Development of Hinduism

Author(s): M M Ninan
Publisher: M M Ninan

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2. DATES OF VEDAS
languages but in India have retroflexes, then Proto-Indo-European did not have retroflexes. By the same token, the contrast between the Indo-European vowels a, e, and o has been lost in all IndoAryan languages (which means Iranian as well as Indian languages), which only have a. Linguistically, it is easy enough for the three vowels to simplify to one, but unheard of for one to differentiate into three without being the effect of some phonetic or morphological environment. No theory of such an environment, as far as I know, has been suggested as part of the Indian-origin theory. Instead, e, and o actually did reemerge in Sanskrit from the diphthongs ai, and au, respectively. Much the same process can be seen in modern Arabic, where bêt, "house," develops from Classical Arabic bayt.
A claim that has recently come to my attention is that the writing of the Indus Valley, whose texts are probably too few (3700 inscribed objects, 60% of which are seals, with much duplication), and with no bilingual examples, to ever be deciphered, has now been identified (by S.R. Rao and others) as consisting of alphabetic characters which are recognizably the source of both the later Brahmi script of India and of the alphabet systems -- Phoenican, Canaanite, Hebrew, etc. of the Middle East.
A very good recent examination of all the work and claims in this area can be found in Lost Languages, The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts, by Andrew Robinson [McGraw Hill, 2002, "At the Sign of the Unicorn, the Indus Script," pp. 264-295]. According to Robinson, the good basic recent work in the Indus Valley script has been done by Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan.
I see three problems with the thesis of the derivation of later alphabet from the Indus script:
(1) When every other known writing system in the world begins with pictographic characters and only later evolves phonetic elements, it is improbable to incredible that an alphabetic or syllabic system should leap into maturity in India, without anything like a similar evolution, let alone all the preliterate stages now known for Sumerian (and, recently, perhaps even Egyptian).
(2) The chronological gap between Indus Valley literacy and the later attested writing, i.e. from c.1500 to 800 or 700 BC, is so large as to render unlikely to impossible the survival of the earlier system. And
(3) the Middle Eastern alphabets appear in the wrong place to be derived from India, i.e. in Syria and Palestine, which is a place strongly linked in trade and culture to Egypt (whose writing the alphabets resemble), but not to someplace on the other side of the India Ocean.
To be sure, related alphabetic writing appears in Yemen, where Indian trade could be postulated, but the derivation of South Arabian writing from Levantine seems uncontroversial to Semiticists.
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