That's interesting. The decoding of Linear Elamite _may_ help in the decipherment of the Indus Valley Script.
One of the theories behind the Indus Valley Civilization, is that they spoke a Dravidian language, related to modern southern India's Dravidian languages.
There are also some theories (not generally agreed on), that the Elamite language is related to the Dravidian languages.
People also have hypothesized that the IVC script may have at least some relation to Linear Elamite, and if so, it's more of a basis to do generate some hypotheses.
This is my biggest hope. I have a pet conspiracy theory that the Hebrew god was once the same as Brahman and that’s why Jewish (and by extension Christia ) mysticism is often compared to Bramanist theology. The “oneness of god” is one direction this ancient “brahamnism” went while the modern religion is the opposite.
My hope is that deciphering the Indus Valley civilization will allow us to extract a more ancient form of this religion from comparing the two.
Yahweh did not come from Brahma, Brahma did not come from Yahweh. Likewise, Osiris, Odin, what-have-you. The undisciplined Vedic, Norse, and Greek pantheons do trace to proto-Indo-Europeans in the Caucasus. The elevation of a chief god out of the pantheon, whether Marduk, Yahweh, or Brahma, is probably associated with political consolidation. Your king-of-kings naturally wants a god-of-gods, and is in a position to get one. Even the Egyptians dabbled.
It is likely there was an enormous corpus of Harappan literature on media that turned to dust without having being transcribed. Very likely, the oldest Harappan settlements are now deep underwater, offshore of India and Pakistan, inundated by meltwater from ice-age glaciers.
People insisting the Vedas came from the Harappans completely neglect that the Vedas are fundamentally martial, while the Harappans had nothing at all like an army. There is plenty of evidence of Harappan violence -- mostly blunt-force trauma -- but by context it more resembles banditry, civil strife, mob violence, or feuding, anyway without any hint of soldiery.
I don't know anything about this really but I would have thought it would have been the opposite: emperors who hold power over many disparate cultures would want a polytheistic religion so they can subsume other cultures' gods into their own pantheons, therefore saying "all gods are real, we just didn't know about yours until we conquered you"
Which would also fit in with why Jews and Christians were discriminated against: being monotheists isn't conducive to unity across an empire if you have one group of people claiming their god is the real one and all the others are not only fake, but it's actually a sin to believe in them
You have correctly identified where pantheons come from. The term for these religions is "syncretist". Each tribe, village, city-state has its god or gods that join in, or are merged into others already there (some get lots of names).
Then when the emperor wants to solidify his power, he replaces local kings with his own people, and identifies himself with a chief god.
Akhenaten, Tut's father, tried it in Egypt, with Aten as big cheese god. It didn't work out (probably) because the priesthood turned out still too powerful.
But that goal probably is a big part of why Rome went Christian.
I actually have contemplated similar conclusions and have been non-seriously collecting evidence that suggests at something similar. Indeed very interesting relationships nonetheless between “Master of Animals,” shiva, thor, Odin, yahweh, thunderbolt, stormgod, Cernunnos, Gilgamesh.
Not many people have connected Cernunnos to the same culture as the above entities. It is evidently quite certain when looking at the art of these cultures that there is a common thread and history. I think there may be oversight into that aspect compared to the writing and language. The way something is crafted is quite unique and the signatures are there tying the above together.
These are connections that are quite curious indeed.
I’ve brought these things up and usually I just get assaulted as a conspiracy theorist or wanting to rewrite history.
All history is fiction anyway.
The only thing I care about is patterns and patterns have signatures, and to me, there’s a common threading of a specific signature that suggests a significant population and culture of same origin that doesn’t align with the reasoning that exists to explain otherwise disconnected cultures.
Ancient Architects used to be fringy, but has lately strayed a bit too far to orthodoxy, e.g. courting Younger Dryas bolide-strike denialism. Lots of good new material.
UnchartedX is distinctly fringy, exposing facts historians find uncomfortable. Strays to speculation, but does not fabricate evidence. (NB: ignore anything about "scoop marks".) Really gets around!
Israel's religion began its transition to monotheism a very long time after the period when this script was in use. Anyway, I think your approach sounds better suited to languages than to religions.
1) Nothing says they can’t have had a similar religion (at least the early YHWH cultists) where there’s many gods but one overarching force. But also
2. YHWH is not a member of that pantheistic hierarchy. He is a foreign god theorized to have been imported by a merchant class. It is YHWH worship I find connections with not (necessarily) the ancient Levantine religion.
Anyway it’s not my approach, just a playful intuition.
The early Canaanite Yahweh had a wife and equal, Asherah, goddess of cakes, etc. The misogynist Hebrews demoted her to a stick, which they could not eliminate because she was still essential to important rituals, for centuries after. (Evidently a stick sufficed.) They finally managed, but there are still traces in the Torah, hard to scrub out.
After the Temple was razed c.70 CE, none of the rituals could be worked anymore, anyhow.
The idea is that the cult that became Judaism has a shared history with Vedic, or pre-Vedic, religions. Not that ancient Israelites actually believed in that religion.
I think what they're getting at is that as best we know, Vedic religions came to India with the Indo-Aryan migration. So the pre-Vedic religions of the Indus Valley Civilization are unlikely to have had any notion of a Vedic concept like brahman.
Right. There is basically no possibility at all that IVC was Vedic. Vedic was pastoral and martial, IVC sedentary, farming, and wholly non-martial.
BTW, "IVC" is problematic, because it extended hundreds of km east well across the subcontinent. The Hindi majority in that part of its range would prefer it not.
One of the theories behind the Indus Valley Civilization, is that they spoke a Dravidian language, related to modern southern India's Dravidian languages.
There are also some theories (not generally agreed on), that the Elamite language is related to the Dravidian languages.
People also have hypothesized that the IVC script may have at least some relation to Linear Elamite, and if so, it's more of a basis to do generate some hypotheses.