Indus Script

www.hindu.com April 16th … an interview with Professor Asko Parpola, an Indologist from the University of Helsinki, is the subject of this article. He has done sustained work on the Indus script and although it is yet to be decyphered he thinks it is written in a Dravidian language that may be fairly close to Old Tamil. Problems in  decypherment are in part due to the fact that only short and terse pieces of the script have survived. Parpola said the Indus civilisation was unlikely to be aryan as the Rig Veda hymns often speak of horses and chariots, and horse sacrifice. Horses are not natural to the Indian subcontinent and do not occur there until the 2nd millennium BC. Archaeologically, finds from the Swat Valley dated to around 1600BC, seem to indicate the horse was introduced from central Asia – at some point after the demise of the Indus civilisation. He then compared aryan loan words in Finno-Ugrian languages of NE Europe (which includes Finland) to Sanskrit.