[Y-Indology] Indus Script -- write or wrong?

[Guest guest]

On S. Kalyanaraman's recent post:

 

1. Claims that Easter Island rongorongo was associated with Indus

symbols were quite popular in the 1930s (following the work of

Guillaume de Hevesy) and were also thoroughly debunked in the same

period. For an amusing discussion of these old claims, see pp. 90-101

in Greg Possehl's history of pseudo-decipherments of the so-called

Indus script (1996). Coincidentally, my collaborator Richard Sproat,

at the University of Illinois, is an expert on rongorongo, whose status

as a 'writing system' is itself widely doubted in the linguistic

community.

 

One of Kalyanaraman's earlier 'decipherment' claims is also dismissed

quickly in Possehl's book, on pp. 150-1. One of Kalyanaraman's most

recent claims in print is that he has found a "Rosetta Stone" that

enables that decipherment.

 

For Kalyanaraman's announced discovery of an Indus "Rosetta Stone", see

his announcement in one of the Hindutva lists last year:

 

sarasvatisindhu/message/301

 

That message on its own needs no comment. Needless to say, no one has

accepted these claims. Obviously, as noted in the Science article, the

Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel paper has already gained many adherents

among legitimate Indus researchers, including Richard Meadow

(co-director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project), the Indus

ethnobiologist Steven Weber, and many others.

 

As the Science story on the Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel paper correctly

reports, there is, in fact, a $10,000 award for finding a 'long' Indus

inscription -- which none of us ever expects will be collected. We

obviously put up the award underline the absurdities of the

130-year-long 'Indus-script' farce. This is what Popper would have

called a 'risky' prediction. :^)

 

Due to the many forgeries and hoaxes associated with the story of the

so-called script in the last century, note that the original rules for

the prize clearly stated that we will only consider candidates for the

prize that are first "accepted as legitimate by the consensus of Indus

researchers." To quote the original announcement:

 

"Turn up just one Indus inscription that contains at least 50 signs and

clear evidence of quasi-random sign duplication of the type found in

true scripts, and we will (1) consider our model to be falsified and

(2) will award the discoverers $10,000. Ground rules: The inscription

must be clearly provenanced from a known Indus archaeological site and

be accepted as legitimate by the consensus of Indus researchers before

becoming a candidate for the prize. The offer, backed by an anonymous

donor, is good throughout Farmer's lifetime."

 

So much nonsense has passed for research on the Indus system, that the

Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel paper emphasizes the importance of

discussing falsification criteria in any future models of the system as

part of a 'script'. See "A Note on Falsifiability" on p. 48 of our

paper, posted among other places at:

 

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

 

The evidence in this paper is obviously not going to go away....

 

Best wishes,

Steve Farmer

 

 

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