Ponniyin Selvan Varalaatru Peravai

Dr sridhar rathnam,

The major god of Mohangedaro was pasupathi.If this proof is not
enough I am proceeding further.

Excavations at the Harappan sites have yielded many fire altars
terracotta ladles as were used in yajnas, and (in some cases) pieces
of bangles, pottery and animal bones in these altars (as in certain
Vedic sacrifices). The book Lothal and the Indus Civilization by Dr
SR Rao shows photographs of these altars (Plates XXXVI A-D and
XXXVII A-B)

LANGUAGE OF INDUS VALLEY:
The identification of the language spoken by the Indus prople is
very crucial significance for Indian History. If they spoke a
Dravidian language, it would certainly corroborate the Aryan
invasion theory according to shich a Dravidian civilization in the
north was destroyed by invading Aryans. If, however, they spoke an
Indo-European language, it would certainly demolish the invasion
theory, since the Indus civilization is archaelogically dated more
than a millenniem and a half - almost two millenniums - before the
alleged date (1500 BC) of the invasion, and its roots go even
further back by more than a millennium.

But the main problem in identifying the language of the Indus people
was that they did not leave behind documents and inscriptions in
their language. The only things, in this connection, excavated by
archaeologists from the Indus sites were thousands of small seals
(used for stamping purposes) made of seatite, terracotta or copper,
depicting figures of human beings and animals, and bearing short
inscriptions of a few letters each, in an unknown script which has
been simply called the Indus or Harappan script.

The major obstacle in deciphering the script was the inadequacy of
the available material. The script was an absolutely unknown one, it
was not found anywhere in conjunction with another known script and
the inscrip- tions on the seals were nowhere of any great length
than a few letters each...

....many attempts were made to decipher the Indus script, by
individual scholars like Langdon, Hunter, Hronzy, Mahadevan and
others, and by teams of Finnish and Soviet scholars. All these
attepts, however, met with failure. Moreover, these scholars set out
on the exercise of attempted decipherment was based on arbitrary and
whimsical methods. Moreover, these scholars set out on the exercise
with two preconceived notions: first, that the script could not be
an alphabatic one, and could only be pictographic- ideographic one;
and second, that the language of the inscriptions was a Dravidian
one (or, in the case of some Indian scholars, that it was
sanskrit)....

Having taken two arbitrary steps, in presuming the script to be a
pictographic-ideographic one, and in presuming the language to be
Dravidian, the scholars then proceeded to set out on a spree of
reckless and whimsical interpretations: each individual letter of
the Indus script was taken up and arbitrarily presumed to stand for
a particular object or concept; then the letter was "read" by giving
it the sound-value of the particular present-day Tamil or general
Dravidian word which was arbit- rarily presumed to be the one word,
out of many, which best expressed that object or concept; then that
letter, on different seals, was variously read with different
arbitrary variations of that sound-value, each variation being again
arbitrarily connected up with other similar present-day Tamil or
general Dravidian words or word-parts.

Using these arbitrary and whimsical methods, it is not very
surprising that these scholars came up with a hundred diferent, even
diametrically opposite "readings" for any single seal, and ended up
tying themselves up into knots and convincing no one but themselves
and their committed admirers.

However, Dr. S.R. Rao, the eminent archaeologist, decided to be less
speculative in his method. He refused to presume the identity of the
Indus language to be either Aryan or Dravidian, and preferred to
await the results, if any, to decide its identity.

He noticed two basic facts about the Indus script which had not
caught the attention of the earlier scholars. Firstly, he noticed
that of the 400 to 500 letters found on the seals, some letters
seemed to be basic letters, while most of the other letters seemed
to be those same basic letters with some additional signs attached
to them. Secondly, he noticed that the script was, as generally
believed, absolutely uniform over the entire period of the Indus
civilization. Those seals, which were later in time, seemed to have
less complicated letters, thereby indicating an evolution.

He, therefore, gathered together all the data on the different
inscrip- tions and classified them periodwise. He also separated the
basic letters from those with additional signs, and arrived at a
small number of basic letters.

Then, he decided to examine, without prejudice, those scripts and
alphabates of the world which were closest, in time, to the Indus
script, to see whether those scripts or alphabates could give any
clue as to the sound-value which could be assigned to these basic
letters.

The oldest extant inscription of the Indian Brahmi script dated to
around 450 BC or so, while the Indus sites excavated dated down to
the mid-2nd millenium BC, leaving a gap of a thousand years.

However, in West Asia, the South Arabic and Old Aramaic alphabetes
had come into prominence by the beginning of the 1st millennium BC,
and the Ahiram Sarcophagus (1300 BC) and Gezer potsherd (1600 BC)
provided the earlier stages of these West Asian scripts. And here
Dr. Rao struck gold. He found that many of the basic letters of the
Indus script bore resemblance to the letters of these two West Asian
alphabets.

He decided to assign to each Indus basic letter the same sound-value
as the West Asian letter which closely resembled it. After assigning
these values to the Indus letters, he proceeded to try to read the
inscriptions on the Indus seals. The language that emerged turned
out to be a "Aryan" one.

The above is rather simplistic narraration of the procedure adopted
by Dr. Rao, which is given in detail in the two relavant books:
Lothal and the Indus Civilization, The Decipherment of the Indus
Script.

Among the many words yielded by Dr. Rao's decipherment are the
numerals aeka, tra, chatus, panta, happta/sapta, dasa, dvadasa and
sata (1,3,4,5,7 10,100) and the names of Vedic personalities like
Atri, Kasyapa, Gara, Manu, Sara, Trita, Daksa, Druhu, Kasu, etc.

While the direct connection between the late Indus script (1600 BC)
and the Bra