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Agora, a reportagem da visita à Abadia de inspiração maçónica no Palácio Foz, nos Restauradores, em Lisboa.
As imagens são do Mário Sérgio.
As a result of its pioneering commercial-colonial links with India since the close of the 15th century, the Portuguese have made some rare contributions to world’s knowledge about Asia, including India, their first point of contact and later the base of their colonial empire in Asia. The manuals produced by Duarte Barbosa and Tomé Pires are still regarded as masterpieces of encyclopedic information about material and human resources of Asia at the time of the Portuguese arrival in the Indian Ocean. Later the colonial missionaries produced linguistic tools that could enable them to penetrate Asian cultures and implant Christianity. In Portugal itself there was short period of orientalist research surge in the late 19th – early 20th century, marked by such scholarly figures as G. de Vasconcellos Abreu, Esteves Pereira, David Lopes Sebastião R. Dalgado. Lately, we have only seen commemorative stunts and neo-orientalist gimmicks!
José Calazans, my colleague at the Lusophone University in Lisbon, and faculty member in the Department of the Science of Religions, has released this week at the Hindu Temple in Lisbon a Short Grammar of the Harappa Language, a bilingual edition in 150 pages, wherein he provides a preview of a much larger work he has compiled on the grammar and dictionary of the Indus Valley script that has so far defied the interested scholars over nearly a century in India, Finland, Russia,USA and elsewhere, assuming generally that Tamil (proto-Dravidian) was the key for the deciphering the 2000 and odd seals so far known.
José Calazans recognizes and praises the pioneering work of Fr. Heras and several others, but points to the reason why their efforts ended in failure: they all sought to fit in Vedic concepts into the Harappan script. His method suggests instead that the “language” ideopictographically expressed could be a dialect (prakrta) of indo-iranian family, partly structured like the Vedic Sanskrit (bhasa), the Pali, other near-contemporary jargons (paisaca), but with significant differences. He cites references in the classical and Vedic texts to the existence of such jargons, some probably never taken seriously, because they are mentioned as languages of the «dogs» (sva), «owls» (uluka), «cuckoos» (koka), «eagles» (suparna) and «vultures» (grdhra), all of them referred as «demons» (raksasas) in the Rgveda. The users of the languages are designated as Kikata people , and their priests as Kilata and Akuli, always in a pejorative sense. There are no references to any written script prior to Brahmi.
The team led by Rajesh Rao (University of Washington, 2009) produced interesting results using computer-based statistics and comparing symbols of Indus script and different languages – including modern English and the ancient Sanskrit - as well as nonlinguistic systems. Calazans confesses that recent statements by Rajesh Rao egged him on to make public his findings, because they supported his own conclusion that the Harappa pictographic script is in fact a dialect (prakrit) closer to Pali than to Vedic Sanskrit.
Calazans classifies the Harappan language as belonging to the group of Raksasibasha. Identifies phonetic and phonologic bridge with the Vedic Sanskrit and Pali, but marked by semantic differences of conflicting social strata and anti-Brahmin orthodoxy. The novelty that Calazans proposes is that the continuity of older traditions need not have been only oral as Vedic texts presume. Harappan script was a written tradition in aphoristic style that was inconvenient to the Aryan Brahmin orthodoxy. This written tradition, defends Calazans, was probably the first source of astronomic and astrologic calculus, and could have been the origin of later shastras linked to the science of astronomy.
In the Harappan ideopictographic writing the stress was not based on sound or pronunciation, vowels or consonants, but on pictograms which need to be interpreted as a whole, an idea and a religious, divine and human principle.
Only through an oral teaching process would hundreds of ideopictographic combinations be fully understood. A sentence was constructed through successive agglutinations in a syntagmatic disposition through prefixation, infixation (a sign placed inside the ideogram when ideographic compounds are formed) and suffixation. Digital affixes represented by short vertical bars indicated specific numbers or declension cases, depending upon their position at the upper left corner (number) or upper right corner (case) of the basic ideopictogram.
