inscription), H616-629 (14 seals with no inscription); Rhd-150 (pot shard); Mr-14 (seal with no inscription from Early Harappan Period VII); L-69-73 (5 seals with no inscription), possibly L-258 (pot shard); and on two seals of uncertain provenance (Q-1 and Q-2, with no inscription).

M-482 is visible in Parpola's "Crocodile" research, having the trigram:


Enclosed Branch -- "U-shaped" symbol -- "Comb"


which adjoins "Tree and Swastika".

It is relatively powerful or striking, not much has this bold appearance.

That one is the same quality or series as where we see the Rhinoceros seemed to have transformed into a big Swastika in a box. We thought he might be the flat, sideways direction, the horizon, and of course the Gharial is not that. I don't want to automatically say everything is "dual", but, that could be two kinds of Swastikas, perhaps more.


Gharials H-278 to 284 are copies of a long text beginning with Enclosed Branch, with Quadruped Rudiment and Scorpion.





Some notes for others that may be worth extracting:


M-486 Tiger faces Human glyph, U-shaped symbol, Checkerboard.


H-973 is a plain Fish backed by the same two kinds of "U" and probably a "Comb", suggested as similar to Gharial text.


H-705 to 707 with gharials has different texts.


M-293 is a Striped Gharial with a "Double Rake" text



H-165, a "Crocodile Tau"-shaped seal composed of boxed swastikas.

Gharial H-474 is backed by:

Striped Mountain, "Seven", "U-shaped" symbol, "Comb"



These are a few more notices from Crocodiles:


Rake, Winged Man U-shaped symbol:

While the moulded Indus tablet M-450 (Figure
58) has broken, enough survives to show that
both sides were originally identical and contained,
from right to left, the image of a crocodile and
an inscription with four signs. The last two signs
frequently occur together in this position, but the
distinctive first two signs probably refer to the
crocodile deity depicted on the tablet. The second
sign is the 'buffalo-horned man' discussed directly
above...


H-1932 is a three-sided tablet. One of the sides
depicts a crocodile; another side has the text IIU...
phrase consisting of the duplicated 'dot-in-circle'
sign...


M-1418 is plain text with no Crocodile. It situates Winged Man between two glyphic cobras. That is what he thinks it the cumulative destiny here. It probably is. We think it is because this character deploys a scorpion-or-gharial illusion in or from the head.








A vertical Fish, on the other hand, becomes the body and feet of Kalibangan Compound Bearer.

So far, I would say the majority of the textual corpus documents these processes.

That does, of course, bear a philosophical resemblance of Varuna to the individual soul. Linguistically, I don't see why Varuna could not have been used to define north, right angles, circles, etc., and so this could very easily be a set of mundane and metaphysical symbols layered together.

Arguably, the Rg Veda is about a reset of the Crocodile (Sisumara) constellation onto Kochab, because the IVC era was more or less Draco crawling across the pole. Thuban and its other stars are relatively weak, and, if you drew a Great Northern Crocodile, it would contain them all and be valid for quite some time.


The Gharial is mechanically in an axis-like position, as if in a set of gears, and like the Rhinoceros, relinquishes his personal appearance for a Swastika.

[shaberon]

Cobra



This is deadly silent and has almost no supportable existence as a textual entity.


We encountered it on M-481 with Winged Man quite possibly between "SS".

It doesn't actually have six sides, but does have some side views so you can see the whole thing is rounded, puffy, cylindrical.


On this, the Cobra's human-sized glyphs are a pairing:


Horn in U 341 and Enclosed Enclosure and Comb


Here is Cobra Speech in concordance standard:




Is it ")" or "S" on the twisted bar?




Cobra and its bi-gram:







I am almost willing to speculate that Horn in U is the single-most important workhorse of all the glyphs, from this basic pair, up to the long text of Asterisk wearing Comb. It runs the gamut with Bird-face Goddess and Winged Man, with a carefully-tiered progression.

It has a couple of other basic pairs, with common glyphs; compared to the one above, it has separate trigrams using Enclosure and Comb.


This large Cobra reclining on a "table or platform" seems to be the only one of its kind. It is usually background support, or in pairs. I don't believe any of these are on a single-faced seal. The fact that this tablet is rounded and bent should tell us something. I spent twenty minutes trying to read the third side, and it was only a seam. That's because M-481 is made like a snake.




Being of an "S" shape, it has a destiny as the Chimera's tail. This actually has an instance where it acts as a shelter for a humanoid glyph.

L-220:





Nothing else there besides a unit of grammar or "version marker".

There is one tail, so, you can see the premise of a serpent who goes on to some magical affinity, but, in most other cases, we just have a pair of them as a framing device.

That, itself, may have an orientation.

Reversed Cobras like ")(" seem to have an existence, confused with a "jar".

Facing Cobras like "()" are seen around the yogin, in the sense that there are no Empty Parentheses in IVC script.

I have the sense that a parenthesis might just be showing the Hood, whereas "S" is the whole body. There is, of course, such a thing as a single parenthesis, which begins the Copper Tablets with a plain Enclosure, similar to the invocation just given by Horn in U.

The more interesting parts of the Winged Man concordance are probably not in the basic combinations, but, in the framing behavior. The Copper Tablets rely heavily on parallel "))" but do not have such a frame.

Unicorn K-11 begins with one Parenthesis over its horn, followed by Enclosure, Rake, Horn in U, U-shaped symbol.

I don't see anything that would contend with Horn in U having a primary arising with the serpent, and, that if a "horn" actually is a valid idea for it, that would come along later. Obviously, it does not look like a snake, while parentheses do. And yet this unusual shape is vital for the common pair of Checkerboards with two kinds of Person with One around a Mallet, which saturates the Copper Tablets and so forth.

The strictest response would be to say that a parenthesis can be a serpentine form, whereas Horn in U 341 is a transferrable knowledge about separating Comb from Enclosure and undergoing whatever People with One and their furnace do. This seems to be spoken by its Wise Serpent who has attained a "platform", such as Markhor and Hare do together, and otherwise is only used by humans. This single Cobra is the only one of them that could be considered "seated".

There is a portable platform with a Unicorn.

It most closely resembles the glyph we call "Sky" which is simply the Egyptian Hieroglyph. At the most minimal level of knowledge transfer, I think you could transmit this shape and meaning through any languages quite easily. It is used over a Mountain, and what looks like Rain and Lightning, so it has this appearance, but also resembles a bench from the imagery.


Cobra M-481 is backed by the textual place one can be sure that Kneeling Person with U is a glyph.

Would it make sense if Cobras were the Parentheses around Birds and Fish? Yes of course. That would compose the main "supporting cast".

I had formerly reasoned that Horn in U 341 simply resembled a detached rhinoceros horn with stripes, dropped into a U glyph. However, more accurately, it perhaps should be Cobra glyph. The second glyph faced here is a singleton, consisting of components that obviously portray some of the fundamental rules of the written script. It therefore has a motive for going away, whereas the glyph that seems to find its origin here is almost the equivalent of the "spine" of the corpus.

[shaberon]

Unicorn



This is not something I have put much focus on. That is because it is too general.

It consists of Pipal Leaves and is mainly an advertisement for Soma.

Almost all of the script reviewers have dodged the issue. The metallurgical school simply twists it into a metaphor for various metals and their molten state. But the Large Copper Plates and various objects, such as e. g. weights, are self-definitive, and, while this is probably expressed in the script in some way, it does not really answer for Soma. But there is every likelihood that what is known as Munja Grass was valid at least since the origin of Shortugai, and quite possibly forever.

More specifically, though, the Unicorn seals do not show mashing, but, Pavamana or the Soma Filter, upon which the entire Rg Veda Book Nine is founded. The underlying implication is there would have been different kinds of filters, made out of woven grasses, or animal hair, and that what had been made probably included a dark sugar syrup, which, when filtered, resulted in a lighter color. At no point does it suggest they "invented" the beverage. They do something particular with it.



