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The Indus Script and Brahmi Q: What do you think the relationship is between the Indus script and the Brahmi script, since you know both of them? A: Several scholars have said that there is a relationship between the two, that the Indus script survived and slowly became linear and ultimately lead to the Brahmi script. I do not at all believe in this theory. The Indus script was in existence not later than at the most about 1500 B.C. The earliest undisputed examples of the Brahmi script are only from the days of Ashoka, around 300 B.C. One might take the origin of the Brahmi script still farther, to the beginnings of the Indo-Gangetic, Iron Age civilization, in the middle of the first millennia B.C., since Ashoka does not claim to have invented the Brahmi script, it is not unlikely that the Brahmi script was known before his times, and perhaps used by the merchants commercially as the Allchins have suggested in their recent book. The absence of such inscriptions by Chandragupta, the illustrious grandfather of Ashoka could be explained by saying that stone inscriptions were not in the Indian tradition and they came to us along with the Persian tradition. This is not unlikely, but even so there is at least a gap of 1,000 years before the introduction of the Brahmi script and the complete collapse of the Indus script. There is a parallel in the history of writing elsewhere in the history of the world. Mycenian Linear B script was written in syllabic script in about the 14th or 15th century B.C. and that has nothing to do with the later script of the Greeks, which was taken over from the Phoenicians. There again was a gap of one thousand years. Personally, I believe that the Indus script was too closely tied up with the Indus language, whatever it was, and when that language ceased to be spoken and became dead, the incoming Aryans could not use that script. Now that again has a parallel in the Egyptian script which was too closely tied up in the Egyptian language and could not survive it. The cuneiform scripts were much more adaptable to a wide variety of languages. So perhaps the logographic Indus script had a one-to-one relation with the words of the Indus language and could not be used in another language. What has survived of the Indus script may be symbols of various kinds, totem signs, royal signs and insignia on punch marked coins and flags and traditions in our mythology of gods, attributes, weapons and so on but not as a writing system. Another reason to say that the Brahmi script is not related to the Indus script is that the connection between Brahmi and some form of Semitic script is too strong. Buehler pointed out the relation between Alif and A, B and Bay, Gameen and Ga, and so on. At least I can see about 10 of the 22 Semitic characters very closely resemble Brahmi both in form and sound. Statistically, such a resemblance is impossible except when there is genetic relationship. I do not say that Brahmi script itself came from the Semitic script, but some elements of the Semitic were taken over, others were locally added, improvements were made, the order of the sounds were changed, the diacritical marks were locally invented, the aspirates were invented, the additional vowels were joined, so that Brahmi is a much developed and transformed script. But the idea of the Brahmi script comes from the alphabetic, Semitic script and I believe in Buehler's theory. For these two reasons I do not agree with the scholars, most of them Indian, who believe that the Brahmi script is a remote descendant of the Indus script. http://www.harappa.com/script/mahadevantext.html#4

"One of the basic rules of cryptography is that no script is undecipherable if there is enough of it available. The trouble with the Indus script is that there isn't enough available." - Mahadevan's interview by Omar Khan.

It is a pity that Mr. I. Mahadevan refuses to discuss Chandragupta and Ashoka beyond a Joneisan frame.

I do not believe in Buehler's theory. The term 'Semitic' has an extremely confusing baggage and needs to be used with greater caution.

Buehler's knowledge of ancient India was limited to Jones' Palibothra at Patna and Gotama Buddha of Lumbini in Nepal (which is a Nepalese fraud in which, according to Mr. T. A. Phelps, the Ranas of Nepal were involved). Brahmi was not developed by Arabs but Yehudis are a more difficult proposition. I have written in a paper in the "Mithras Reader III" that the earliest Jews were the Yadus of India.

Incidentally Mr. Phelps writes that Buehler was a friend of the notorious thug Dr. A. A. Fuhrer, the doyen of Nepalese archaeology.

This has been already discussed in the RBSI. I may again quote http://www.lumkap.org.uk/

Neither Prof. Tucci nor anyone else can ignore the fact that all the great Nepalese fraudulent discoveries were made by one person. There is nothing in the history, literature, art or archaeology of Nepal that speaks of a Buddhist past dating to the 6th century B.C.

