This article first appeared in The Greek News Agenda. Facebook Twitter: NeosKosmos Instagram. Newsletter Get the best of Neos Kosmos delivered to your inbox. English edition Greek edition. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Receive free Neos Kosmos highlights from our Editors. Hand-coloured aquatint etching by Thomas Milton after Luigi Mayer , — The stone was shipped to England and arrived in Portsmouth in February Soon after the end of the 4th century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared.
In the early years of the 19th century, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young — , an English physicist, was one of the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. A letter from Thomas Young written on 10 February asking William Bankes to seek out these hieroglyphic examples whilst in Egypt.
The meanings he suggests for these groups are mostly correct, but he was unable to analyse how the signs conveyed their meaning. This laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture. Champollion made a crucial step in understanding ancient Egyptian writing when he identified the hieroglyphs that were used to write the names of non-Egyptian rulers. He announced his discovery, which had been based on analysis of the Rosetta Stone and other texts, in a paper at the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres at Paris on Friday 27 September The audience included his English rival Thomas Young, who was also trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Champollion then made a second crucial breakthrough, realising that the alphabetic signs were used not only for foreign names, but also for Egyptian names. Together with his knowledge of the Coptic language , which derived from ancient Egyptian, this allowed him to begin reading hieroglyphic inscriptions fully. The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests. It is one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation in BC.
You can read the full translation here. According to the inscription on the Stone, an identical copy of the declaration was to be placed in every sizeable temple across Egypt. Whether this happened is unknown, but copies of the same bilingual, three-script decree have now been found and can be seen in other museums. The Rosetta Stone is thus one of many mass-produced stelae designed to widely disseminate an agreement issued by a council of priests in BC. In fact, the text on the Stone is a copy of a prototype that was composed about a century earlier in the 3rd century BC.
Only the date and the names were changed! Some of these methods were: adding modifiers such as or to basic signs , , , , , and , , , , etc. Because ISC also uses such generative modifiers , etc. Rather such generative patterns strongly indicate the linguistic nature of the Indus signs. Secondly, as Wells , p.
This type of data proves that Indus phrases have used the key functional signs in the same way for quite a long period. On the other hand, the general substantive lexemes that mainly function as content-morphemes carrying information, possibly represented an open class of lexemes with potential to subsume some new member-signs with further excavations of Indus artifacts.
This is possibly because, if some of the Indus signs represented certain commodities used in IVC, a new sign would then be needed whenever a new type of commodity is used. Interestingly, in Indus inscriptions too, certain signs co-occur adjacently, maintaining a specific order, in far-greater-than-chance frequencies.
Since Indus signs do not demonstrate statistically significant correlations beyond the bigram level see Section-S4 of supplementary-file Supp 1 , this study concentrates mostly on the bigrams of ISC. For example, all of the following bigrams, i. Thus, an unsupervised algorithm, modeled to consider relative bigram frequencies, would segment the inscription-line as , which would be patently wrong. Being a PF1-sign, is not an integral part of its preceding phrase. Thus, replacing the of by any other stroke-numeral does not generate any such collocation that actually occurs.
To find these, I exclude all the bigrams that contain any PF1s or CM-signs, since such signs have certain fixed phrase-structural roles to play, and hence do not usually form fixed pairs with specific individual lexemes. Bigram collocations occurring in different inscriptional contexts. Instances where the same collocation occurs: as the only inscription-content in inscribed objects Column-1 , alone with phrase-finals Column-2 , in pre-connective Column-3 and post-connective constituents Column-4 , or as part of a longer sign-sequence in non-composite inscriptions Column However, among the infrequent bigrams less than 10 DILs not listed in Fig.
A list of bigrams which occurred in at least 10 distinct inscription-lines. In natural languages, compositional collocations are defined as collocations, whose meanings can be derived by combining the meanings of their shorter constituents. As analyzed below, many of the collocations of ISC are compositional in nature. For example,comparing the occurrences of the collocation 11 DILs and its constituent sign , this study finds that their inscriptional contexts are sometimes very similar.