Pipal inside and out M-1656:









You have an elaborate glyph and Pinch, followed by three basic glyphs from the Unicorn and other "facing conversations".




One of the most complete Unicorn texts is on one of the most primitive images C-1, with no Object.

The script perhaps has the role of attaching the two.

This is a bit Alpha and Omega, plainest imagery with advanced text:






It perhaps literally gets moved into position.

M-490 and 491 being carried on a Tau-shaped platform backed by Bird-face Goddess with Conjoined Enclosures:








That last picture is a comparison to the importance of the Filter. Unicorn on Tau is only backed by text.



We find it has "basic arisings" like other animals and evolves:





It seems to have more of these than any others do, with individual "facing" varieties on:


K-26, B-3, C-17, Ns-56, M-1719, M-1718, M-1793, M-1792



With two triples:






The Unicorn is somewhat independent of the Filter, which is sometimes the property of other animals.



In my view, it shares with/collects from them all, becoming the sum total of speech. It is almost chameleonic; M-324 has the same inscription on both sides, accompanied by different motifs ('unicorn' ' and 'composite animal').

Tablet M-436 is similar.

M-324 is using Three Circles:





H-465 singleton:






It is related to Horned Tiger by script, whereas, visually, it has the lead role in multi-headed composites.

Further, the Unicorn holds blocks of text that are quoted by, at least, Zebu, Elephant, Buffalo, Tiger.

It does have a nebulous background in Sanskrit, via Ekasrnga or Rishi Asrnga, whereby it is entirely possible a "unicorn horn" was a "pointer", such as an ivory rod.

Zoological Avatars doesn't have any special additional information, however the author considers the Unicorn as the driver of Monumental iconography par excellence. This is rather limited and I would contend is largely based on Tree. But we find these giant "Crescent Standards" and "Banners", along with a Soma Filter that dwarfs a person. This reverse view of ritual people turning into glyphs is the closest thing to anthropomorphic-based transfer of information. This is the mundane people, the worldly folk using their normal daily objects, which, becoming pictures, reduces them to script.

The corresponding token Unicorn is carried on a Tau, a shape that has been rotating since the "pre-IVC era" and enters the script under the context of Bull.

So far, my guess is that is a threshhold that bars full-blown Indic or Sanskrit from a common or mutual understanding used when it interfaces other cultures and their languages. Therefor, it would make sense that a Bull could come to represent five Indic or Sanskrit groups.

The Unicorn icon seems to grant a stamp of literacy, similar to poetic license, under which individual glyphs, ligatures, combinations, or statements can be issued.

It perhaps is a legitimization, by saying, "participates in Soma ritual", which may have to do with some of the "Cup" ideas, or offerings on tables. These could be for ghosts, deities, personal powers, or all of these.

It can't be a true Vedic Soma Yajna, but it probably could have rudimentary aspects.

That is why both songs and recipes could be subjects in the script.



Here are a few basic kinds.

C-17 with a round headed, arms naturally hanging person:




with a similar Bearer H-73:





Embossed Wheel M-713:






Here is a glimpse at his environmental associations to Person with One and text:




The associated Object or Filter also conveys text.



The question arises, are these disparate objects, considered pulled in tow by Bird-face Goddess following a Unicorn on M-488.

Here is that line placed in a concordance of Person wearing Comb, having a progression from One to Two:






and similar relationship:





but I still don't know if we are looking at treasure guards and sea captains. The script does largely seem to be about those two humanoid glyphs who are following the Unicorn, although it is probably Bearer who undergoes catharsis, and would be more qualified as the main subject, like saying Yudhisthira is the main subject of Mahabharata.


From Zoological Avatars, it becomes slightly less definitive to note the Soma Filter as actually passing along to several species, against the claim that Unicorn, Fake Unicorn, and Horned Tiger never face a Manger. They may face glyphs, but, they never use this theoretical symbol of feeding. As to the distribution of the Filter from an ostensible object to a "feeder" of animals real or imaginary:

The coming together of the two to form
a convention must have been an inflectional point in the
development of the iconographic communication system of
mature Harappa.

Probably so. However, it seems likely the story contained within the communication, is possibly older than the whole written system, and, already summarized in the relatively crude C-1. The article did not ask about F0 Unicorn. I believe I have noticed some others elongated or perhaps without livery. Someone might even call that a Gazelle. Chanhu daro is among the older sites going back to possibly 4,000. What we would be suggesting is a shared story with distant Kalibangan by the time the script/seals are produced, they themselves reflecting the development of craftsmanship, and growth as shown by permits to utter tiny pieces of the meaning of C-1, rather than originating or writing the legend themselves.

Without the Filter, the Unicorn is egregeious in its number of facing glyphs, but without anything, it has one of the most intricate texts in the corpus.

In turn, you get a Sky Filter over Rakhigarhi Buffalo.

The Unicorn faces an A-symmetrical Three, whereas Buffalo has a rotated A-symmetrical Three where it looks like it does Girl-in-air.

Avatars notes Tree K-76 is backed by a Bird facing a Tree, followed by what may be a Pinwheel glyph.

H-73 as a vacancy is anomalous in the first finds of Harappa Unicorns. Even from those, we could say, there is a plain one in Pipal livery, there is one with a Striped Collar, and there is one with a Striped Face and Horn. That makes at least four kinds of it. It appears the ones facing glyphs all have Striped Collar.

Our point of digression is that Avatars considers the Unicorn a "subtractive Urus", whereas we think that is not a real Auroch but a distorted Ibex equivalent to a Fake Unicorn. That a single horn is intended by the iconography is supported by terracotta figurines of a bull-like creature having a single horn. I, at least, would be confident the Unicorn has a "real identity" as an imaginary creature, and, because so much is unreal, the next creature, Fake Unicorn, is too unrealistic to be considered any normal type of horned creature.


It is relatively easy to trace the layers of Unicorn progression.


From the basic level with dominant tetragram:




Pipal halter:





Two-sided:






Striped Collar:







Singleton of Tiger text without Three:





That is the kind used in multi-headed composites.

This feature is standard on furry animals, but, is occasionally optional on pachyderms, e. g. Elephant M-294.


Here we see it with two states of Filter:




That also shows the evolution of the Asterisk of Compound Bearer, as distinguishable from Asterisk wearing Comb.




Striped Face, smooth horn:












Striped Face, Striped Horn, with dominant trigram:









All stripes combined on K-15:





B-1:





Are those the Unicorns?

It is quite similar to the Horned Tiger, following a similar thematic progression.

As to whether it contributes Bangles on the Horns, I am not yet sure, because we have just recently realized this is a definite effect strewn across certain seals.

[shaberon]

Fake Unicorn



This is not much more than a flimsy excuse for sticking a third head on some imaginary creature.


It has mock traits of Ibex and Unicorn, winding up with two "wrong way" Ibex horns. So, for some reason, it is a distinct icon that appears unrealistic by design.

However it has not much more than about five existences, several of them being a "facing conversation", and so we already more or less know it.


One is Blk-5 facing Spear or Pipal.


facing Pipal Leaf:




K-67:






facing Filter M-233:





At the end of a comparative chart, B-4 facing Branch:





From scrolling the corpus so many times, I know what it looks like, and, this consolation of a creature is exemplary for these "facing" forms, and I'm drawing a blank on anything else. That is, I do not recall further use of it.


That's because it reveals itself in the Large Copper Plates:

It is possible that, unlike the relatively common steatite seals where the few incised characters are generally deemed not to relate to any image on the seal, the text on the copper plates described here relates directly to the images, and may thus present a unique tool to progress the epigraphic analysis of Indus script.

That probably is true for most of the Unicorns, statistically, the text is open-ended, but, usually, the more specific the image, the more personalized the text. That same principle is carried forward in this collection as well. And we may decide it lets the Fake Unicorn dominate:

Amongst the animal copper plates, Plate 8 is the most unusual as it depicts a sort of antelope that, with its forward projecting horns, is essentially fictitious or perhaps drawn from an uncertain description. Seals with similar animals have been found recently at Banawali, Haryana, India (Bryan Wells, pers. comm.), and one small steatite seal found at Chanhudaro in 1936 shows a virtually identical animal accompanied by an altar (Mackay, 1943). This unique seal also provides a pipal leaf similar to that mentioned for Plate 5.

