The Indus Script: Was it really a script?

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Describing what is sure to be a highly controversial idea, Science Magazine [paid or institutional access required] publishes an article about a group of scientists who are calling into question whether the Indus script is really even a script, in the traditional sense. Because of the fact that this article will not be accessible by most, I will liberally quote for the benefit of SM readers.

For 130 years scholars have struggled to decipher the Indus script. Now, in a proposal with broad academic and political implications, a brash outsider claims that such efforts are doomed to failure because the Indus symbols are not writing

Academic prizes typically are designed to confer prestige. But the latest proposed award, a $10,000 check for finding a lengthy inscription from the ancient Indus civilization, is intended to goad rather than honor. The controversial scholar who announced the prize last month cheekily predicts that he will never have to pay up. Going against a century of scholarship, he and a growing number of linguists and archaeologists assert that the Indus people–unlike their Egyptian and Mesopotamian contemporaries 4000 years ago–could not write.

That claim is part of a bitter clash among academics, as well as between Western scientists and Indian nationalists, over the nature of the Indus society, a clash that has led to shouting matches and death threats. But the provocative proposal, summed up in a paper published online last week, is winning adherents within the small community of Indus scholars who say it is time to rethink an enigmatic society that spanned a vast area in today’s Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan–the largest civilization of its day.

The Indus civilization has intrigued and puzzled researchers for more than 130 years, with their sophisticated sewers, huge numbers of wells, and a notable lack of monumental architecture or other signs of an elite class (see sidebar on p. 2027). Most intriguing of all is the mysterious system of symbols, left on small tablets, pots, and stamp seals. But without translations into a known script–the “Rosetta stones” that led to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform in the 19th century–hundreds of attempts to understand the symbols have so far failed. And what language the system might have expressed–such as a Dravidian language similar to tongues of today’s southern India, or a Vedic language of northern India–is also a hot topic. This is no dry discussion: Powerful Indian nationalists of the Hindutva movement see the Indus civilization as the direct ancestor to Hindu tradition and Vedic culture.

The scientist who is championing this controversial idea is Steve Farmer:

…this former street kid from Chicago, who lacks a high school diploma, has shaken up the closed field of Indus studies (see main text). “It is healthy the way this is turning things upside down,” says archaeologist Steven Weber of Washington State University in Vancouver.

Farmer’s linguistic ability got him off the streets when he joined the Army in the 1960s. After learning Russian at the military’s language school in Monterey, California, he worked for the National Security Agency listening in on the conversations of Soviet pilots. Then, radicalized by the Vietnam War, he left the military for academia. After winning a high school equivalency diploma, he studied history at the University of Maryland, College Park, and earned a Ph.D. in comparative cultural history at Stanford University in California. He taught history of science and European history at George Mason University outside Washington, D.C., and then moved to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge as a tenure-track professor. But he says he rejected full-time academic life to avoid teaching courses he found boring and moved back to California, where he was on the adjunct faculty at Ohlone College in Fremont until 1997. To support his scholarly pursuits, Farmer has edited a journal on narcolepsy, worked on a PGA golf tournament training program, and helped develop a device to aid people with brain disorders.

… His arrogance makes him hard for some scholars to get along with. “I’ve remade the field,” he recently boasted. Others resent his methods. “He uses verbose arguments,” says archaeologist J. Mark Kenoyer of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, co-director of the Harappa dig. “And he’s not basing it on science.” Adds linguist Gregory Possehl of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, “I don’t think his ideas are interesting or viable, and I’m surprised they have raised interest.” At this point, however, that interest is undeniable, so Indus specialists are making room, albeit reluctantly, for a new member of their small family. But the intellectually peripatetic Farmer insists he will not make himself at home: “This is just a chapter in my book.”

What do other reserachers think of Farmer’s ideas?

[Farmer and his collegue’s] thesis has bitterly divided the field of Indus studies, made up of a small and close-knit bunch dominated by Americans. Some respected archaeologists and linguists flatly reject it. “I categorically disagree that the script does not reflect a language,” says archaeologist J. Mark Kenoyer of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who co-directs a dig at the key site of Harappa in Pakistan. “What the heck were they doing if not encoding language?” Asko Parpola, a linguist at Finland’s University of Helsinki who has worked for decades to decipher the signs, says. “There is no chance it is not a script; this is a fully formed system. It was a phonetic script.” Linguist Gregory Possehl of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia says that it is not possible to “prove” the script cannot be deciphered. All three argue that Farmer’s thesis is a pessimistic and defeatist approach to a challenging problem. Meanwhile, the very idea that the Indus civilization was not literate is deeply offensive to many Indian nationalists.

So the question which hangs in everyone’s mind is, “if it is not writing then what is it?”

Since the 1870s, archaeologists have uncovered more than 4000 Indus inscriptions on a variety of media. Rudimentary signs appear around 3200 B.C.E.–the same era in which hieroglyphics and cuneiform began to appear in Egypt and Iraq. By 2800 B.C.E., the signs become more durable, continuing in use in later periods; the greatest diversity starts to appear around 2400 B.C.E. Some signs are highly abstract, whereas others seem to have obvious pictographic qualities, such as one that looks like a fish and another that resembles a jar. Both are used frequently; the jar sign accounts for one in 10 symbols, says Possehl. As in Mesopotamia, the signs typically appear on small tablets made of clay as well as on stamp seals. The seals often are accompanied by images of animals and plants, both real and mythical.

The signs start to diminish around 1900 B.C.E. and vanish entirely by 1700 B.C.E., when the Indus culture disappears. Oddly, the inscriptions are almost all found in trash dumps rather than in graves or in primary contexts such as the floor of a home. “They were thrown away like expired credit cards,” says Meadow.

No one had ever seriously questioned whether the signs are a form of writing. But scholars hotly debate whether the system is phonetic like English or Greek or logosyllabic–using a combination of symbols that encode both sound and concepts–like cuneiform or hieroglyphics. Even the number of signs is controversial. Archaeologist and linguist S. R. Rao of India’s University of Goa has proposed a sign list of only 20, but Harvard graduate student Bryan Wells is compiling a revised list now numbering 700; most estimates hover in the 400 range.