For instance, comparing the pre-connective constituents of seal and seal , it is found that the lexeme-sign Criteria has preceded sign , once individually, and once as part of the collocation. Similarly, in inscriptions seal and seal , the individual sign and its collocation precedes the CROP-sign in similar contexts.
So, the meaning of must have been independently applicable in all these DILs. Thus, in , the collocate NUM-sign possibly added some optional attributive detail to the meaning of , substantiating the compositional nature of the collocation. Since NUM-signs and MET-signs are numerical qualifiers that quantify their adjacent lexeme-signs in some way Mahadevan, , such collocations can be described as qualifier-qualified constructs, which are inherently compositional in nature.
For example, for collocation , both collocates and have individually occurred as AWPF-lexemes in different inscriptions e. Moreover, sign has also occasionally functioned as a PCL sign, making determination of which one of them was attributive in nature quite difficult. I suggest that such collocations were possibly genitive constructs where one nominal sign qualifies the other, depending on their sequence.
The repeated sign-sequences of Indus inscriptions often demonstrate quite different combinatorial patterns compared to their non-repeated counterparts, which suggests that such sign-repetition was possibly some morphological tool used to introduce certain semantic changes. Similarly, although sign seldom occurs in phrase-final positions, frequently assume the role of PF1-signs compare DILs like and , or constructs like , , and.
But, as shown in Fig. Several languages of Indian subcontinent use various forms of reduplication Mohan, At this stage, it is difficult to identify all the functionalities served by the duplicated signs of ISC. For example, where follows the two-stroked numeral and , share very similar inscriptional contexts Fig. Having identified the lexemes, their sign-classes, and the collocations, we can now analyze how the inter-related sign-classes contributed in the process of making meanings through the inscriptions.
I shall first describe a glossing method that helps visualize the phrase-structures, and then formulate certain rules to dissect the inscriptions into different semantic segments. To visualize the formulaic structures of Indus inscriptions, I programmatically parse the DILs of ISC only completely undamaged inscription-lines , and apply a sign-by-sign glossing method to replace each sign, using the abbreviated name PF1, PCL, etc. The lexeme-signs that are not categorized into any functional sign-class are simply glossed as LEX.
Figure 32a demonstrates the step-by-step glossing procedure. Figure 32b shows three inscription-lines getting glossed through different steps. Now, CM-signs having been glossed before MET-signs, some of the metrological occurrences of the polyvalent signs , and get wrongly glossed as CMs.
Luckily, however, the inscriptional contexts can help to easily distinguish their metrological occurrences from the connective ones. Glossing Indus inscriptions. The newly glossed results of each step are highlighted in red. Interestingly, using the procedure depicted in Fig. This proves that despite containing different signs, such DILs shared very similar structures. Certain inscription-segmentation techniques naturally emerge from the results of the structural analysis.
Each of the techniques is explained step-by-step, through segmenting a signs-long inscription-line seal , which is one of the two longest inscription-lines recorded in IDF A Segmentation-Step1, using PFs: Since the PF1-signs and PF-clusters denote the syntactic and semantic boundaries of semantically complete phrases, they can be used to identify the shorter semantically complete messages if any present in an inscription-line.
Here using the PF1-signs and , this longer inscription gets segmented into two semantically complete phrases. B Segmentation-Step2, using CMs: If a CM-sign is present in an inscription-line, then the inscription-content present on either side of it can be separated out as pre-connective and post-connective constituents.
Here, the second semantic constituent is a composite inscription that got segmented into pre-connective and post-connective parts. C Segmentation-Step3, collocations and repeated sequences: The collocations and repeated-signs present in the inscription-lines if any should be identified to mark the smaller semantic segments of the message. D Glossing-STEP-4, glossing individual signs: Each individual sign of the inscription-line can be glossed with the abbreviated name of its sign-class to visualize the formulaic structure of each inscriptional segment.
In linguistics, compositional semantics explores the ways through which the meaning of a phrase, a sentence, or a longer constituent is built using the meanings of its smaller semantic units. A demonstration of how it is possible to get a basic idea about the compositional semantics of the Indus inscriptions without inferring the meaning of even a single Indus sign follows.
However, certain relatively short inscriptions can be extremely useful in understanding the compositional semantics of the longer ones.