We will post this again for convenience, because, of course, Plate 8 hasn't been printed or studied. But it has two lines of text where it is quoting Five from the Bull and SS from the Rhinoceros:





If you look at that for a moment, the other animals are constrained, they have one simple line and are not in their power guises. They are sort of run-of-the-mill, common-and-garden representatives of famous species. Meanwhile, this rogue stranger, a would-be third head, only seems to talk here.

Its plate is Arsenicated Bronze, slightly more pure than that of the Rhinoceros.

The Fake Unicorn is a major basis of that thing like the Unicorn is the major basis of the Copper Tablets:








It might be passable to call these the Copper Text mascots.

They being the main additions to a realistic Gaur in order to produce a three-headed compound creature. On these, it is sometimes possible for the Unicorn or its Fake to be replaced by an Ibex.

Otherwise, that's notorious -- you'd be building a beast based on something virtually unheard of. In the Copper Tablets, this seems to be the game, mixing this and that between things that can generally be identified; but those compounds don't get used elsewhere. The one that is famous is based on next to nothing, essentially indifferentiable from a Unicorn, so, its meaning would seem to depend directly on the Large Plate. It's not easily readable, and no one has transcribed it up close. So far, all I can say is it appears to be drawing from its neighbors.


Subsidiary Fakes:



M-1173:

[shaberon]

Multi-headed Chimerae and Hydra




This is a hand-picked assortment of things we have mostly already posted. What is of note is #4:

The genealogical relationship between
M-417 and M-297, is one of the clearest illustrations of how
the glyptic art of Indus abstracts an established compound
unit to extract a component-avatar.

This is what it presumably grows into:





Obviously, it has an orientation, such that the Bird-face Goddess glyph would be upright, which would make the Bull the nadir, whereby the round shape is flattened.

There probably was another glyph on the broken part, but there may not be more than one missing.

There is something like a human-faced buffalo or horned tiger, the area is not damaged, so there does not seem to be an artistic attempt to give it an elongated animal head. Bhaskar thinks it is a Gaur because it is in every composite. If so, the only way this could match the majority is if the two broken heads are Fake Unicorn and Ibex.

The presence of the Tiger is a disputation against something.

It may leave a hint the Tiger is supposed to get those Bull horns. But it doesn't match the look of anything.

If memory serves, I can only come up with one two-headed creature, and one that always uses three out of four possibilities.



Dholavira Ibex appeared to show us sunrise or sun on the horizon.





Notice the next convenient marker from the same place:





Following that motion, are these the times of day?


K-43:





Notice the defect in the standardized text:





The script is written geometrically as if to present the shape. The pair of Flattened Crabs is vertically mirrored.

This thing has an unusual helping of two U-shaped symbols with two Quotes.




The strange behavior of this glyph among its other texts finds its way into Bhaskar's Anisotropy, where it (344) may be the closest thing to a normal compound ligature by merging 99 "Two Quotes" with 342 "U-shaped" symbol:


99 infixes to  342 to
create  344 which then does the same job that 99 normally does. In every example except 8039, a  344 occurs
before  342. There are also 15 cases with  344 in a line
but no  342, like in 8039. These are discussed in ESM7,
and one of them in Table 7.


The constraint that 99 does not repeat in a sequence
rubs off on  344 as well, and reinforces the understanding
that the latter is a marked version of  342 infixed with 99.
An exception is apparent on K-43, Fig. 9.

This apparent exception is extraordinarily
illuminating.

K-43 provides additional evidence for (1) the synonymy
between sign 99 and the turning goat, and (2) that  344
is  342 with an infixed 99, where the modified sign corresponds with a turning animal, an urus in this case. Between
M-272 in Fig. 2 and K-43 in Fig. 9, the animals are different, but the animal action, to turn, is the same and so are the
signs that denote the action in two different contexts.

Earlier in Sect. 3, attention was turned to a line break in a
sign sequence, to when a line break should be taken as such,
and when it can or should be negated. From the caption to
Fig. 9, it is quite apparent that the line breaks in K-43 are
literal. M77 and ICIT document it erroneously in a single
line. The arrangement of the sequence/s is seemingly haphazard. But it is highly ordered. There are three heads and
they correspond to three sequences. There are seven seal impressions in CISI, and a few more outside, with joined
animals. Other sequences, such as the one on M-1169, fatten
the signs into a single line. K-43 offers a unique, structural
view.



So that glyph is either breaking its own rule, or, the rule does not apply because it has been formed into a shape.


From a page with this Kalibangan Text 8309:


There are 14 Indus Script inscriptions which have three animal heads joined to a bovine body.


Here are at least several of the rest of them.


Bhirrana or Banawali:








Mohenjo daro:




M-1169:











Amri:




Dwaraka:





Unknown:







Here, at Dholavira, it is difficult to say these are people riding it, because they look like part of it:








One of them has the C-shaped back knot of Man-in-tree, the other, horns like the yogin, and here they are at equilibrium.


I wind up being unconvinced that the Six-headed Hydra is only related to compounded animals. After all, it has no body, and it actually looks more like heads that grow on trees. It may even have two Unicorn heads like the tree.



The Copper Tablets have a couple of multi-headed creatures following a different design.

Using text from wider recognition, Double Bull in Unicorn livery:





Its unique aberration is one, which, upon looking at the original image, I am not sure a Turtle is intended here:




The necks have been called "camels" and "snakes", but, it's hard to say. This has virtually no correspondences anywhere, and may be specific to the tablets.

[shaberon]

Horned Tiger Chimera



This creature is considerably more in-depth that the predecessor just posted.


It has close to thirty-one instances as given in Vidale's Chimeras 2012, which is well put-together with all example seals and complete concordance. We will extract it and add it to the top of this post. It has Horned Elephants and Unicorns mixed in to get to that total number, but, most of them are Tigers. Probably around twenty-six, including tablets and examples already posted for previous reasons.


In this case, yes, it has human-sized glyphs following it on M-449, 1399, and 2020. It's an inverted "U" with lobes or budding tips, with Mortar-and Pestle.

That's something common with something spontaneously unique.

However, it's not quite a singleton. The Chimera Glyph is used on both sides of Rhinoceros M-1397:









Let's see. The basic pairings of Mortar-and-Pestle are once with U-shaped symbol, once with Comb, and around a dozen instances of this thing. Most of those are copied impressions of the Tiger Chimera. One is a Harappan Tablet backed by a Soma Filter.

IM77 only finds it as 321 used once more between Mortar-and-Pestle and Comb, with the whole trigram between two Rhinoceroses.


M-1399:



M-2020:





Aside from copies with that particular glyph, Tiger Chimera is hardly repetitive at all. It is modestly complex or goes into a "level one" degree of conjugation, grammar, syntax, or some related semantic function, by using different prefixes and operators.

The notable pair of subjects is Bird-face Goddess and Person wearing Comb, used at the beginning and end of texts.

My explanation of why bother to share this glyph from a Rhinoceros to a Horned Tiger is because later it gets attached, and becomes what the Bearer is Bearing. The Rhinoceros seems to go in a box, while this symbol elevates and appears to be part of multiple ligatures, instead of having any trajectory of its own.


The script, of course, is very difficult, and right now we are trying to exhume the iconography to see how the stuff is arrayed. In the texts associated with this Chimera, it joins the general practice with multiple forms of "U", Fish families, and two Checkerboards. It has, so to speak, accessory use of "X", Three Triangles, and Scorpion with "Z".

Eventually it has the coupling "U-shaped" symbol with Pipal Leaf stated three times (M-1430).