Farmer and colleagues reanalyzed the signs, drawing on published data from many sites and unpublished data from the Harappa project provided by Meadow. They found that the average Indus inscription, out of a total of 4000 to 5000 in a 1977 compilation, has 4.6 signs. The longest known inscription contains 17 signs, and fewer than 1% are as long as 10 symbols. The authors argued that such short “texts” are unprecedented for actual writing. Although many scholars assert that longer inscriptions may have been made on perishable materials, the authors note that there is no archaeological evidence of the imperishable paraphernalia that typically accompanies literate culture, such as inkpots, rock inscriptions, or papermaking devices.

Farmer and colleagues also take apart a long-held assumption that the frequent repetition of a small number of Indus signs is evidence of a script encoding language. About 12% of an average English text, for example, consists of the letter “E,” often used repeatedly in a single sentence to express a certain sound. In contrast, the paper notes that very few Indus symbols are repeated within individual inscriptions, implying that the signs do not encode sounds.

Further, the authors note that many Indus symbols are incredibly rare. Half of the symbols appear only once, based on Wells’s catalog; three-quarters of the signs appear five times or fewer. According to the 1977 compilation put together by Iravatham Mahadevan, an Indian linguist now retired in Chennai, India, more than one-fourth of all signs appear only once, and more than half show up five times or fewer. Rarely used signs likely would not encode sound, says Farmer. It is as if many symbols “were invented on the fly, only to be abandoned after being used once or a handful of times,” he, Witzel, and Sproat write.

Farmer believes that the symbols have nonlinguistic meaning. He speculates that the signs may have been considered magical–as the Christian cross can be–and indicated individuals or clans, cities or professions, or gods. He and his colleagues compare the Indus script to inscriptions found in prehistoric southeastern Europe around 4000 B.C.E., where the Vina culture produced an array of symbols often displayed in a linear form, including a handful used frequently.

I urge Sepia Mutiny readers who are as fascinated by this article as I am, to go purchase a copy of Science Magazine or check it out at your local library.

24 thoughts on “The Indus Script: Was it really a script?”

  1. The Science article I believe is only a 4 page synopsis of the effects of work of Farmer, Sproat and Witzel.

    A more complete paper by these authors on this topic can be found at: http://www.safarmer.com/fsw2.pdf

    Having read it, my main observation is that I am in no position to argue linguistics. However, other possibilities for the Indus script come to mind that the authors do not mention. Foremost amongst them, is the possibility that the discovered “text” from the Indus sites represent not one, but many languages which were hard to distinguish. This mish-mash of different languages represented in different amounts might perhaps account for the odd symbol frequencies found.

  2. Thanks very much for the comment on our article. I don’t read Sepia Mutiny regularly, so please I won’t see a response to my note unless you email me directly.

    To you post: the thesis that the odd frequencies might arise from a mismash of different languages is something we already considered — it is a reasonable thing to think about — but it doesn’t work, since my collaborators and I show that you get the same oddities when you calculate frequencies for specific sets of inscriptions just from one time period and Indus site. This finding is discussed explicitly in our paper (first item at http://www.safarmer.com/downloads ).

    As we argue at some length, the Indus Valley Civilization becomes much more interesting, not less, now that we know it was nonliterate. (For our arguments as to why this is true, see the original article.)

    Cheers – Steve Farmer

  3. With all due respect, no one yet can say they “know” whether the IVC was nonliterate or literate.

  4. Dear Sepia Muntiny, I’m writing in reponse to you posting on the Indus Script. Dave Kelley once told me that: “The only thing that is worse that having your research attacked is having it ignored”. I was hoping to ignore Farmer et al in the same way I will be ignoring Barua and his Tantric decipherment and the flurry of competing Sanskrit decipherments. Unfortunately, in the light of recent developments I may not be able to. There are several serious error in the Farmer et al argument, so many in fact that it is not possible to discuss them all here. I offer this rather lengthy e-mail as a critique of the most obvious as serious of these errors.

    Here is what’s wrong with Farmer et al’s approach:

    1) They makes the argument that because there are so many singletons in the Indus sign list it cannot be writing. They do not command any ancient script so they have no idea of how these scripts work. Out of curiosity I downloaded the Proto-Sumerian sign list from the Cuniform Library Inititive web page. I compared the frequency of signs to that of the Indus script. The sign frequency is nearly identical. In fact the r2 for these distributione is 0.97. The same data is available for the Proto-Elamite script which has an even a high percentage of singletons. It seems that the high frequency of singletons is not proof that the Indus Script is not writting but rather that it is a normal linear scripts from South Asia.

    2) They Says: “Inscriptions consist of high frequency signs that rarely repeat even in the longest inscriptions”. Then in their proof that the “duck in a pond” texts is not writing (his Case #1) they give the following reason: “The most common Indus sign…shows up no less than three times in this six sign inscription”. He is only partly right in both case. There are some examples of the same sign repeated in a given text. I don’t know the exact count yet, but I will get my programer to count them. This point is important to Farmer et al because they is assuming the script is “heavily syllabic”. I count ≈ 700 signs, way too many for a syllabic script. It is most likely logo-syllabic, with a high probability of at least some determinatives being used. Also In the “duck in a pond” text the two segments of the text are separated by a iconographic element (Bull). It looks to me like two 3 sign texts.
    This is a very rare artifact (a silver seal). Not that Farmer et al ever address the bulk of the corpus except in a gross statistical way. They focus instead on rare artifacts types and unusual texts.

    3) They say there are no evidence for perishable texts in the Indus Corpus. This is not true. We have the impression on the back of a clay sealing of a text that was carved on a wooden doweling (Mackay, Vol. II, Plate XC:17) and has 9+ signs. The text runs the full length of the sealing and seems to run off in both directions. It is in very rough shape and the sealing picks up only the bottom of the signs. Nevertheless., this is proof of two things. First, Farmer et al have no clue as to what is in the Corpus (or chooses to ignore data that are in opposition to his views) and second, that Indus people carved texts in wood.