Since in each of the inscriptions the lexemes were used without any additional change to their graphemes, and no other sign occurred in between them, their juxtaposing technique possibly was an agglutinative one. All this evidence clearly indicates that often the longer inscriptions were simply composed of the information-units used in different smaller inscriptions. The semantic compositionality of the signs-long inscription-line can be analyzed by applying this same principle.
As already demonstrated in Fig. Similarly, the pre-connective constituent of consists of two bigram collocations and , each of which has typically occurred as semantic units in pre-connective parts of other inscriptions. Moreover, both and occur together in the pre-connective part of inscription in seal Thus even the message of the second longest inscription-line of IDF is merely composed of many shorter messages. Analyzing many such examples, a generalization can be safely ventured that the longer Indus inscriptions were structurally no different than the shorter inscriptions, as they just contained more units of information, not different types of information.
Demonstrating how the meanings of certain longer Indus inscriptions b , c were made of informational units present in smaller inscriptions a. We could, thus, get a good idea of the semantic compositionality of Indus inscriptions without ascribing any meaning or sound to its constituent signs.
Interestingly Indus sign-classes too evince various forms of co-occurrence restrictions. The PF1-signs rarely occur adjacent to each other. Moreover, multiple non-adjacent PF1-signs seldom occur inside the same semantic unit. Moreover, multiple non-adjacent PF2-signs rarely occur in an inscription-line. These patterns very strongly suggest that a single Indus message could logically contain maximum one value from the semantic scope of certain sign-classes.
This scenario is comparable to that of the stamps of Fig. One of the interesting co-occurrence restriction patterns existing between different sign-classes is that, not a single inscription exists where a PPF-sign has preceded an ENC-sign.
These co-occurrence restriction patterns may prove to be crucial clues for understanding certain semantic aspects of Indus inscriptions. Since lexeme signs are already identified, and the high probability that many unclassified signs were lexemes is already discussed, adding another section discussing the logographic nature of ISC may seem apparently unnecessary. Yet, since many scholars continue to believe that a significant number of Indus signs have functioned as phonograms, this point needs pressing from diverse perspectives.
A very compelling, nearly unassailable proof of the logographic nature of Indus inscriptions comes from the co-occurrence restriction patterns maintained in them. Various natural languages across the world use different co-occurrence restriction patterns in their phonological, as well as grammatical and lexical constructs. This is why phonological co-occurrence restrictions pertain to the locales of syllables, morphemes and small words only, seldom operating in larger domains of phrases or sentences.
Often phonemes that cannot co-occur in a syllable can appear in the root and suffix of a polysyllabic word MacEachern, , p. Contrastively, semantic co-occurrence restrictions, originating in needs of logical compatibility between different linguistic elements, operate at the levels of collocations, phrases, sentences and even discourse Cruse, , p.
The co-occurrence restriction patterns of ISC are intriguing. Moreover, certain signs such as and have occurred exclusively with and its ligature , in artifacts found from various Indus locations. Since and occur in inscriptions found from similar stratigraphic levels of same Indus locations Mahadevan, , they were contemporary signs. Thus, such special affinity between , and proves that and must have been separate signs, not allographs.
Then, if CROP-signs were phonograms, what stopped them from co-occurring in different positions of the same inscription even once? Phonological co-occurrence restrictions might restrict adjacency, but cannot operate in inscriptional domain for longer inscriptions.
The co-occurrence restrictions between signs that can sometimes occur adjacently are even more revelatory. The general lexeme-signs also demonstrate the same occurrence-patterns as the functional sign-classes.
For example, among the DILs where occurs, only 11 DILs contain two non-adjacent signs, while 7 have its reduplicated form. None of the other fish-like signs , , , etc.
The longer inscriptions make the phonogram hypothesis about PF1s appear even more absurd. For example, analyzing the long seal-inscription , and the shorter seal-inscriptions, , , , , , and , we find that these shorter inscriptions are formed using the marked smaller constituents of.
Now, if these constituents were phonetically constructed, it is startling to see that each short inscription needed the help of the supposed PF1 phonograms to complete their supposed word-sounds.