That's because it is on each face of a prism. This should be counted as an iconic appearance of the composite or multi-headed creature as well, although it faces nothing. In the middle part with Horned Toger, we see some weird barrier like a set of giant logs or something. So it's kind of hard to tell what might be happening there:






What happens to the creature overall is very apparent. It gets charged up just like a Unicorn. There are a couple of Fake Unicorns that perhaps have two horns from this thing. It appears to be the boss of the Pathani Damb retinue from the opening post, because it is the only thing that is iconographically correct -- it has transferred its Stripes to everything, including the Unicorn.


The total thing is far more than just growing some horns, it is mixed severally, according to a diagram which shows I am not the only one who thinks it has the Arm of Man-in-tree:





The arm is non-different from Hastin or Elephant.

The Elephant is what it quotes as superscript in the Copper Tablets:




That seems to me an invocation, i. e., a plainer form without Trunk recites this text in order to generate the effect.

It's less clear how the head is affected.


Vidale's assessment is that the Tiger Centaur represents an existing myth, whereas Horned Tiger is a personal, individual text of the seal's owner.

There's not a clear bridge how these would be linked. One might say Ns-9 has the tasseled glyph. Those basically all look like a whole woman followed by a tiger image, even M-311 which is slightly muddled from enhancement seems complete in the original. I'm not sure it really is a "centaur" format. The cylinder seal seems to show the on or off of the tiger extension.


Horned Tiger faces a Pipal Leaf on its Copper Plate, as is used on M-1430. This does propel it into a higher order of significance than as a mere emblem for a personal message. It seems to be a separate character from Tiger Centaur, although it gains a human face. Its own internal text has leads. M-1402, which was originally red, has it following a bovid, backed by a text that is its answer to M-488, by beginning with a pair of Checkerboards rather than ending.

M-1402:






It has four tablets of its own glyph, it is on M-1402, and the more famous ones M-488, 1430, and 2033 we have discussed.


It is rather prominent on M-2033:






M-324:



M-436:







Conceptually, the Tiger is increasing by something, whether it is paying fees, performing tasks, or learning to read, we don't know exactly what, but it moves in a framework. It never becomes part of a three-headed composite, although it is on the Hydra. If the multi-headed creature is "too small" to display a six-fold nature, this, arguably, is achieved by mirroring an external trinity within, so that instead of additional heads, there are body modifications.

Most Sixes are Stacked Threes.

Numerologically, it looks less like six is a number after five, and more like a doubled three.


Tablets don't usually have very good detail, but, this creature progresses quite similarly to the Unicorn until it is thought to adhere Unicorn into part of its body.


On seals, we can find most of its iconic development.


Smooth Horns:





M-300:









Striped Horns:

Banawali 17, Text 9201 Find spot: “The plan of ‘palatial building’ rectangular in shape (52 X 46 m) with eleven units of rooms…The discovery of a tiger seal from the sitting room and a few others from the house and its vicinity, weights of chert, and lapis lazuli beads and deluxe Harappan pottery indicate that the house belonged to a prominent merchant.”

With Tusks H-96:










M-299:




M-301:



M-1176:







Scorpion Stinger M-1177:




M-302:







Finally it does one thing, mock combat:









I've not really noticed anything that shows from point A to point B here. Some of its tablets have people on them, but, here, it has the reversed gaze from the Man-in-tree scene.

She also does this with a male human and Gharial.

That would be construed as a low-ranked Chimera, where perhaps it is the Bangles that are of note.

It almost looks imitative. It doesn't look like a male tiger. You can even see the Hastin gesture of the hand, by a person with animal features. This has the glyph of tasseled loops, or striped vertical chevrons, or there are two that are perhaps similar.

[shaberon]

Human Markhor



This doesn't quite qualify for a title like "chimera" or "centaur", because all that is observed is the grafting of a human face onto a goat.


In the narrative scenes, the Markhor is ubiquitous in "deity invocation", or however you would like to classify the supplication imagery. Some are a plain goat, some are this.

However, the Markhor is ostensibly female-centric, and so far it appears only women gain these horns.

A balanced view of "looking back" perhaps says the male gains the attention of Tiger and the female of Goat:





I, at least, think less in terms of "is" and more of "does", so that these are more about "gains the powers or experience of" rather than "becomes". This may simply mean "of the opposite sex".


As to whose face the animal receives, it appears to transition through a glyph, Enclosed Quote K-35:





And then I probably would have treated it as "background support", i. e., an environmental element in the scenes -- except it turns out that it does have an iconic identity.


It's brief, but is found facing Branch M-1180 with Bull text:





What is notable is that this text floats to the top of the posted concordance on Five.




It also arises with a basic pair on M-1179:




compared with Procession Seal:




It may be a change of the natural Goat and inversion of the Arch:

[shaberon]

Scorpion-or-Gharial Illusion




This seems to be the heart of the IVC ethos.

Firstly, as an inheritance from Jiroft, it must be said the Scorpion is the mainstay of that iconography. It is heavily detailed and repetitive, becoming minotaurs and other forms. In this sense, we think that "animal hieroglyphs" as a mode of expression are a common idea throughout the region, but what they have to say is probably different in each iconic realm.

In India, the Scorpion is part of the statistically-dominant tetragram, although it has essentially no iconography.

But it was very plainly and elaborately detailed at Rehman Dheri, so, there is no question about its potential for visual deployment. It just doesn't happen.


In the Copper Tablets, it quotes Horned Tiger and Half Horned Tiger:





Scorpion trigram:








So we want to observe the path of Frog in Rehman Dheri:






Binjor:




It passes through IVC on Samyoga H-180 and the edge of M-1923 Tiger and Gharial:





and across the Megalithic Culture to Adichanallur funeral jars ca. 900 - 700:








It's just an indistinct four-footed thing. The purpose of the script is to make it into something, here in its abstract and real representations:




M-1934:





That's a unique configuration that isn't really the same as Sky Crocodile over Procession of Animals.

It's not the same as with the meditating yogin.


These are consistently manufactured as one-sided objects. That is the best-preserved one. But it also comes in tablet form. These are not exactly backed by a text. It comes with the only other edition of a Three-Tiger Hydra. On this, the surfaces are so highly worn that we basically have to take everyone's word. I can only see enough to the point I would not argue it's not tigers, but, there are none like the solo agent we have posted.

What this does is the art of subtraction.

It removes the Rhinoceros, whom we believe turns into symbols and glyphs. It also removes what is considered to be a Monkey, which so far hasn't got any outside references. This is easy because they are not actually connected to the thing.


You are left with the top of the unit as clashing Gaur, as found elsewhere with Two Twelves and a massive Tree, or else on a bar tablet with individual glyphs in lozenge and square shapes.

This assembly is moderately visible from Scorpion-or-Gharial Illusions towards the end as M-1395 and 441:






What also remains is the Elephant's Trunk, as if being held by Person holding One, or the arm of Man-in-tree; simultaneously, this is the Tiger's Tail.

Bhaskar calls this "Gharial-centric" as if there were no question it might be a Scorpion.

One way in which all three are true is because scorpions come out when it is warm because it is warm, frogs come out when it rains, crocodiles come out when it is cold in order to bask. That makes a three-seasonal year.

There isn't a text involved with this.

It's two sets of triple illusions.

The Crocodile may be subsumed or supplanted by Scorpion in the script. If we look at a Horned Tiger that has a Scorpion Tail coming off its face, then, the horns are somewhat suggestive of the pincers, so, overall the human head assumes a scorpionic shape.

Here, the lower register consists of the beasts of Contest Heroine.


That means it is a bit like Big Tree scene over Master of Animals.

There are no associated glyphs, so, we are left with the ability to explain it contained within the total knowledge base of the script. It only has a name because prior reviews have asserted it was a Scorpion or Gharial, or that the four-footed headless thing was. We will have to track down if it can be asserted that Scorpion is the Human Head of a Chimera, or if Winged Man or other texts absorb it, and does this attach to the Gharial in some way.

One might try to argue, those are the constellations, Scorpio and Draco. I'm not sure this is impossible, but I'm not sure it's correct either. It could just as easily be whatever Jiroft means by "Scorpion", with edits to its personal adventure.