    4) Farmer et al’s treatment of Indus Numbers would be comical if it were not such a serious topic.
    a) On the one hand they complain Indus numbers are mostly “2s and 3s in several morphological types”. Similar I would guess to 3, 30, 300 etc are in our system. That is, he conflates linear short strokes, stacked short strokes, and linear long strokes into one set of numerals. Strangely, he ignores the very common occurrences of short and long one stroke signs? I have no idea why. He goes on to complain that “Frequently apparent numbers are grouped with other numbers in idiosyncratic ways”. He is referring to a seal texts with one long stroke, followed by 3 short stacked strokes, followed by five short stacked strokes. This looks far from “idiosyncratic” to me. In fact it is common in positional notation in all ancient scripts to have strings of numeral which combine systematically to form higher order numbers. In this case one could guess 135 or 1035? I am aware of 20 or so examples of positional notation without really looking. b) They also completely miss the simple right bracket “)” as five, and several other signs, that from their contexts in replacement sets, may also be numbers or minimally their are functional equivalents.
    c) Farmer et al point out that “Certain apparent numerical signs are regularly found in conjunction only with specific non-numerical signs, never with others — in a way that again seems peculiar for an abstract number system.” Again not well thought out. First, “only with specific non-numerical signs” translates from Farmer speak to English as: 16 sign very frequently, and occasionally with 60 additional signs. That is, “only with specific non-numerical signs” = 76 or about 11% of all signs. This is also a common pattern in ancient writing systems: that numbers occur with the nouns the discribe — 10 sheep, 15 people etc.

    5) As if to reinforce their complete lack of knowledge about the Indus Corpus, Farmer et al repeatedly refer to HR3005 (M-0314) as the longest indus text. It is really the forth longest text. It is the longest seal texts, but there are several bas relief tablets with more signs.

    6) Farmer et al make much of the terseness of Indus Texts (now about 4.87 signs). Don’t they know the average length of a texts from Nissans Uruk data is 6.8 signs? Of course there are some really long ones, but the vast majority are about 3-5 signs long. They consist of noun+number constructions with occasional totals in the longer texts.

    7) As to there discussion of the high frequency signs I refer them the recent article by Peter Damerow of the Max-Planck-Institut (Berlin) on Proto-Elamite. As with the signleton signs, the high frequency signs occur in nearly identical proportions in Proto-Elamite, Proto-Sumerian, and the Indus Script.

    8) It has also been said that inscribed Indus artifacts occur mostly in garbage heaps and in refuse. This is also a gross exaggeration. In fact there are many good examples of seals clustering in specific houses and near kilns at Mohenjo-daro. There is also a clustering of seals and weights in specific rooms in some of these houses. A careful examination of the excavation data from Mackay allows the tracking of changes of seal use through time based on these distributions at Mohenjo-daro DK.G area. The simple fact is that Farmer et al have no clue about either the archaeology of the Indus Valley, where the seals come from in these deposits, or how inscribed artifacts were used.

    MY question is why do publisher continue to print garbage on the Indus script? Couldn’t they find a competent referee for the Farmer et al paper? It also suprises me that the basic facts concerning the components and mechanics of ancient scripts seem to be unknown, not just the media but in the academic community as well.

    There is a lot of valuable research into the Indus script, unfortunately it is the more bizarre work that attracts the attention of the press. This is too bad because the informed work on Indus Writing is so much more interesting, if somewhat less simplistic than Farmer et al’s perception.

    Best Regards Bryan Wells Traveling Scholar Harvard University

  6. In response to one of Wells’ claims, I just wanted to point out that I am actually quite familiar with the way ancient scripts work (as are my coauthors). Wells is to be forgiven for not knowing that I have actually done work on formal models of writing systems, since most people who work on ancient scripts and decipherment don’t seem to see themselves as part of a larger community of scholars with a general interest in writing systems, and so they tend to keep to themselves. For example, I never see such people at workshops on writing systems, though I often see linguists working on modern writing systems, as well as psycholinguists interested in the psychology of reading. This is unfortunate since the two communities have much to learn from each other.

    On the matter of singletons, I think the issue is rather simple. If, as we claim, the number of singletons continues to grow as more inscriptions are found and catalogued, then that is at least problematic for a view that the IVS was a stable system: apparently people were continuing to invent symbols. This is not impossible in a true script, but it begs the question of how one could expect the reader to know what the new symbols meant, given that apparently (unlike Chinese) the new symbols were not in general complex compounds of a “semantic” and “phonetic” component. Perhaps, as we suggest, there were “school texts” or “dictionaries”, as there were in the ancient Near East. If so, where are these texts?

    In any case, the singleton issue is but one of many arguments that we give in support of the view that the IVS was not a writing system, and by no means the most important one.

    Wells takes issue with this and other arguments. That is fine. While we believe that there is sufficient reason to doubt that the IVS was a writing system, we certainly do not advocate that people stop trying to decipher it as if it were a writing system. Indeed, we are quite explicitly in favor of people doing so, since coming up with a decipherment that is accepted by the wider community of scholars (or finding a REALLY long text, or a bilingual text, or a school text…) would constitute an adequate falsification of our views, as we have pointed out elsewhere.

    Personally, I would really welcome such an outcome. But until that happens, what really bothers me about all of this is that people have been starting with the assumption that it’s obvious this is a script, whereas I don’t think this is warranted.

  7. Dear Sepia Mutiny,

    Richard Sproat today pointed me to Bryan Wells’ remarks at this site (from February) on our paper debunking the 130-year-old Indus-script myth. I respond below to Wells’ remarks, which are very odd indeed. Wells’ criticisms are filled with many willful distortions, all of which can be disposed of on evidential grounds. I apologize for the length of my remarks, but anyone who reads through them (and looks at the accompanying web pages I provide) will quickly see that Wells’ critiques are way off base.