Then how is it possible that such a long inscription needed the PF1-sound only at the end, nowhere before? No natural language can suffer such skewed sounds for their words. The triplicated and quadruplicated sequences of ISC , , , etc. Some scholars argue athwart all this evidence that ISC has used a mixed system of writing, where both logograms and phonograms co-existed Wells, , p. Truly, certain ancient scripts e. But, the coexistence of such signs always maintained specific pre-defined rules in such scripts.
Thus, if Indus Inscriptions contained mixed writing, we should have seen two conspicuously different sign-classes representing the logograms and phonograms. Now, as discussed before, since the PF-signs are syntactically detachable from their preceding sequences, and demonstrate a distinct phrase-level role, they show the most conspicuous combinatorial contrast compared to other signs. Thus, if the PFs are phonograms, their preceding sign-sequences must be logograms and vice versa.
Thus, the sign-sequences preceding the PFs should complementarily be phonograms. So, the inscriptions that are constituted mostly with these signs cannot be instances of mixed writing. For a proof by contradiction, let us first assume that Indus inscriptions were phonetically written. Next, let us analyze the most frequent 30 signs, each of which has occurred in more than 80 DILs.
Among these signs, the PF-signs , , , and , and the PPF-sign are reputed for their rigid preferences for terminal and pre-phrase-final positions. The CM-signs , , , and are mainly located in between two semantically complete constituents. The PCLs , and dominantly occur in the initial positions of pre-connective constituents. The other frequent signs, such as , , , , , etc. Therefore, if these signs are to spell out words phonetically, words of a grievously restricted phonetic range would result, which is simply unacceptable for the words of any natural language.
Thus the hypothesis that Indus inscriptions were phonetically constructed cannot be accepted, at least not for most of the inscriptions excavated till date. This pattern is characteristic to the texts of various modern data-carriers and metrological devices.
Some of the reduplicated sign-sequences possibly were special morphological units, whose meanings were derived from the meaning of the basic signs using some specific rules. Thus sign-adjacency was permitted for certain sign-classes, whereas inscription-level co-occurrences were prohibited for them.
Co-occurrence preferences: The co-occurrence preferences of specific collocates quite obviously indicate that certain lexemes were semantically more compatible to each other in the semantic scope of the inscriptions. As discussed before, Indus collocations were compositional in nature, signifying that certain attributive lexemes were more applicable to certain substantive lexemes, leading to the formation of fixed collocations.
Compositionality of longer inscriptions: The longer inscriptions found in certain formalized data-carriers are expected to demonstrate semantic compositionality by getting constructed with semantic units present in smaller inscriptions present in other data-carriers see Fig. Positional preferences: The positional preferences of certain signs might be a simple document-specific format.
For example, in the stamps shown in Fig. This positional preference is just document-specific, not bound by any linguistic rules. Similarly, the positional preferences of PF1s and PF2s might have been a document-specific convention maintained in Indus seals and tablets. Order of signs: Unlike certain possible document-specific formats, the syntactic orders maintained in the bigram collocations e.
For example, the languages that use prenominal adjectives generally place qualifying morphemes before the qualified morphemes. Moreover, since the inscribed objects are identified as formalized data-carriers, in which linguistic syntaxes and document-specific syntaxes can play equally important roles, a researcher would not have to explain each syntactic feature from a linguistic and grammatical aspect.
The focus of the future semantic analysis should be on understanding the semantic role of each of the functional sign-classes and the reason behind their interdependence. Often in logographic writing systems, the grapheme chosen for a logogram resembles the real world objects which symbolize the semantic concept of the logogram though over time those graphemes might go beyond recognition by getting more stylized and abstract.
Since many Indus signs are quite pictorial in nature e. Since the archeological evidence strongly suggests that ISC was used in some highly standardized socio-economic activity of ancient Indus life, one should explore the functionality of the sign-classes and investigate whether most of the graphemes used for the logograms of a functional sign-class are related to some particular socio-economic symbolic dealing.
In this context, the historical evidence extracted from the earliest available literatures of ancient India should be thoroughly analyzed. Additionally, the archeological and historical evidence obtained from the civilizations which were ancient trade partners of Indus valley e. In: Harden T, Hentschel E eds 40 jahre partikelforschung.
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