Or, the freestanding animals on the large retinue, correspond to the glyphs on solo Three Tigers.

No other icon, text, or scene has anything but one or two tigers or a mixed or modified one.


In the amuletic sense, that makes this tablet about the most powerful of them all.

As a student of later Indian philosophy, it is quite easy to see Tri-Shakti combined with a type of triple Sky God, or Manas as Knower, the Known, and Knowledge thereof, it would be incredibly easy to simply attribute the resemblances as definite facts. Those would have to be considered a variation or distinction of anything known from Iran. But the point is we are going to let the script itself show what it has. So far, it has had every kind of idea projected onto it, from dancing to human sacrifice, or it must be like Sumerian, or it is the Rg Veda or Vana Durga, which has been a great disservice.

It has two forms of direct continuity, this four-footed thing and possibly the India glyph, and the system of weights.


For the sake of diligence, here are three of the Triple Tigers with Illusion, except one of them has been touched up with the "full" version:




And this would be the correct and full family tree of Three Tigers:

[shaberon]

Objects



Here, we are looking at a few things that are taken into the plane of artistic imagery, not actual objects that are inscribed.


We found that the Unicorn appeared to be objectified, and was being carried on a platform that would be entirely unrealistic if it was any kind of animal resembling a bull. It would work if it was a terracotta figurine, but not a real animal.

Other people were carrying things like a Crescent Standard and Banner.

It seems to me we are looking at the x-ness of space; people are reduced to the size of small objects, glyphs are enlarged to the size of people.

Conversely, there are a few cases where a glyph is not a glyph, but, "a picture or symbol". Among these, one finds the image of a Tree in Tiger's Kiss or tablets with Swastikas, and a Soma Filter with Rakhigarhi Buffalo. They are not stick figures, but filled-out and realistic like pictures in the visual field.


I have been unable to find a train of people resembling anything like the full Animal Procession. Not that many.

The weird procession and some objects have text. There is an error in the extracted text of M-490 and 491:





Its number should be Stacked Three (similar to Gharial without Fish H-174):




Curiously, the text proceeds to something as basic as Lozenge.




In this area we pass tablets with additional horned people:

H-175 Buffalo

H-178 Markhor



and arrive at a large number of tablets having on one side a Tree and on the other, various texts.

H-189 copies one of these to an image of what is probably an I-shaped Vase.

We saw such a vase being used on a Pathani Damb seal, which may be the source for something with vertical text posted as unprovenanced, which uses male and female participants:








The trees are in various stands ranging from crescent to grid-shape, and use several highly-functioning glyphs such as Three Mountains and pair of Checkerboards.

Some have suggested the "base" is really a "trunk" that a branch is growing out of:






But they are not all the same.


Tree in base and Soma Filter H-1778:






Doubled Filter M-2002:




Miniature of a three-dimensional object:






That's not the only one:

It clarifies why the tiger’s horn is bristled. It
merges the bristle aspect of the urus horn with the zebu horn
in B-17, but not in M-1168 where the horned tiger stands
free (F0).

F2, the container, enjoys an iconographic status independently of animal imagery on several seal-impressions
(M-457–463, 1407–1414, 2025; H-98, 195, 196 AB, 197,
228, 739–743, 1779–1784, 1788–1789, 1791–1792, 2006,
2022). We see it carved and sculpted in ivory (M-2116),
engraved on gold (M-2125), and incised on steatite (H291–293+similar). The coming together of the two to form
a convention must have been an inflectional point in the
development of the iconographic communication system of
mature Harappa.

In Bhaskar's view, the main point is given by M-490 above corresponding to text extracted from Monumental Soma Filter H-196:




That says it includes the Tiger Chimera glyph pair.






Most of the others we will have to discover and re-circulate. The texts on many of these have been posted, but no notice was given it was a Tree Tablet.

M-500 is a Tree disk with a Caged Mallet text. Some round seals have circular script.





I thought I had a link for a summary image, and now I cannot find it. The meaningful image is found near the beginning of Three Zebus, Three Trees, taken from Parpola's Deciphering fig. 1.14, taken from Jarrige 1988 fig. 4.4.

In this, three different Zebus are tied to three kinds of Trees, on Nausharo pottery.

Later, they are tied to "posts" or "standards".

In Kulli ware, according to Uesugi 2014, Ibex, Zebu, Tiger come together iconographically. That this converges into IVC Unicorn, so to speak. Tsurumi U 2010 perhaps has better examples, such as Cypress as found with Horned Tiger. The triptych is in there near the end, it's the same as the famous Bull jar, except it is unrolled so you can see all of it. Then you have Pipal, Sami, Bilva or some kind of fruit. This is probably something more specific than Iranian Bull and Pipal motifs. If we can't find a working image link, we will annotate this.


There are several other repetitive animals and designs, which of course the personal paper goes on to assign to known entities.

Over time in Indian pottery, the Bull becomes more and more a landing spot for Birds, which comes to fruition in Cemetery H around 1,900, that is, technically within the IVC itself, but exhibiting practices of decarnation and cremation. For example, semi-appropriate Sky Peacocks:







The principal question about Trees would be if there is any indication of Pururavas with Asvattha and Sami twigs for the purpose of fire sticks. There is an idea Pururavas is the Bull of the Mehi sherd or with a triangle between his horns. Subsequently, Urvashi is behind watery or Comb symbols.

"Mehi" perhaps means a Nindowari sherd with two of the Bulls.

He thinks the "Rainy Cartwheel" over Zebu is Urvashi or addresses her.


The similar-sounding Avestan is far later -- Pouroush Aspa as the father of Zarat Ustra has the meaning "having many horses", that is, an Anatomically Modern Horse which is first seen in Late IVC. They have no obvious possible equivalent for Pururavas, same as we do not expect them to have the details developed in that milieu.

Bot the Vedic school and the Dravidian school think Urvashi or Apsarases should be present, in fact, this idea is what they use to refute the suggestion it is stars, such as the Pleiades.


So far the symbolism tells me we might expect terrestrial and cosmic nymphs, but as of yet, the most reliable match is two kinds of Trees.



That "stars" or something may be found inside horns is not new -- I am not sure I have found the "triangle" being referred to:






Here is a Tree Prism compared to a much, much later artifact that seems to have IVC Shield shape and Swastika opposite Tree:





The same material, bronze, and area, Kausambi, 35 miles from Prayag, produced this Woman with Zebus in Late IVC ca. 2,000 - 1,750:







There are a few we're not very sure about.

Tau or Arch over a "stack", with knotwork and Backgammon Board:





I would conclude the Objects are heavily conditional to what is in the script.

That there are others, but Soma Filter is again paramount, is very telling.

The Veda and the Mazda Yasna are Books of Soma. It's mandatory for the substrate of both.


Painted wares rather obviously contain a basis for script compared to IM77:





Physically, Soma is known from Ulug Depe. The region's connection is such that the domestic pig, Sus vittatus, was in Kopet Dag around 4,000, coming from southeast Asia.

I think there is an unusually large and complete human network probably a thousand years before IVC script is discernable.

Because we tend to think Zoroaster came from the northeast, it would just be eminently likely that Avestan descends from Anau or Soma culture reaching at least to Gonur Tepe in Bactria.

Because people are now researching residues on ceramics, perhaps some ingredients will come to light.

This Soma Filter is the most ubiquitous and pervasive element of the entire Corpus. With few exceptions, it is on the Unicorn which accounts for almost 60% of the material or about 80% of the iconography. Then it has its own scenes, and stand-alone representations.


And, no, so far the people are not using the "U", or "Lozenge", etc., they sometimes hold, but there is this environment of a Unicorn. Person with One does appear to be with the Filter, which is suggestive of the Unicorn operation on Striped Mallet, which suggests Mallet. Then you get a text with Checkerboards, perhaps Filters, nearby.

The Veda speaks of mashing and purifying as two different things, which seems parallel here.


