Anybody know how much is new in this claim of the decipherment of the Indus (Harappan) script?Asko Parpola (University of Helsinki) has long been identified with efforts to connect this ancient but undeciphered script with Dravidian. Here, he declares that “an opening to the secrets of the Indus script has been achieved."
This is one of those old puzzles that have often been claimed to have been solved, and curious minds want to know ...
5 comments:
The article does not really give enough info to make a judgment, but the association with a Tamil conference screams "crackpot".
I've deciphered it. It's Linear A. And it certainly is crackpottedry to say it's Tamil, when it is in fact clearly Basque. You know, like the Voynich manuscript.
He gave a plenary talk at the LSA Institute in 2007. It was notable mostly because all the instructors got an email about it beforehand from a concerned citizen who was very keen for us all to know that the Indus script was clearly Indo-Iranian and crackpot Dravidian theories were a threat to Indian national security (or something along those lines, unfortunately I didn't keep the email). The result was that the talk was much better attended than it might otherwise have been, but it was disappointingly light on actual .. um .. data.
Thanks, everybody (and especially Claire for the story!) ... Yeah, the warning signs were there, but I'm always curious whether one of these people is going to end up revealing something brilliant. I'm comfortable with being disappointed 999 times out of a thousand, but I stay tuned for that one other time.
If you want to see something brilliant, go to this link:
http://decipherquarterly.piczo.com/?cr=2
Post a Comment