    But first, let me point readers to our original paper, which has been the subject in the last three months of feature articles in Science magazine (US), Facts magazine (Switzerland), Der Standard (Austria), and Der Tagesspiegel (Germany). A feature article on our work is also currently in press in the German edition of Scientific American. For reference purposes, since Wells so badly distorts our views, readers can download our original paper for comparison purposes from:

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

    Tens of thousands of copies of that article have been downloaded since it was first published in December. Some of the news articles (also other materials) on our paper can also be downloaded from:

    http://www.safarmer.com/downloads

    Below are 9 numbered comments on Wells’ critique:

    1. It should first be noted that in his comments Wells doesn’t mention the obviously relevant fact that his work is sharply criticized in our paper — e.g., in the long footnote #23 on p. 37 of our article. Wells’ status in the scholarly world at present is also relevant: Wells is a graduate student in the dissertation stage — his (quite traditional) thesis on the so-called Indus script has not yet been completed — which, given the major sea change that our paper has triggered in scholarly attitudes towards the inscriptions, goes a long way to explain his distress. Wells has long been committed (going back to his earlier graduate student days in the 90s) to the so-called Dravidian model of the inscriptions, and his violent reaction to our paper (if not his distortions of what we have to say in it, which took us by surprise) was fully expected.

    2. Wells writes of me and my two coauthors:

    “They makes (sic) the argument that because there are so many singletons in the Indus sign list it cannot be writing. They do not command any ancient script so they have no idea of how these scripts work.”

    In fact, the “singleton” argument is NOT one of the main arguments in Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel 2004 — on this, see below — but before discussing this matter let me comment on what Wells says about our supposed lack of “command” of ancient scripts, which is surely an odd one coming from a grad student who hasn’t even finished his dissertation. One of the three coauthors of our paper is Michael Witzel, Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard and editor-in-chief of the prestigious Harvard Oriental Series, which had its origins in the classical period of Sanskrit studies in the 1890s. On the contents of this key editorial series, which frequently deals with inscriptional matters, see:

    http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/hos.htm

    Michael is also widely recognized as one of the world’s leading specialists on ancient Vedic traditions, and unlike Wells is fluent in a number of South Asian languages, including of course Vedic Sanskrit. Given this background, Wells seriously wants us to believe that Witzel does not “command any ancient script?” :^) I suggest that readers of Sepia Media judge for themselves by scanning through Witzel’s bibliography (and reading some papers!) at:

    http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Ewitzel/mwbib.htm

    Our other coauthor is Richard Sproat, of the University of Illinois. Richard, who is one of the world’s leading computational linguists, is the author of many books and articles, including the now standard study A Computational Theory of Writing Systems (Cambridge University Press 2000). Before accepting Wells’ odd claim that Richard Sproat has “no idea” about how ancient scripts work, I suggest that readers take a look at Richard’s biography at:

    http://www.linguistics.uiuc.edu/rws/

    and at his massive bibliography (with writings not only on Indic scripts, but as well on Chinese and many others) at:

    http://compling.ai.uiuc.edu/rws/newindex/publications.html

    Part of my own research has involved editing and translating what is widely considered to be one of the most difficult late-Latin texts, which also involved work in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. All told, I would conservatively guess that our publications on script issues probably outnumber those of Wells by several orders of magnitude. A quick look at the paper under discussion (which deals with Chinese, Sumerian, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Luwian hieroglyphics, and Linear Elamite, among other topics) may also suggest that altogether we may know a little about ancient scripts. :^)

    1. Going back to the context of Wells’ comments; he writes:

    “They makes (sic) the argument that because there are so many singletons in the Indus sign list it cannot be writing.”

    As noted earlier, this is NOT a central argument in our recent paper, for reasons we discuss at some length on pages where we sharply criticize Wells. See again p. 37, n. 23 in our paper. Wells continues:

    “They do not command any ancient script so they have no idea of how these scripts work. Out of curiosity I downloaded the Proto-Sumerian sign list from the Cuniform Library Inititive web page. I compared the frequency of signs to that of the Indus script. The sign frequency is nearly identical. In fact the r2 for these distributione is 0.97. The same data is available for the Proto-Elamite script which has an even a high percentage of singletons. It seems that the high frequency of singletons is not proof that the Indus Script is not writting but rather that it is a normal linear scripts from South Asia.”

    Pointing out quickly some of Wells’ errors here: the nonspecialist reader should be aware of the fact that (1) Proto-Elamite is not from South Asia, but from SW Iran; (2) that both Proto-Sumerian and Proto-Cuneiform (which Wells mentions) were part of accounting systems, and were certainly not fully functional “scripts” nor (according to most recent research) closely aligned with oral language; the upshot is that in pointing to a parallel between these proto-scripts and the Indus system Wells is unwittingly undermining his own case; (3) that we discuss the issue of these proto-scripts and “singletons” explicitly in our paper, on the same pages where we criticize Wells’ work (see again page 37). And finally and most importantly (4) it should finally be noted that the inscriptions encoded in the proto-scripts Wells mentions here can be quite long, despite the fact that their links with oral language are widely being questioned. The fact that long texts of ANY sort are lacking in the Indus corpus is one of many pieces of evidence presented in detail in our paper that Indus symbols were NOT part of a language-encoding or “writing” system. (See further below.)

    1. Wells makes many bizarre claims about what we say in our paper. For example, he writes:

    “They Says (sic): “Inscriptions consist of high frequency signs that rarely repeat even in the longest inscriptions”. Then in their proof that the “duck in a pond” texts (sic) is not writing (his Case #1) they give…”

    Wells’ whole discussion here isn’t even from our paper — readers can doublecheck for themselves — but is grabbed from an informal lecture I gave long ago that did not involve Sproat or Witzel. Our paper does not anywhere discuss the so-called “duck in pond” inscription.