It is entirely possible that Sanskrit Babhru stems from a root meaning the Caspian Tiger, and, if the Veda ignores the animal, it does not ignore the color. It may be that in IVC, Babhru = Tiger = the color of Soma, perhaps.


Originally it is used rather sparingly, with no room to contend any meaning other than the color.


Such a view is that of a Vedic Manusa:


babhrur eko viṣuṇaḥ sūnaro yuvāñjy aṅkte hiraṇyayam ||

“One (Soma) brown of hue, all-pervading, leader of the nights, ever young, decorates (himself) with golden ornament.”


By this, we are actually talking about the Vedic Middle Period. The term traces back through important precursors, such as Vasistha:


dadhikrāvāṇam bubudhāno agnim upa bruva uṣasaṃ sūryaṃ gām | bradhnam mām̐ścator varuṇasya babhruṃ te viśvāsmad duritā yāvayantu ||

“Propitiating Dadhikrāvan, I glorify Agni, Uṣas, the sun, the earth, the great brown horse of Varuṇa, who is mindful of his adorers; may they put far away from us iniquities.”


It's a twist, because "bradhna" is a gain a color, applicable to sun, horse, soma, requiring context; then he says:


Māṃścatva (मांश्चत्व):—[from māṃścatu] mfn. ([probably]) yellowish


So he is giving three colorizations, that are all definitely of Varuna, and could have all three meanings. IVC is almost like erasing "Horse" and substituting "Tiger".



Ambarisa:


pari tyaṃ haryataṃ harim babhrum punanti vāreṇa | yo devān viśvām̐ it pari madena saha gacchati ||

“Him, coveted (by all), green-tinted, brown, they purify with the filter; who goes to all the gods with (his) exhilaration.”



The first line does not have to be original in meaning. It would work in a pre-Vedic Avestan cognate. In the second line, however, he is making a theological point about Vedic Soma not known to be described elsewhere.

On the contrary, IVC probably makes a theological point about Three Tigers, which may be beyond impure soma stage.


For the texts possibly about Soma components, the Person has them independently:





This is how the Unicorn affects it:




The Unicorn does not have any ritual object. It is nowhere to be found, unless it has been sublimated into this text.

One Checkerboard is with the Rhinoceros, the other with Zebu with the necessary accoutrement:





This archive is practically definitive for the whole script, and, there is no Soma, unless it is in the script.

I can easily conceive a commercial product that pushed such a level of connoisseurship it snuffed its own market, like Absinthe.

The Veda is clearly grounded in the principle of surplus agriculture, such that monklike characters could produce and filter their own Soma. Its northern and southern frontiers of expansion would both be considered "into Soma-producing regions", trans-Himalaya and Aravalli. The "height" of times around 2,300 would have amounted to a contiguous bloc of Soma use from Bihar to Gujarat, Bactria, and the Makran.

[shaberon]

Kalibangan Pipal Leaf over Three Mountains




As a fledgling student of the script, this jumped out into my attention.


K-53:





There's only one. It's beguilingly simple. I take it as similar to a diploma, or, perhaps, the official seal of the city, or some mode of conveying authority.

Nothing need be said about the Pipal, except it has achieved a banner-like status.

These look like mountains and are consistently differentiable from the "interlocking" Three Triangles that seem like Tigers.


It kept standing out when I tried looking at the structure and patterns of the script.

In geometric terms, we have already found Three Mountains one time written uphill.

The script has Diminishing Branches and Uphill Mountains in a similar configuration.


The eminence of Kalibangan as an issuer of texts is demonstrated by Ameri 2018 on Regional Variation:


In terms of iconography, the seals from Kalibangan show far more
variation than the seals from Lothal, Harappa or Mohenjo-daro. The site
has the smallest percentage of unicorn seals of any of the corpora examined thus far. While at Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Lothal and Chanhudaro, the unicorn seals make up about 80% of the figural assemblage, at
Kalibangan they are only 63%. The remaining 37% of the seals encompass almost all of the iconographic types (Table 19.1, Figure 19.3). Yet
there is no other figure that replaces the unicorn in frequency...

A close analysis of the seals from Kalibangan shows that, unlike the
seals from Lothal which fit fairly well with the basic iconographic distribution found at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, these have a number of
unusual features...

...about 25% of the
seals from Kalibangan have animals facing right. In spite of the reversal
of the animal figure, however, the inscription itself does not seem to be
reversed.

Also from Kalibangan is one of the nine cylinder seals found in the
Greater Indus Valley. This seal belongs to the small subset of narrative
seals found in the Harappan corpus and is without a doubt the most
interesting of the cylinders found in this region. While the form of this
seal is Mesopotamian, its iconography is purely Harappan. It depicts
two nude human figures—with spears—who appear to be fighting over
a skirted figure standing between them. A composite human animal figure looks on from the right. This centaur figure is found on two other
seals, both of which are standard square stamps. The first is also from
Kalibangan while the second was found at Nausharo, far to the west.
The cylinder seal found at Kalibangan illustrates the final difference between the seals from Kalibangan and those from small classical
Harappan sites like Lothal and Chanhu-daro. While the glyptic repertoire at these last two sites is limited to unicorns and a number of
other standard animal seals, the seals from Kalibangan are distinguished
by their many depictions of mythological themes (see Figure 19.5 for
some examples). These include the centaur figure seen in the cylinder
seal discussed above and in seal K-50, a scene depicting a human figure
(probably female) in a tree with a tiger looking back towards it (K-49)...


On the other hand, none of the seals or sealings found
at Lothal depict mythological subjects.

The transitional phase at Banawali combines Harappan
elements, such as the complete rebuilding of the town with bricks with a
4:2:1 ratio, with a continuing local Sothi pottery tradition.


Only 17%
of the seals from Banawali depict unicorns, while 53.3% depict goats,
makhors, and urus (aurochs). In addition, all but two of the seals from
Banawali show the animal figure facing right rather than left. The
single sealing found at the site (Joshi and Parpola 1987, B-23) was
impressed with a seal showing a human figure facing a unicorn and
a goat with curly horns. The human figure’s raised arm suggests that
he or she is addressing the animals, possibly in a shamanistic gesture.



Kalibangan Unicorns typically are Striped, while Lothal ones are only a few. They seem to put less zest into seal craftsmanship and are more perfunctory.

The high proportion of "facing" conversations particularly at Banawali is also noted.

That article -- entirely about the seals -- is oblivious to the, I suppose, more recent qualification of "IVC culture" as an ancient Kunal emanation, having Kalibangan as its largest direct transmitter. And then I think you need to add in the observation that it was abandoned just like Mehrgarh around the same time, and then was re-made relatively quickly, co-inciding with the time of "Mature" script.

This is a time lapse based on chemical analysis of the soil. and, it is not even looking at Mehrgarh:





and Kalibangan towards the center of most of the named sites:






There is no shortage of holy mountains in later Indian literature, but that does not seem likely to apply.

Is there anything in the iconography that is remotely suggestive of mountains, no.

At the broadest reach, it could be said they lived between the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush, and the Aravallis. Those might be the border markers.


In any case, there is nothing intuitive and no clue where these came from. They are also different from a single Mountain; it may be that one mountain is repeated in three ways.

For one thing, there is exclusion, or, not everyone talks about this.

Horned Tiger Chimera does not have this glyph.

It's not in the Ivory Rods -- Striped Mountain appears to be their destiny.



Three Mountains 230 associates itself to a number of basic glyphs in pairs and trigrams. What it does that is unusual is it gates Neptune 175. It does so on a Mohenjo daro Unicorn having U-shaped symbol with two Quotes. It has this marker another time adding Three Triangles.

It has a Doubly Caged Branch.

But primarily it has ongoing operations with Neptune. Each glyph has a small life apart from each other, and then there is a lot in common in their fiftyish texts.



Bird-face Goddess participates in exactly this. She uses Three Mountains to make the Fat Chevron in Branch-tipped "U" singleton on Unicorn K-18.

It comes round again with Neptune on her Mohenjo daro Unicorn.

That makes one statement of each kind.

