Word: harappan
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...More the shame, says Bryan Wells, a senior researcher at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, for solving the riddle of the Harappan script needs the involvement of people from all backgrounds. Wells, who was not part of Rao and Vahia's team, spent 15 years painstakingly examining the disparate body of Indus Valley artifacts and compiling what is now the largest database of Harappan signs - 676 in total. Even though no one knows the root language behind the script, he reckons greater cooperation and a monkish devotion to the task can slowly unravel more secrets. Wells...
...analysis and scrutiny will take years, probably decades. But it would be worth the wait. Scholars aren't even sure how this enigmatic civilization disappeared. Was it eradicated by conquest or washed away by floods, or did its people just blend into other migrations settling the Indian subcontinent? Although Harappan cities were vast - Mohenjo-daro could have been populated by as many as 50,000 people, a staggering figure for such deep antiquity - they have left behind few towering monuments or epic ruins. Instead, we have clues in miniature, a copper figurine of a mercurial dancing girl, for example...
...group examined hundreds of Harappan texts and tested their structure against other known languages using a computer program. Every language, the scientists suggest, possesses what is known as "conditional entropy": the degree of randomness in a given sequence. In English, for example, the letter t can be found preceding a large variety of other letters, but instances of tx and tz are far more infrequent than th and ta. "A written language comes about through this mix of built-in rules and flexible variables," says Mayank Vahia, an astrophysicist at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai who worked...
...shaped jar sign toward the end. Bit by bit, the structure of the script is coming into view. "We want to find the bedrock against which all further interpretation of the language should be checked," says Vahia. Down the road, he imagines he could write in "flawless Harappan" - even though he may have no idea what the assembled sequences would mean. Rajesh Rao, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington and a co-author of the study, says the task ahead of them is "like a jigsaw puzzle, one where you try to fit meanings into...
...doesn't help that, though long dead, the Harappan script sparks sometimes acrimonious debate in India over the nature of its origins. Scholars from southern India claim it ought to be linked to proto-Dravidian, the progenitor of languages like Tamil, while others think it is related to the Vedic Sanskrit of early Hinduism, the ancestor of Hindi and other languages spoken in India's north. And while cultural agendas within India have stymied collaborative efforts, the enmity between India and Pakistan has impeded archaeological breakthroughs. Ganeriwala, a desert site in Pakistan that possibly holds the ruins...