    Wells goes on, using our (non-discussion) of this inscription as “proof” of the worthlessness of our arguments:

    “Not that Farmer et al ever address the bulk of the corpus except in a gross statistical way. They focus instead on rare artifacts types and unusual texts.”

    Anyone who reads our paper will see for himself very quickly that this is false. There are so many odd comments like this in Wells’ paper that it is difficult to imagine that Wells even read the paper. Were our conclusions so distressing for him that he couldn’t read through it?

    Again, the original can be downloaded from:

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

    Compare carefully what Wells claims that the paper says with what it actually says: The two have little in common.

    1. In our paper, we point to extensive archaeological evidence that suggests that there were no “lost” manuscripts written on perishable from the Indus Valley, as has been claimed since the 1920s to explain the extreme brevity of Indus inscriptions. We prove that this thesis is untenable for many reasons; see our paper for details.

    Wells “disproves” this thesis by inventing a little evidence — and his “evidence” is bizarre indeed! He writes:

    “They say there are (sic) no evidence for perishable texts in the Indus Corpus. This is not true. We have the impression on the back of a clay sealing of a text that was carved on a wooden doweling (Mackay, Vol. II, Plate XC:17) and has 9+ signs. The text runs the full length of the sealing and seems to run off in both directions. It is in very rough shape and the sealing picks up only the bottom of the signs. Nevertheless., this is proof of two things. First, Farmer et al have no clue as to what is in the Corpus (or chooses to ignore data that are in opposition to his views) and second, that Indus people carved texts in wood.”

    Wells earlier made this whopper of a claim — it is quite absurd, as shown below — to a German reporter in late January. E.J.H. Mackay (Further Excavations of Mohenjo-daro 1938, Vol. 1, p. 349) correctly identifies the piece that Wells mentions as a tiny clay ‘sealing’ — that is, it is a small piece of clay (known to researchers as a ‘tag’) carrying a seal impression that once surrounded a wooden rod. It is certainly NOT a carving in wood, as Wells claims. Seal impressions like this were very common sealing types in the Near East, and Indus examples of this sealing type are illustrated in an important paper (now in press) written by the Italian researchers Maurizio Tosi and Dennys Frenez, who have studied such pieces in Lothal (an Indus urban site).

    Here is what Mackay wrote about this piece, which he had in hand 67 years ago (Mackay 1938, Vol. I, p. 349):

    “No. 17 in Pl. XC is certainly a true sealing [i.e., a clay seal impression] and it owes its preservation to having been slightly burnt; it was once fastened to some such object as a smooth wooden rod.”

    I’ve just put a scanned image of this piece up on the web, with some additional comments that shows how bizarre (coming from a graduate student) that Wells’ comments are:

    http://www.safarmer.com/indus/evidencevswells.html

    This is the “evidence” that Wells gives that (1) Sproat, Witzel, and I have “no clue what is in the Corpus” and (2) that “Indus scribes carved in wood”!

    Some long Indus “text”! For his own good, let’s hope that “evidence” like this isn’t found in Wells’ doctoral thesis.

    1. The rest of Wells’ comments are of the same order. He writes:

    “Farmer et al’s treatment of Indus Numbers would be comical if it were not such a serious topic. a) On the one hand they complain Indus numbers are mostly “2s and 3s in several morphological types”.”

    Again, this quotation is not even from the Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel paper: It comes from notes for a working lecture at Harvard that I gave several years ago.

    Again one asks: has Wells actually even read the paper he is supposedly criticizing?

    1. Other distortions show up throughout his comments — some quite disingenuous. For example, Wells writes:

    “As if to reinforce their complete lack of knowledge about the Indus Corpus, Farmer et al repeatedly refer to HR3005 (M-0314) as the longest indus text. It is really the forth (sic) longest text. It is the longest seal texts (sic), but there are several bas relief tablets with more signs.”

    Seal M-314 (this is the standard numbering system used in the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscription) is referred to in our paper quite precisely as the “longest Indus text on a single surface”. (Wells quietly drops the words “on a single surface” to make it sound as if we were wrong.) It contains 17 nonrepeating signs — which again is not much of a “text.” If you really want to fudge to get a “long” Indus text, you can add up all the symbols on three DIFFERENT sides of a famous multisided terracotta piece (found in the duplicate inscriptions M-494 and M495, which were made in a single mold) to get a grand total of 26 symbols. (Again, this isn’t much of a “text.”) To claim that we aren’t aware of such things is absurd, as anyone can see who reads our paper (or looks at the dozens of working papers that led into writing it).

    1. Wells goes on about the brevity of the text, and again distorts our position beyond recognition:

    “Farmer et al make much of the terseness of Indus Texts (now about 4.87 signs). Don’t they know the average length of a texts from Nissans Uruk data is 6.8 signs? Of course there are some really long ones, but the vast majority are about 3-5 signs long. They consist of noun+number constructions with occasional totals in the longer texts.”

    The problem in the Indus Corpus, as our paper makes very clear, isn’t the “average” shortness of the inscriptions, but the lack of long texts of ANY sort among the many thousands of known Indus inscriptions. This finding is unlike those we find in ANY known writing OR proto-writing system from any historical period, including the Uruk inscriptions that Wells mentions above. In fact, the extreme brevity of the inscriptions alone is enough to falsify the Indus-script thesis. For those who like quick proofs that can’t be easily distorted by critics with deep personal interests in the Indus-script thesis, see our accurate (if also a bit tongue-in-cheek) one-sentence refutation of the Indus-script thesis at:

    http://www.safarmer.com/indus/simpleproof.html

    1. I’ll add just one more remark, since it should be obvious by this point that not much that Wells says in his post is legitimate scholarly criticism. Wells writes:

    “It has also been said that inscribed Indus artifacts occur mostly in garbage heaps and in refuse….The simple fact is that Farmer et al have no clue about either the archaeology of the Indus Valley, where the seals come from in these deposits, or how inscribed artifacts were used.”