Here is a notice of it and brief seal roster in that blog author's terminology.

M-809:





104 STRIPED TRIANGLE / TRIPLE TRIANGLES (not found in my database)

M-1307 STRIPED TRIANGLE / TRIPLE TRIANGLES // POT (MT).

H-187 STRIPED TRIANGLE / TRIPLE TRIANGLES // POT / COMB (MT).

M-58 CIRCLED VEE / BI-QUOTES // STRIPED TRIANGLE / TRIPLE TRIANGLES // POT (PMT).

M-245 CIRCLED VEE / BI-QUOTES // STRIPED TRIANGLE / TRIPLE TRIANGLES / BOAT / SKEWERED CHEVRON // TRI-FORK TOPPED POT / POT (PMT)


So, it is less renowned with a Mountain than a Striped Mountain.


Well, here is the rubber ball. We figured out that Trees had been exempted from the knowledge base by way of being ignored. The next two of these are Tree Tablets:


H-729:




H-728:




Plain script M-379:





Elephant text:




M-281:






Rhinoceros text:




which is vertical on M-1133:









with Striped Mountain on Tree Tablet H-187:




M-58:






Gaur M-245:





H-515:








Wheel winds up being enclosed by what looks like four walls with watchtowers. The second "Double Caged Asterisk" is with "City" 286 in M-655; this "completed" glyph is:


CARTWHEEL IN FAT EX IN DIAMOND (M-145, M-225, M-296, M-655, L-139, L-189)


Of these, M-296 is the famous Pipal with two Unicorn Heads.

M-1318 has it with Striped Mountain and Three Mountains.

Without the "City" the pair are also on M-1307 and M-1353.


Three Mountains is not widespread on visual tablets, some standard sources, and some animals. It's in a vein. However this is taken up by the Copper Tablets.

Among the basics, a single Striped Mountain:





and then look what comes up in what is probably the deepest superscript:






I tend to think that what looks dedicated to a deity or hero is inferior to this.

That these Three Mountains are effectively like a diploma here as well.

Moreover, a statistical analysis that will show us how the dominant tetragram comes together and works, will have these Neptune and Three Mountains texts snapping at its heels.

They are very nearly two different tracks, having little do do with each other.

That turns out to be an objective fact, it more or less defines a sub-genre.

So, this seemed to fly in the face of everything I had done before, which was to scout for basics attached to iconographic suggestions. That's not possible; the significance of Three Mountains could only come from within the script. It may have been such common knowledge, it needed no introduction; retrospectively, it has no beginning.

[shaberon]

Two Bearers of Striped Mountain and Compound Bearer





These struck me as being ultimately significant like Pipal Leaf over Three Mountains.

They are singletons, but the difference is they seem to be crafted.


Here's part of it. We saw that the Crocodile did something impossible and then went quiet after a very low numerology.

Gharial H-474 is backed by:

Striped Mountain, "Seven", "U-shaped" symbol, "Comb"


It turns out that the strongest numerology for Striped Mountain is seven.

Then there was consternation figuring out what the real "Crocodile glyph" was, and, it may be an aspect of Rotating Tau. Anyone who studied history got some thirty years of Parpola calling something else a "crocodile" and he basically is correcting himself. And it is the only possible explanation for the "facing conversation" that happens with a Round Wheel on the animal's back, and this quite strange glyph that may be the only time two people do something.


Tiger M-288:








It's not a trough. There are better images in the Corpus where you can be pretty sure it's a Tau rolled all the way over, but, the "thick" kind similar to the real Gharial glyph. It is a non-entity unless explainable as an effect on this, or, maybe, Rectangle. The clue is the Gharial on the edge of Tiger M-1923. These animals are associated, a bit clandestine, but enough to give grounds for M-288 as likely to be "Rotated Gharial" as anything else.




Now we are going to make another fine tuning. In the opposite direction from Ameri, showing us regional variations, Mukhopadhyay designed a table of regional commonalities with specific changes.

Although the following is not incorrect, it is lossy.

The presentation has skipped a step in the move from Mohenjo daro to Lothal of Striped Mountain. Flanged "U" is added to the trigram in Mohenjo daro, and is copied numerous, numerous times as part of the Copper Tablets. This is one of the main points of the whole thing.

The database shows all of them, and then you can say, the Lothal text is the only one that adds "Bearer" to this:





But what kind of Bearer.

It seems to take two of the right kind in order to interact with this glyph.

What is it?

Well, under what we have denominated as Bird-face Goddess, she is by far the Most Stripes. That is, she adds a version of Striped Mountain to a statement that stripes and hatches several other glyphs as well. Hers is more stripier than others.

Lothal is an entirely different subject, a vertically-bisected mountain, which also gains stripes.

The symbol itself appears with one of the rare moments of an animal using a Soma Filter, Elephant Ad-8 at the end of this regional library:





That paraphrases the corpus quite well.

You have a Mallet and Branch statement over a Double-handled Mallet and Three Mountains. The Rhinoceros is doing something with a shape which presumably is bequeathed to the Bull. And there is another Striped Mountain.

It is often with Seven; this is its other common pair, Neptune with Striped Mountain Ns-9:




They cover the spectrum; if not completely correct, this is probably a good guess on Stripes:

Triangle with 2 stripes: 1 occurrence (M-1307)
Triangle with 3 stripes: 9 occurrences (?) (M-29, M-269, M-362, M-453?, M-523, , M-961, M-1363?; K-63; Ns-9?)
Triangle with 4 stripes: 42 occurrences (M-30, M-245?, M-374, M-551 through M-565?, M-678, M-809, M-861?, M-937, M-1353, M-1503 through M-1513?; H-139, H-157, H-187, H-641, H-666, H-707 through 710)
Triangle with 5 stripes: 6 occurrences ( M-174?, M-246?, M-408, M-516, M-517, M-1318)
Triangle with 6 stripes: 10 occurrences (H-13; L-22; M-14, M-101, M-374, M-859, M-1095, M-1271; Ad-4?, Ad-8?)
Triangle with 7 stripes: 2 occurrences (H-599; M-58, possibly M-551??)

That's basically handmade; part of the value of that blog is it questioned all the standardizations on IVC script, because there is some disagreement about what variations are merely handwriting, and what signifies a ligature, and some things don't get counted at all. The contents there are, by now, incomplete. But we are able to determine for example, nothing after IM77 keeps the round shape in the upper part of Compound Bearer K-79:





Standardized:






147:







It is arguable if "Water Carrier" is really a compound, because there is no separately-existing yoke of jugs that has been added to the person.

"Rake" and other objects exist separately.


Again, that is to say, others have already questioned whether IVC Bearer should be considered a copy of Sumerian Water Carrier. No, probably not, because, going a step farther, we would say the IVC script is saying some assembly required. It may be the Tiger Chimera, or it may be the Bull's modified Tau. It's not entirely human and is possibly mechanical.

So, I would contend that can be traced through multiple texts. Pretty similar to Bearer getting a "U-shaped symbol" for a head, which is the most obvious and most-studied alteration, but, we have also seen it grabs what seems to be the yoke without any jugs. I'd guess there are probably several steps in a course of development that perhaps only in rare cases amount to what looks like the complete Compound Bearer.


I posted a highlighted version for clarity. We're wondering if upright Fish really do walk on their fins because it really is a Person. On the original article, it looks like this was actually drawn first as a Fish, being bold and upright. It is the attachments which are skewed and off-centered:





The encumbered figure is backed by a symbol that is not a singleton.

It is found four and six-branched:




There, the four is argued to be an error because it is a singleton.

It is supposed to be a six-rayed shape similar to a Hydra, or inner part of a Wheel. It is an Asterisk with round tips added. The Asterisk is X on a wide Post, and, has increments and adjustments and is therefore the pliable or dynamic agent.


In the longest text of Conjoined Enclosures with "Slashes", Bird-face Goddess is replaced by the Asterisk wearing Comb 145 singleton.