Pali for your information, is closer to Avestan, not Nepali.

You need not! One way of writing history could be using UNESCO bulletins or Wikipedia articles. I would hate to subscribe to such stuff. I have nothing to say about the Japanese Emperor's views. My first book was in Japanese and was published only due to the wisdom of some Japanese scholars who knew all about Fuhrer, the patron saint of Nepal. 99 % of our Indian University professors teach that Gotama was born in Eastern U.P. or Nepal and they are all horribly wrong.

More than ten thousand Buddhist fragments, some dating to 4th century B.C. have been unearthed from Bamiyan in Afghanistan. Why is there nothing from Nepal? The Nepalese lies have degraded world history for more than a century but the time has come when one should know the truth. I thank Mr. T. A. Phelps for his wonderful detective work. Unesco or Wikipedia is not Truth.

No Nepalese Buddhist Canon , Nepalese Buddha icon, or any early Nepalese Buddhist relic is known, which contrasts sharply with the radiant Buddhist finds from Gandhara, Bamiyan and Seistan. Please read J. N. Farquhar, 'Outline of the Religious Literature of India (Oxford, 1920) 275.'

In his famous book on Buddhism C. Humphreys laments over the stark ground reality, The Lumbini gardens, where Gotama was born, lie in the difficult Nepal Terai, and Kusinara, where the Buddha passed away, has little to show'.

Dr.Ranajit Pal's path-breaking 'A New Non-Jonesian History of the World' - a skeptic's deconstruction - a must read for history researchers : http://www.ranajitpal.com/ This site was presented on RBSI last year !

As a neutral observer on RBSI...I have come to realize more than once that many a historical fact are treated as truth simply based on a single book by a single foreign writer some 200 years ago. This appears almost unbelievable for us today, since we would have presumed that these facts would have been corroborated by local myth, legend and history and a detailed study by many scholars. Many a time it is not and the locals would have been quite unaware of such an ancient past of their region. Given the situation of a certain vacuum, disinterest and general ignorance of the time…it is highly possible for many a 'historical discoverer' of the 18th and 19th centuries would have either done shoddy research, had mischievous political intentions or were victims of pure fantasy to have propounded these theories. Only another new study which evaluates each of these assumptions and validates them once again after subjecting them to a scientific scrutiny can confirm that it is indeed history. This discussion reminds me of a brilliant essay written by Sumedha Verma Ojha Verma Ojha in October 2010 on : "Problems of Chronology and historiography in Ancient India: Need for a New Paradigm? https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=157224144300635 The article of course speaks for itself and makes for a compelling reading !

I shall quote from the book "Discovery of Ancient India", by Upinder Singh, p. 320. "In 1897 Fuhrer was busy at work at Sagarwa in the terai region, where he presided over an exercise in looting and destruction in the name of archaeological excavation. Structures (including apparently several square stupas) were destroyed in the search for relics, with no attempt towards description or documentation. At the end of it all Fuhrer triumphantly announced that he had found the relic stupas of the Sakyas massacred, according to Buddhist tradition, by the Kosalan king Vidudabha. Vincent Smith, who had taken a keen interest in the history of the history of India and was at the time commissioner of Fyzabad, paid a surprise visit to the site and put an end to the series of fraudulent claims Fuhrer had been making. ....

There appears to be a dire need to give a scientific rather than "social" foundation to the science of knowing the past.

I would like to point RBSI to the excellent computational paper on the topic. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F5377996%2F5393306%2F05393759.pdf%3Farnumber%3D5393759&authDecision=-203 While its a IEEE paper and thus can not be shared in public space, I believe it should be okay to just reproduce a small piece from its conclusion ======================== Upon closer scrutiny of the 100 final solutions in the Pareto front, it is noticed that many Indus characters map consistently to certain Brahmi ones, more than 50% of the time. This revealed some interesting features. It is observed that 28 out of the 59 Indus symbols are associated with unaspirated consonants, while only 6 were associated with aspirated ones. This is entirely consistent with the fact that the Tamil script, used in writing the Tamil language - the putative descendant of the language of the Indus valley, does not even encode aspirated consonants. This indicated that Indus may have been used to write a Dravidian language. Thus, aspirated consonants either appeared la +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++