    This claim that “Indus artifacts occur mostly in garbage heaps and in refuse” is not a claim that Sproat, Witzel, or I make in this paper or anyplace else. Wells instead took that comment from the story on our work in Science, where the comment is attributed not to us but to Harvard University’s Richard Meadow, Co-Director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project. (We’ve subsequently found that the reporter twisted Richard’s remarks here, but that is besides the point.)

    The key thing here is that the claim that Wells condemns us for isn’t one we make anyplace, let alone in this paper: Lacking any arguments here, he is simply making things up.

    We understand quite well that our paper undercuts Wells’ work in his unfinished dissertation. But that does not justify the willful distortions in his online comments, which is not what is expected of serious researchers.

    Best, Steve Farmer http://www.safarmer.com/downloads

  8. Literacy is commonly uderstood to mean ‘reading, writing’. Based on this meaning, Sarasvati civilization was a literate society. About 4,000 inscriptions contain a writing system based on hieroglyphs, read and understood, rebus. It will be an error to ignore many repetitive glyphs which occur on epigraphs, on a variety of materials including inscriptions on copper tablets and metal tools. If these glyphs are wished away as magical power representations or divinities, the onus is on the reasearchers to prove what these magical powers or divinities were. It is not mere coincidence that many glyphs recur on rongorongo tablets. Based on statistical analyses, is rongorongo writing or not?

    See some samples at:

    http://hinducivilization.blogspot.com/

    Updates: Hieroglyphs showing kammat.a ‘gold furnace, mint’ (Te.)

    Archer, fig leaf (petioles), rimless pot: kama_t.hiyo ‘archer’ (G.); kammat.a ‘mint, gold furnace’ (Te.) kamad.ha ‘pot for curds’ (Pkt.) [Perhaps, a rimless pot, a U without handles, as distinct from a rim of a short-necked jar, the most freuently occurring glyph in the corpus of inscriptions.] U glyph, that is, pot is also a frequent glyph in Harappa inscriptions, on miniature tablets, in particular.

    Copper tablet inscriptions (pictures are appended). For a full review of the decipherment of the hieroglyphs see the 7 volume encyclopaedic set on Sarasvati.

    Get the set for your school or community library. http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/exchange-glance/Y01Y2082414Y0848505/002-5207429-3881666

    Dhanyavaadah.

    Dr. S. Kalyanaraman 20 March 2005

  9. Dear Sepia Mutiny

    Once again I find myself in the position of spending valuable time on the work of Farmer et al. I sincerely had hoped to avoid this at all costs as time is short and these discussions are mostly unproductive. I cannot let Farmer’s posting go unanswered. To Richard Sproat many thanks for your encouragement.

    I would like to begin by apologizing to Richard Sproat and Michael Witzel for associating them inadvertently with Steve Farmers’ earlier work on the Indus Script. In my previous e-mail I have given quotes from Farmer’s “Five Cases of Dubious Writing” as well as material from their joint paper. I assumed that this work represented one body of research. Here I will address only the most resent paper “The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis”.

    Second, I need to be clearer about what I mean when I say they do not control any ancient script. They do not control any Logo-syllabic writing systems such as Maya, Egyptian, Cuneiform, Linear-B, proto-Elamite, or Shang Chinese etc. That is the type of writing systems that may be comparable to the Indus Script. Their experience with alphabets does not necessarily qualify them to make informed statements with regard to the Indus script. I would agree that they are about as well qualified as Barry Fell who also held a PhD – in marine biology.

    Third, I would like to point out several errors relating to my work that typify the style of Farmer et al: 1) on page 30 they quote men a say that “sign repletion in single inscriptions may have been avoided for aesthetic reasons”. This was in reference to the well known practice in Egyptian Hieroglyphics of aesthetic spellings, and the equally well attested practice among Maya scribes of using many varieties of signs, often to construct more symmetrical glyph blocks. They go on to state “Some ancient scripts did contain many homophonous signs, but no evidence exists that they were used for such systematic purposes
”. This is evidence they do not understand the ways in which major ancient writing systems worked. 2) on page 37 in footnote 23 they tell the reader that I have abandoned my earlier sign list and have now gone to “to the opposite extreme, now claiming that nearly all ‘singletons’ are complex signs.” This information was received by through Andrew Lawler, the author of the Science article. This seems to be the quality of information that Farmer et al are most comfortable with. In fact, my earlier sign list was based entirely on the first two volumes of “The Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions”. In my Master of Arts Thesis I made it abundantly clear that my purpose was to create as detailed of a sign list as possible with the data at hand. Both the Thesis and the sign list can be downloaded at: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/MQ31309.pdf
    As to singletons: they are most commonly constructions of several sign components, or members of one of the allograph groups (low frequency signs with similar graphs that cannot be definitely identified as one grapheme with certainty). The most frequent signs (n>29) are most often single component (basic) signs. Of the signs that occur more than 100 times none consist of more than 3 components. I have presented in detail in my dissertation (forthcoming) my methodology for creating a sign list for the Indus script. This method begins with the grouping of signs on the basis of sign design. Allographs are identified through the analysis of their contexts, and the resulting graphemes are analyzed for their chronological and spatial distributions. Additional considerations included artifact type and pairings with other signs including numerals. This methodology led to the creation of a sign list with 677 signs, but as has been pointed out in my dissertation not all of these signs are certain to be separate graphemes. Instead, part of the sign list consists of sets of related signs that cannot be defined either as allographs or graphemes with certainty. Following a policy of maintaining detail, signs that fall into this category are maintained as separate signs awaiting further analysis. Note that the number of elements used to construct signs and the frequency of signs are inversely proportional. Complex signs with many components normally have low frequencies. This results in a high proportion of singletons in the sign list. This is also true for both the proto-Elamite and proto-Cuneiform scripts. In addition to having large proportions of singletons these three scripts (the Indus, proto-Elamite, and proto-Cuneiform scripts) share other features: a small number of very high frequency signs, many allographic variants, and logographic conflations including numbers. I would suggest to Farmer et al that they take a look at the signs, not just at the statistics derived from other sign lists. Further, if they are so dissatisfied with the Indus sign lists available, I suggest they make their own. As Farmer points out repeatedly in his most resent posting I will not have my PhD in hand for another year, so they should be able to do a sign list much quicker than the 15 years it has taken me. I would also like to point out that my sign list will change in the future as I continue to analyze the Indus script. That is the nature of this work (epigraphy).

