An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology v1.c25.s4.17

v1.c25.s4.17

According to Mahadevan, 1970, 1972, 1973, the language used in the Indus script is non-Indo-European and resembles the Dravidian languages. On the basis of homophony, he has assigned phonetic values to certain signs and has also interpreted that certain signs represent different areas of Harappa settlements such as the temple, the citadel or acropolis, the lower city, etc. He has further divided the system into two main groups: the priest-rulers who resided in the citadel area and the others living in the lower city. He has identified the former with the Veḷir who, after the disintegration of the Indus civilization, established the Āndhra, Cera-Cola and Veḷir kingdoms and the latter with the Kochars who had perhaps migrated from Elam and were mountain people. Mahadevan also connects the Indus priest-rulers with the Kurus and the ‘lower city’ peoples with the Pāṇḍus and contends that the *Mahābhārata* war was fought between these two groups in which the Kochars emerged victorious (Mahadevan, 1970, p. 51). Mahadevan, 1972 (reprinted in Possehl, 1979, pp. 261-67), tries to read names of dynasties of the historical period in the Indus inscriptions by giving pictographic equivalents of certain Harappa signs in Sanskrit. In his detailed critique Lal, 1973, has shown that Mahadevan’s conjectures are invalid. Mahadevan has now compiled with the aid of computers a concordance of Indus inscriptions (Mahadevan, 1977) which is a very useful contribution to the subject. It may also be mentioned here that the Finns (Koskenniemi *et al.*, 1973) have also compiled and published a concordance of Indus inscriptions taking help of computers.