So, yes, Asterisk and Bearer both affably follow "development tracks" that may be a little more intricate than a stripe count. Consequently, a "block outline" format of sub-modules seems to be going on. Glyphs like Asterisk, Bearer, and Striped mountain have ten to maybe thirty or forty texts that explain their subjects. It seems much more like they concatenate rather than being an ongoing linear strand.

Out of all the possible configurations and disputes about what is really part of a glyph or not, what we have posted will be impervious, nothing will affect this layer of meaning.




For a moment, to work the other way, from the Allahdino example, it comes again on a page for 87 Mallet and Branch statements which is a good use of a concordance when it helps us with things that are hard to see, such as the text from numerous copies of Gharials H-278+:





Lothal text with City and Bisected Mountain:





Those are both highly representative of the script, however the Gharial is making a more existential or mythic statement, and you can see that, because it almost has the tetragram but it has Quadruped Rudiment, and this is what intercepts the Fish, which may be most of a human being.

The Gharial has common text, rare text, and then this is probably the Most Gharial.

Lothal is writing about something else. All we can be sure of is that Mallet and Branch are a "behavior modifier" that affect the patterns of U-shaped symbol and Bearer. In and of itself, this common pair does not seem very profound, but it opens the door for things that are.

From this point we have covered most of the examples, and will probably be posting batches of texts and their apparent rulesets. I don't think it works like normal cryptography. It is something more subliminal than a glyph is a word. In some cases, maybe a few of them are that simple, but my impression is this is highly articulate as literature or philosophy. To read it is going to take some kind of discovery that hasn't happened yet.


Here for instance is an industrialized looking Lothal seal that turns out to involve a six-rayed Asterisk with modified Tau:

[shaberon]

Patterns and Statistics



One statistic to mention is that, as I expected, by moving this to a publicly-visible sub-forum, all of the related topics are eating up the search engine. If you look up any of this stuff, it will give you our link. I suspect this will play out to the degree of individual seal citations. It will take over the internet.

I have no source materials and try to fairly cite anything used, and I found that some of the newer seal imagery had come from Kevin Standage. He does a regular India travelogue, so, he's not a corpus editor, but went to the IVC section of the National Museum. He goes everywhere from Konark Sun Temple to Udayagiri, and, if anything, is perhaps taking a closer look at petroglyphs. But some very good images of seals and other items.


We haven't got an alphabet or a Rosetta Stone; there is nothing to work with other than the script's own internal evidence.

Immersion in around forty to sixty symbols will familiarize you with the IVC corpus almost entirely.

They mostly appear in affiliated groups in predictable ways.


Superficially, the binding of most short strings has a similar form to compounds of Sanskrit nouns, while there are primarily prefixes, and, sometimes, suffixes, that seem to affect the semantic value, and are considered a form of conjugation or grammar, that can alter other information.


Yadav on n-grams is a straightforward introduction to how this works.

It looks at the most common glyph combinations and measures their frequency at beginning, middle, and end of texts.

It stops at four characters total, and, although I have found a repeated sequence of five glyphs, I have not found it as a stand-alone. The interest is on packets of information that conjugate or otherwise join additional packets, while themselves already being functional.

In English, you would say "t-h-e" and "a-n-d" are common trigrams, which would not get you very far into understanding it. It is practically impossible the IVC glyphs are letters like this, and still highly unlikely most of them are single words. So if you figure out a trigram, you have gotten something big. My guess is once we get a single n-gram and operation applied to it, the rest of the script will fall in a domino effect. I say that because I don't believe a single one of the "decipherments" that have been offered, although several of them are probably not totally vacuous or irrelevant ideas, we should remain at the level of comparing the ideas. Taxes or baskets of fish. Grave goods. Those sorts of things may be in the script, but I, at least, don't think they define it or characterize it in entirety.


Going from Table 4 on common pairs, the vast majority of them come under "enumerations" or "grammar", and are less distinguishable as "subjects" on their own. The most common pairs that appear to blend subject matter are:


U-shaped symbol and Comb

Winged Man and U-shaped symbol

U-shaped symbol and Person


Those pairs are mostly found at the end of texts.

You can already see how Winged Man bends a tendency.

All pairs have a "preferred position", and their use as independent texts are very few.


Next you find that U-shaped symbol and Comb is not part of a trigram. It has a transferability of itself, whereas the next pair is frequently blended into Rake -- Winged Man -- U-shaped symbol. And what looked like a pair related to enumeration, becomes part of the dominant trigram:





In return, Spear is something that pushes away or replaces other glyphs.

At this level we also run in to things like Scorpion and Conjoined Enclosures as the subjects.

The trigrams are mostly similar to pairs, they have preferred positions, and many of them are simply constructive steps.


The next step is a bottleneck, because even I, strictly speaking, cannot refute it, without finding a five-glyph sequence that has independent as well as connected meaning. That role is held by the tetragram that dominates at a ratio of 16 : 9 over the next most common one:





Again, most of the cited tetragram examples are numeric or Branch statements, except for the Tree Tablet H-728:





That is to say, with reference to the statistical majority of texts, Scorpion and Tree are the main subjects. Tree perhaps has to do with the use of Neptune 175.

Now for one thing, the figures don't match cryptography, because you can't go, well, the most common four-letter words in this language are found six times out of several thousand specimens. Is it a four-word name, or slogan, or something? I imagine it might be a four stage set of things, each having two or more possibilities. In other words, you can't "read" Scorpion. You could make some connotations that would be specified by context. That is what those version markers are for. In turn, these "gears" comprise most of the high statistics.


Similarly, Mortar-and-Pestle is another sub-genre, its own modification of "U" found through a certain class of texts.

Here is the dominant trigram with addition of a single glyph:





It comes around twice on a Rhinoceros.

There is a good image showing a striped horn clearly on M-276.









M-303:






M-1169:






The Akkadian page happened to give a Trigram Concordance:




It's not complete.

M-956 is Comb, common trigram, Fish (perhaps with Slash). Note the only instance of Comb ending the text.

Bird 76 uses the common trigram with two kinds of Fish (M-631). Here it uses a less-common connector.

Generally it seems very interested in different kinds of Fish.

It could perhaps be said that Spear shapes the path Mortar-and-Pestle 336 is on.

Similarly to Three Mountains, Mortar-and-Pestle has a semi-independent existence, and, they each develop standing relationships, with Neptune and with Spear.



Showing the mobility of pairs, the first lines here have Three Mountains, and then the dominant trigram on the next:









Here are examples of the dominant tetragram:






H-61:





H-12:





M-38:




M-626:






Rakhigarhi:




Other instances are K-10; 412 is a Rabbit glyph with an attached "H" that subjugates the tetragram.



While this may not be the longest, it must be very important with Tiger text M-1475:





That's because it is in the Copper Tablets.

They do not have the dominant trigram; they use a variant. The normal one is on the Elephantine Chimera M-303. They have an aspect of this creature lacking the Zebu hump.


This however is the Buffalo of the Tablets:














which is re-purposed into what looks like the arch-glyph of Mohenjo daro or of the Tablets:





While that may be "supreme", technically, it is a lower order or reverted to something similar to a naming convention.

If we take a look at what are considered the likely grammatical prefixes, we will find this Buffalo cast to the lower right as a gross violator:




The tetragram has turned into a prefix one time.




Here is a similar chart where, in the lower right, the tetragram twins with a different text under a very rare prefix:





There are a limited number -- seven or so -- of these connective prefixes.

Wheel and Bow with handle are particularly owned by Bird-face Goddess. And yet her common glyph can hardly be found on these tables. She is rarely subjugated, and here it was shown due to the aberrational way Bearer has taken the prefix, in the chart before this.

I was able to find two more instances of grammar with her.

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


L-90:






So, after viewing large amounts of texts, in actuality there seem to be basic statements, seven kinds of subject headers, and four ways of blocking or grouping semantic informational components. It does have this underlying structure. The difficulty is, every author wants to re-classify the classification in their own terms.


The Buffalo of the Copper Tablets is highly anomalous, however, these are likely a mundane explanation because there is no Soma.