The Inscriptions contain essential and extended new information about the beginnings and further advance of the whole Euro-Asian civilization and are written in a script with exactly same structure to till today East Asian (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) scripts. Used language and script are more or less identical with the Old Persian. This work is a big step in historical, religious and other sciences, as well as of invaluable value for the cultural world heritage.

The in today’s India and Pakistan situated Indus Civilization is regarded, beside Egypt and Mesopotamia, as one of the first high cultures of mankind. It has already been known for a long time that the Indus Civilization was the greatest of these, and in many fields was also the most advanced one. Thus the towns of the urban phase (between about 2500 and 1900 BC) were much more advanced systematically planned and built of standardized, high-quality building materials then anywhere else. They possessed an extensive, standard sanitary infrastructure of domestic wells, well-equipped bathrooms, urban drainage ducts and seep pits as it was only invented again in modern times. All these technologies already had precursors in the pre-urban phase (from about 3000 to 2500 BC). The oldest traces of civilization in this region are even proven back to the 9^th millennium BC. The trade relationships of the Indus valley Indus Civilization, situated in present-day Pakistan and India, to Sumer, the cultures in the Persian highlands and other cultural centres are also relatively well investigated. Therewith the Indus Civilization is not only regionally, but also globally of great importance for the emergence of the worlds civilization.

Seal Impression

From Mohenjo-Daro.

But in spite of its great civilizationary achievements, the Indus Civilization, since its discovery in the year 1921, could not step out of the shadow of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations which dominate the public consciousness. This could also be due to the lack of impressive pyramids. But the main reason for its shadowy existence was surely also its unreadable script, until now, which is preserved mainly in engraved stamps. This was regarded by many experts as even undecipherable because of the lack of a bilingual text. So up to now it was also unclear which language it was written in and which direction to read it. Countless deciphering attempts ended without success.

The breakthrough in the deciphering was finally done by the retired German defence ministry linguist Kurt Schildmann in the year 1994 on the basis of the so-called Pictorial Bilinguals, from short texts which are accompanied by animal pictures. Before this it was already supposed that these texts could contain the species names of the animals shown. Schildmann, who had lived several years in Persia and India, tried to read these mostly three- to six-symbol long texts, written in the old Indian-Persian Sanskrit/Vedic/Avesta language, in the direction the animals were looking, and had success. All of the ca. 2000 analysed texts produced a logical sense, and most of them contained statements which dealt with acts of cause and effect. The script is exactly structured like the till today East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) scripts of varied pictograms and syllabics. The syllabic as well as pictorial symbols correspond appropriately with their pictorial origin. The syllabics could be arranged into a-u-i vocal rows. Now the problem was the absence of a meaningful connection of the texts to each other. However, this discovery remained, for the time being, largely unrecognized by Schildmann who was over 90 years old.

Mohenjo-Daro

City of the Indus Valley Civilization, 20 km Larkana and some 80 km southwest of modern Sukkur, Sindh, Pakistan, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Some years later, Rainer Hasenpflug discovered by chance the deciphering work and recognized its value while inquiring at the German research project Mohenjo-Daro, at the Technical University of Aachen. He systematically analysed the texts in almost three years of work, improved the deciphering, and could, in this way, reveal an extensive self-description of the Indus Civilization. The stamps were proven as an intelligent, national, public education program of an Indo-European minority in a difficult political situation. The texts contain not only innumerable amounts of information about religion, environment, state order, society, science, and spiritual life, but also the systematically exact use of symbolism and language by the Indus authors which is, up to now, universally unrivalled. Many often-employed metaphors are globally used even today. For example, bulls stood for strong men, like today, and society‘s outsiders were called dogs. Also the symbolism of numbers takes up a large amount of space. The seven-day week, with six working days and one free day, was just as well known as its origin. So our ancestors present themselves as highly intelligent and progressive humans who lived in a complex society. This is the decisive end for some theories about a partially primitive, utopically isolated Indus Civilization. Hasenpflug‘s work is thus not only a breakthrough for cultural history, but should also be received with greatest interest by linguists, archaeologists and many other special fields.

Further give the inscriptions among others answers on:

— The arise of complex urban civilizations
— Intercultural relations and common cultural sources
— The development of religions
— The meaning of metaphors in ancient and modern languages

But the biggest historical surprise is that the Indus Civilization rates, in fact, as no less than the mythic Vedic age of ancient India. So the legendary Rama is revered as the state founder of the Indus Empire, formed by his tribe in the south around the city of Mohenjo-Daro and the Indra tribe in the north around the city of Harappa. Many myths find their ancestors here in a prehistoric, highly advanced culture.

Rainer Hasenpflug
The Inscriptions of the Indus Civilization
ISBN: 3-8334-4613-7, in US/UK
Internet: www.indus-civilization.info.