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Tradition of Writing, and Scripts, in
Ancient India
The discovery of a script on seals belonging to the chalcolithic civilisation of the Indus Valley, has established the tradition of writing in India as far back as 3500 BC at least and has belied the speculations of the import' theory enthusiasts. Its points of resemblance with the Egyptian, the Sumerian and the ProtoElamite scripts have been analysed by G.R. Hunter:
The entire body of anthropomorphic signs have Egyptian equivalents which are virtually exact; these signs have no parallels in the Sumerian or the Proto-Elamite. There are many of the signs that are exactly paralleled in the Proto-Elamite and Jemdet-Nasr tablets; they have no conceivable morphological equivalent in the Egyptian. There is a considerable proportion of signs that are common to all the three scripts, such as the signs for tree, bird, fish. The less obvious and more conventionalised ideograms, especially those that are so conventionalised that their pictographic origin is hardly determinable, show a marked correspondence, and in a lesser degree, as in the Proto-Elamite, where easily recognisable picto
graphs show the same variations. He concludes that “it is possible that all three had a common ancestry, and that the Egyptian element in our script alone was
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