While discovered in the 19th century, and first excavated in the early 20th, the civilization that grew up between India and the Middle East was a cipher to history. It left no monumental architecture, and little text on stone or clay. Indeed, there was more than a little argument over the nature of the script, and the possibility that it was a proto-literate, or pre-historical ideographic system rather than a developed syllabary or other form of writing. This changed with the discovery in the far north of a cache of papyrus scrolls, which are now known as Rupar I, for the site there were located near. As importantly, at Rupar II, an interlingual was found, allowing the first reasonable decipherment of the later script. This interlingual was, at first, confusing, since it seemed to have the Indus script twice, and a later script which, while an obscure variation of old Chinese seal script, was readable. It was only at this point that the first of many mysteries became revealed: the script had encoded many different languages, and the interlingual was the key between an Indo-European tongue, closely allied with Sanskrit, and another, which was a language isolate, though somewhat connected with older Dravidian languages, and perhaps Sumerian.
For twenty years Rupar I and Rupar II were hidden from the scholarly community, as explained by Rao and Himmelberg, because of the politics of the discovery, which can be left aside for the present commentary...
The Rupar Texts and Their Significance Wei Huang Li, Journal of Mathematical Linguistics, April 2041, Vol 9, No. 8 pg. 897
The Banner of The White Tiger
a
There is something new under the sun. That sun which streams now through the portal to the courtyard, the hear leaves of ivy tied with bits of twine to a trellis, the shapes decorating the edges of the shadow on the floor. The shutter swings slightly back and forth in the cooling breeze that is the distant touch of the season of storms, which the people to the east call, the Monsoon.
I was born in the same place of the sun, with that same breath of cool dryness retreating from warm wetness, where the touch of the air was arid, and the weight of the air held a smell like clothes left damp in the corner. I was called 6th moon daughter on my birth, and so they left me with the nurse, a woman who had had so many children of her own that she numbered them. It was not until I was five that I was given even a use name, so much like a clay pot on a shelf is a young daughter who may or may not be beautiful or useful.
So when the time came for me to have something more useful than 9th Moon, my father began calling me after that name, Monsoon. It was a word with a foreign sound, and as a merchant of Deslapur, he knew that people of that moment had a mania for all things foreign, just as they had a mania for the very soft beyond soft wool that came floating down the river in flat bottomed barges, moved by pole or oar, or simple sail, and which was spun into cloth as fine as gold. As a man of means, he had the luxury of naming his children, and only selling them in marriage when they would fetch a good price.
I suppose I should set more of my tale. The name he gave me then clings to me only in the darker nights an corners of my life, when passion overtakes me or my lover, or when I think back to those days of weaving and learning to trace the symbols that showed what was in a jar, or was bound up in a sack. The stick figures that chase each other, and were then the signs of wealth and trade.
Trade, my father's favorite word. Everything was trade. From a sweet lump of honey, to the task of the day, to moments of his affection, everything was in trade. So he set me to taking stylus and tracing lines in clay, which was then fired, to show what had been packed. The other merchant's scribe would do the same, and the two were [...]
by Lillie Yifu (lillie.yiyuan@yahoo.com) at November 09, 2009 07:16 AM
Syndicating the Second Life blogosphere
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So I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to word this since inevitably, it would create an entirely larger situation for Titan Studios. And really, it’s just breaking out my thought process after my 
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