    As can be seen from this discussion the Indus script is more complex than a cursory study of sign list statistics would lead us to believe. Sign construction can occur in a variety of ways. By my count there are at least 30 strategies used to create Indus signs. Add to this the demonstrable polyvalence of several number signs and the whole issue becomes exceedingly complex.

    In their paper “The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis” they present six basic arguments to support the claim that the Indus Script is not writing.

    Extreme brevity (p. 22): In a resent paper Robert Englund (2004:130-40) describes the set of inscriptions he uses to analyze sign M371 as: ranging for 1 – 14 signs with the mean length of 5 non-numerical signs. A brief examination of the Uruk IV texts will reveal they are like wise very terse. Note that there are no monumental inscriptions using the proto-Elamite script. Lost Manuscript Thesis (p. 24): Farmer et al point to the lack of archaeological evidence for the existence of manuscript production. They would like to find an inkpot and quill or other paraphernalia of writing. How about traces of ink on the wooden doweling? In Farmer posting he correctly points out that the text on the reverse of this tag was not carved in wood, he does however seen unaware of the text on the reverse of the tag. He writes:

    “Wells earlier made this whopper of a claim — it is quite absurd, as shown below — to a German reporter in late January. E.J.H. Mackay (Further Excavations of Mohenjo-daro 1938, Vol. 1, p. 349) correctly identifies the piece that Wells mentions as a tiny clay ‘sealing’ — that is, it is a small piece of clay (known to researchers as a ‘tag’) carrying a seal impression that once surrounded a wooden rod. It is certainly NOT a carving in wood, as Wells claims. Seal impressions like this were very common sealing types in the Near East, and Indus examples of this sealing type are illustrated in an important paper (now in press) written by the Italian researchers Maurizio Tosi and Dennys Frenez, who have studied such pieces in Lothal (an Indus urban site).”

    First the tag in question was found at Mohenjo-daro (what has Lothal got to do with it? Note Lothal is not an urban center). The picture is clear: see Mackay 1938:Plate XC 17 a-c. XC 17c is the photo of the text on the reverse of the tag. What Mackay (1938:353-4) actually says is: “On the inside of the sealing there are also some markings which look remarkably like pictographic signs (c), though, unfortunately but little remains of them owing to the breaking of the sealing
if, however, the inscription had been incised upon the wooden rod, the characters upon the sealing should have been in relief, whereas they are the opposite. There is, however, the possibility that the original writing, if writing it be, was in some thick ink which stood out enough to impress it self upon the reverse side of the sealing.” I must apologize for my mistake with regards to this point. A careful examination of the photo XC 17c seems to show a texts with 13+ signs, but only the bottoms of the signs remain.

    Paradoxical Sign Frequencies (p. 26): These are two striking features of frequency distribution of Indus signs—the high frequency of signs that occur only once (singletons) and the small number of signs that occur extremely frequently. This sort of distribution is not unusual in sign lists from other ancient scripts from South Asia [Steve if you look at a map Iran is in Asia and its really south]. The most obvious feature Proto-Elamite script is that it has many more singletons than either of the other two scripts (Indus and P-Cuneiform). It can also be shown that the Indus script is most similar to Proto-Sumerian. The reason for the large number of singletons and large numbers of allographic variants is that the scripts have not yet been standardized (Damerow 1999). This is exactly what happens with the Indus script. There are sets of signs that are graphically related but with minor variations in the design of their graphs (allographic sets). Signs have many allographs. Signs are constructed from conflations of several signs, or signs plus design elements. This distribution is not paradoxical, but rather very common.

    Sign Repetition Rate (p. 26): The repetition rates as discussed in Farmer et al are another example of their complete misunderstanding of the nature of the Indus inscriptions. Their repetition rates are very similar to Uruk IV and proto-Elamite texts of similar lengths. Why are these problematic? The most glaring error in this section of their paper is their reference on page 34 in Figure 5 to bar seals as being “Late-Mature Harappan”. They are not. Look at DKG at Mohenjo-daro (Mackay 1938) and the Mound F data from Harappa (Vats 1940) and you will quickly see that these artifacts occur in all levels of these sites. They are not even most common in the Late-Mature Harappan, but rather the Middle of the Mature Harappan period at Mohenjo-daro (Intermediate I and Late III).

    Unique signs (p. 36) have already been dealt with.

    Comparison With Other Ancient Symbol Systems (p. 39): The most obvious error in this section is in Figure 8 that gives line drawings of Vinca symbols. These artifacts date from 4500 to 6000 BC and their archaeological contexts are poorly understood. What is known is that they come from at least two locals that cannot be linked archaeologically, and that the ones most similar to Uruk IV tablets may be as much as 1000 years later than the decorative marks found on figurines and ceramics. These are not a single set of data as Farmer et al pretend.

    One comment: Look at the caption and graphic (K-59a) for Figure 11 (p.42) and think about what is being said and if it is reasonable. One hint: think positional notation.

    Finally, think about this: If you define writing as “
a graphic representation of language that, ultimately, can be used for any sort of linguistic expression” (Cooper 2004:93), then none of the early logographic writing systems of the old world would qualify.

    Sorry for the lengthy discussion.

