Beyond Brahmi,Indus text shaped modern scripts: study

“So far,it was believed all modern Indian scripts owe their origin to Brahmi script. Our findings add a new dimension and push back the evolution of both the Dravidian (southern India) and Aryan (north Indian) family of language scripts to the Indus Valley Civilisation and beyond. The presence of Brahmi- and Kharosthi-like scripts is also traced to the Indus script,” said S Srinivasan,principal author for both papers. The other authors are J V M Joseph and P H Harikumar (retired).

The paper notes symbols in the Indus text that resemble the zodiac symbols for Aries to Pisces. “A need to invent signs for zodiac symbols would have arisen when the Indus folk needed to cast horoscopes. References to such practices abound in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Also the Indus folk may have used the seven basic notes [of music. We suspect the exposure to these musical note signs would have led to the intrusion of the note signs into the early Tamil-Brahmi writings,” it says.

Medial-vowel signs suggested Indian scripts of the Aryan and Dravidian families evolved from Indus writing,and all such Tamil and Kannada signs were identified in the Indus text. Two frequent signs in the Indus script,the jar and the short,double vertical strokes symbol,were identified as equivalent to two medial-vowel signs in Tamil. Two others,comb and arrow,were identified with medial-vowel signs in Kannada. “We were able to identify from the Indus text,the presence of scripts for five Indian languages,namely,Tamil,Kannada,Telugu,Prakrit and Sanskrit,” the paper says.

The authors believe that the script influenced about 15 languages. “A match between fish-like signs in Indus text and Kannada script was revealed in our analysis,” the lead author said.

The papers use illustrations to describe the similarity between several Tamil,Kannada and Telugu-like consonants with the Indus scripts. A few Dravidian words denoting ‘you’,‘she’,‘brave’,‘beauty’,‘land’,‘house’,‘fruit-fly’,‘porcupine’,‘owl’ and ‘elephant’ were also been identified by the authors from the Indus text.

“It looks easier to trace the genesis of these scripts directly from the Indus script rather than deriving it from the Brahmi route. However,we can’t rule out the possibility of the age-old belief that Tamil could be the mother or sister of all South Indian languages,” said Srinivasan.

Avinash Pandey,associate professor at Mumbai University’’s department of linguistics,is not convinced the Indus text is a script at all.

“A script has its own properties and there are very few symbols in the Indus text that can definitely establish that it’s a script. Besides,the relationship between languages are not established on the basis of scripts,” said Pandey.