Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies: Indus-Script Myth

[Guest guest]

Michael Witzel's Indology@ account is bouncing, so he has

asked me to forward this message to the List. A 4-page feature article

on our paper will show up in _Science__ magazine this coming Friday

(Dec. 17th; on the Web Thursday evening), and an abbreviated account

sometime soon in the Financial Times.

 

xxx

 

The following may be of interest to members:

 

ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF VEDIC STUDIES (EJVS)

Vol. 11 (2004) Issue 2 (December 13) : 19-57 ( C) ISSN 1084-7561

 

The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis:

The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization

 

By Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel

 

Abstract

 

Archaeologists have long claimed the Indus Valley as one of the four

literate centers of the early ancient world, complete with long texts

written on perishable materials. We demonstrate the impossibility of the

lost-manuscript thesis and show that Indus symbols were not even

evolving

in linguistic directions after at least 600 years of use. Suggestions of

how Indus inscriptions were used are examined in nonlinguistic symbol

systems in the Near East that served important religious, political, and

social functions without encoding speech or serving as formal memory

aids.

Evidence is reviewed that the Harappans'slack of a true script may have

been tied to the role played by their symbols in controlling large

multilinguistic populations; parallels are drawn to the later resistance

of priestly elites to the literate encoding of Vedic sources and to

similar phenomena in esoteric traditions outside South Asia. Discussion

is

provided on some of the academic and political forces that helped

sustain

the Indus-script myth for over 130 years and on ways in which our

findings

transform current views of the Indus Valley and of the place of writing

in

ancient civilizations in general.

 

The paper is available at:

http://www.safarmer.com/fsw2.pdf

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm (fsw2.pdf)

and, of course, the EJVS website:

http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/issues.html

 

A discussion of the present paper is scheduled to appear in SCIENCE

Magazine on Dec. 17, 2004.

http://www.sciencemag.org

 

-------------------

Michael Witzel

Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University

1 Bow Street , Cambridge MA 02138

1-617-495 3295 Fax: 496 8571

direct line: 496 2990

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, Steve Farmer <saf@s...> wrote:

> > The following may be of interest to members:

> > ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF VEDIC STUDIES (EJVS)

> Vol. 11 (2004) Issue 2 (December 13) : 19-57 ( C) ISSN 1084-

7561> > The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis:> The Myth of a

Literate Harappan Civilization > By Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat,

and Michael Witzel

 

One of the authors who claims to have seen 'Para'-Munda (whatever it

means) in the civilization area, now joins with others to claim that

the Harppans were illiterate.

 

Two reasons are adequate to demolish the reductio ad absurdum in an

incoherent jumbling up of anecdotes from unconnected places: 1. there

is no reason to assume that heraldic or agricultural symbols were

depicted without understanding why they were so depicted; 2. citing

arbitrary, anecdotal evidences from other far-off places for such

assumed symbolism is reducing scholarship to the level of absurdity.

 

For a literate reading of the script, why can't the glyphs be assumed

to be heiroglyphs? The learned trio are breath-takingly silent on

this possibility. Talk of myth-making !

 

Kalyanaraman