Calazans sees extraordinary similarity with the Chinese number system, more so than Egyptian and Summerian, a fact he attributes to the proximity of two mythical regions of Uttara-Kuru and Takla-Makan as a cultural melting pot. Calazans is not yet sure of the full meaning of the zoomorphic sequence in the seals, but believes that it obeys to cycles of years or seasons, also similar to the dozen animals of the Chinese calendar. Following the order adopted in the Corpus of Hindu Seals and Inscriptions (A. Parpola, 1987-1991) despite persistence of doubts, sees some important registry of events, such as a solstice on July 26 of 3912 BC, when Mars and Saturn were in conjunction during five days. Such seals were reused probably as amulets with some ritual value. This date suggests that the Harappan culture belongs to a much earlier chronological setting than so far believed, and Calazans opines that this fact may embarrass many a political rival.
Calazans declares that it is not his intention to announce any “triumph” (sic) before achieving it or to take the risk of repeating what others have said before. States that many had been close to finding a solution, implying that he too may join the ranks. Hopes though that his solution will revive the interest of the scholars and awaits scholarly feedback proving him right or wrong. We too wish that the readers of this column take up the issue and pass on the word. Personally, I respect my erudite colleague and wish him luck in this bold endeavour.
To conclude, among some of the doubts that do not find answers or leads in the present edition of the Short Grammar of Harappa Language, but which we hope to find in the fuller published version, is how the very limited sequences of seals can ever provide a satisfactory base to capture a meaningful system of concepts. We are also not provided details of any comparative advance made beyond what Parpola or Mahadevan have done for solving the Harappan puzzle. Besides, why would the pictographic script disappear in the Middle East and Indus Valley, but not in China and Chinese cultural world? Was it determined by changes in dominant cultural thought patterns or a change in dominant materials and support technologies? We have no clue either as to how a language seemingly well developed long before the arrival of the Aryans into the region should have structural links with Vedic languages or related jargons. Or does the researcher-author imply that Vedic language and dialects grew out of the Harappan culture or suffered its linguistic influence in a significant manner?
Teotónio R. de Souza
http://www.scribd.com/doc/45187412/Harappan-Secrets
Aqui fica a entrevista de Joaquim Franco à SIC, no dia da apresentação do seu livro sobre a visita de Bento XVI a Portugal.
À Raquel Rita o grande Obrigado pelas imagens!
O grupo com José Manuel Anes, na escadaria do Palácio Foz.
José Carlos Calazans dirige a visita ao Templo Hindu
O grupo à porta do Templo
Começou a apresentação dos livros...
Joaquim Franco fala do seu livro sobre a viagem de Bento XVI a Portugal
A assistencia, com o Deputado Vera Jardim e o Dr. Ashok ao centro
José Carlos Calazans apresenta a sua gramática de Harappa
O belo final da sessão
Jantar - 1
Jantar - 2
Jantar - 3
Jantar - 4... terminou
Aqui fica o link da entrevista de José Carlos Calazans à TSF, sobre a decifração da língua de Harappa.
Frei Bento Domingues, o.p., primeiro director da LIc. em Ciência das Religiões, vai ser agraciado com o Prémio dos Direitos Humanos, juntamente com Dr. Levi Baptista, como membros da Comissão Nacional de Socorro aos Presos Políticos, atribuído pela Comissão Nacional para os Direitos Humanos, no dia 10 de Dezembro de 2010, às 12h na Assembleia da República.
No mesmo dia, às 18h, Frei Bento Domingues, o.p. vai ser agraciado também com o Prémio Ângelo d’Almeida Ribeiro, atribuído pela Comissão dos Direitos Humanos da Ordem dos Advogados, no Salão Nobre da Ordem dos Advogados, sito no Largo de São Domingos, nº 14, em Lisboa.
. Sites Oficiais da área de Ciência das Religiões
. Portal de Ciência das Religiões
. Revista Lusófona de Ciência das Religiões
. Ciências da Religião (Fatin / Un. Lusófona)
. Meios de Comunicação da área de Ciência das Religiões
. Fórum de alunos e Professores
. Áreas de reflexão em Ciência das Religiões
. Re-Ligare : reflexões sobre História e Sociologia das Religiões
. Teo-logizar: espaço de reflexão teológica
. ... pode interessar a quem estuda religião ...
. Instituições de apoio e de desenvolvimento