An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology v1.c25.s4.19

v1.c25.s4.19

Krishna Rao, 1969, 1973, claims to have read all the Indus inscriptions by giving phonetic values to signs on the principle of acrophony. His methodology consists of 'a comparison and identification of every Indus sign with the original pictographic form' and identifying the 'evolutionary conventional and abstract froms ... with the help of the archaic Sumerian script and Egyptian, Minoan and Hittite hieroglyphs, and then translating the name of the object into Sanskrit and fixing the first syllable of the name thus obtained. Where it is found to be difficult to identify a sign with the pictographic form, the phonetic values are adopted from the ancient scripts, provided such values do not conflict with meaningful readings' (Krishna Rao, 1973, p. 279). According to him the Indus script was syllabic rather than logographic. He reads 'terminations and titles' on the tiny Indus seals, which he identifies as weights, measures and currency, and names of tribes, foreign rulers, merchant-princes, governors and kings on the seals, copper tablets and other objects. Thus he reads the names of foreign rulers like Narmer (Menes), Sargon, Rimus, etc., in the Indus inscriptions (Krishna Rao, 1973, pp. 286-9). The key seal of Krishna Rao is however the so-called Paśupati seal from Mohenjo-daro (Mackay, 1937, 2, pl. XCIV, 420). He connects the five symbols on top of the seal with the five animal and human figures on the seal and after taking for granted that the language used is Sanskrit or one of its early forms and using the principle of acrophony, gives the reading 'Makhanāśana', an epithet of Indra, as destroyer of Makha or Asur Makhas, the Asura priests (Krishna Rao, 1969, pp. i-iii). In an appraisal B.B. Lal, 1969, has demonstrated how Krishna Rao has read two different names 'Makhanā-śana' and 'Īśāna' on the two seals (Mackay, 1937, 2, pl. XCIV, 420 and pl. LXXXVII, 222) even though the figure represented on both is the same. Similarly Krishna Rao's identification of the figure standing within the arch with a radiating design in two other seals as 'Syona' meaning the sun and 'Ishtar' 'the Aryan and Babylonian goddess of war' is internally inconsistent. Besides Krishna Rao has adopted the system of acrophony for assigning phonetic values to various Indus signs in one case only and in other cases he has freely borrowed 'the phonetic values of similar symbols occurring in a very large number of languages, cutting across all frontiers of space and time. Thus, his borrowings range from England to Mesopotamia and from the 3rd millennium B.C. to the early centuries A.D.: Egyptian, Sumerian, Phoenician, Ogham and Runic are all deeply involved in this affair' (Lal, 1969). Not only this, on the basis of the alleged occurrence of the Sumerian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Ogham and Runic signs in the Indus inscriptions, Krishna Rao has also dated the Indus civilization between the 3rd millennium B.C. and 9th century B.C. when it is already established that the terminal date of the civilization is not after the mid-2nd millennium B.C. Lal has also shown that contrary to stratigraphic and chronological evidence Krishna Rao found 'that the Third Dynasty of Ur (assignable to the period about 2000 B.C.) prospered in the 1st millennium B.C. or that Solomon (10th century B.C.) was earlier than the Third Dynasty of Ur as well as Narmer (around 3000 B.C.)' (Lal, 1969).