    My best to all Bryan Wells Traveling Scholar Harvard University

  10. Not sure how to verify the details of this discussion, but one thing is for certain, and Farmer et al cannot disprove this:

    The civilization that existed in the Harrapa/Mohenjo Daro region was extremly sophisticated and advanced, at a level equal to or above any other at that time. At that time Europe and Central Asia were still in the hunter gatherer or nomadic invader phase of civilization. (I’m not trying to disparage different “phases” of civilization, as erstwhile American scholars and professors were wont to do, I’m just pointing out disparate levels of societal sophistication). Meanwhile, the Indus Valley/Sarasvati civilization had extremely efficient urban planning (featuring “Euclidean” orientations and proportions, WAY before Euclid), advanced sanitation practices, highly specialized societal roles and functions, advanced recreation (as evidenced by the 6 face dice and Chess pieces) and religion (relics that were precursors to Shiva)…in short, all the hallmarks of an advanced civilization. Given this degree of sophistication, its HIGHLY unlikely that the plethora of writings which did exist did not have formal rules, but were rather just a bunch of credit-card-junk-mail-like jibberish. Please.

    Such a contention is not surprising to me, however. It reflects an inherent disdain that I have noticed among some of my American professors of the “subjects” they study. This is at an ivy league university too. Just as decades ago these professors would insist that the putatively advanced Aryans necessarily invaded and civilized the docile and lowly Indus valley civilization, some of them now try to detract from the latter’s sophistication with the same vigilance.

    Farmer you were a kid from the street so I’ll put it in street terms. Stop hating. Give props where props is due. Thank you come again.

  11. The arguments of Farmer in this paper are easily falsified. He claims that the Harappans could not have had writing because the seal inscriptions are too short. This opinion is arrogant and Eurocentric. The size of the inscription does not define its existence as writing or non-writing. The research of Farmer et al lacks validity, fails to support their conclusions and is contradicted by their own statistics. For example, Farmer et al make it clear that the mean word length for comparable Egyptian text is 6.94 and Indus text 7.39, this shows no statistical difference and should have alerted the researchers’ to the fallacy of their arguments. In addition, Dr. Gunter Dryer, an Egyptologist, has found Egyptian text with as few as two (2) symbols that phonetically readable. This is evidence that the literature review of the authors does not reflect the actual knowledge base for ancient writing.

      For example, Egyptian writing discovered in 1998,

    by Dr. Gunter Dreyer, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Egypt, has one to four signs with each sign being a CV lexical item. This writing is recognized as “true writing”. Farmer maintains that no writing can have meaning with only a limited number of signs, yet these Egyptian clay tablets number in the hundreds.The presence of a large number of ancient inscriptions written with a limited number of symbols that have a phonemic identity falsifies the theory of Farmer, since the foundation of his theory rest on the brevity of the Indus seals and singletons. Finally, Farmer et al maintain that their work is falsified (p.48) when someone publishes a clear set of rules for Indus writing that can be used to interpret the writing. This was done and was published a decade ago, see:

    _________. (1994c). Ancient Dravidian: And introductory grammar of Harappan with Vocabularies, Journal Tamil Studies, No.41, 1-21.

    _________.(1995a). Ancient Dravidian: The Harappan signs, Journal Tamil Studies, No.42, 1-23.

    __________.(1995b). Ancient Dravidian: Harappan Grammar/Dictionary, Journal Tamil Studies, No.43-44,pp.59-130.

    You can find an electronic version of these papers at:

    http://us.share.geocities.com/olmec982000/HarWRITE.pdf or http://geocities.com/olmec982000/HarWRITE.pdf

    In Farmer et al’s paper they claim that the Dravidian theory for Harappan was rejected. You will notice that they discussed some of the Dravidian based attempts at decipherment, but they failed to discuss mine. Farmer can not claim he does not know about my decipherment because I referred him to my decipherment during our recent on-line debate on one of the Yahoo groups last Spring on his thesis that Indus writing can not be phonetically read. Due to our exchanges on this forum, I know he read what I wrote. This is confirmed by the fact that in his new paper he did not use the Zipf Law to support his theory, because I showed how it did not fit his theory, and supported the view that Indus writing is phonetically readable. In conclusion the theory of Farmer et al is without foundation. They do not prove that the Harappans were illiterate, because many short inscriptions from other ancient civilizations can be read phonetically.

  12. Dear List,

    This is a quick response (re the Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel paper) to the most recent posts by DesiOne and Bryan Wells on the Indus symbol system (the so-called ‘Indus script’). Starting on the week of April 4-11, a massive new Indology researchers’ List will be launched through The Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies (the name of the List and sign-up details will be announced next week on all major Lists), moderated by Michael Witzel, George Thompson, and myself, on which these topics can be more extensively discussed by interested researchers. Stay tuned for information on the List, which will be different from anything of its type that has existed since the original Indology List folded in 2000. (Planning for this List has been in the works with many prominent researchers for a number of months.)

    First to DesiOne:

    DesiOne suggests that it is unlikely that an “advanced civilization” like that of the Harappans lacked writing and only produced “just a bunch of credit-card-junk-mail jibberish.” We agree fully with DesiOne’s statement — the credit-card analogy was a reporter’s invention, put unwittingly into the mouth of the Indus archaeologist Richard Meadow. The three of us (Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel) do NOT think that Indus symbols were “jibberish” — the evidence is strong that they were central to the civilization — but argue only against the previously unexamined assumption that they systematically encoded oral language. The Harappans were NOT the only major urban society that had elaborate symbol systems but lacked full-blown speech-encoding systems. Other obvious examples (which we discuss near the end of our paper) include the civilizations of the Incas, Mixtecs, and Aztecs in the New World and, in Central Asia, the BMAC, who were the closest urban neighbors to the Indus Valley. (The so-called ‘picture writing’ systems of the Mixtecs and Aztecs were not scripts as linguists normally use that term; for discussion, see the articles in the volume edited by Boone and Mignolo, 1994, which is referenced in our paper).

    To claim that the Indus Valley lacked a full writing system, or even rejected its use, is certainly not to show “inherent disdain” for that civilization, as DesiOne complains, even more than it shows disdain for early Vedic civilization to point out that Vedic priests memorized their ‘texts’. We’d like to point out to DesiOne that in our paper we repeatedly point out why the demonstration that the Indus system was not linguistic increases, and does not decrease, the value of studies of Indus civilization. This argument will be significantly expanded at the upcoming Harvard Roundtable to be held in Kyoto, Japan, in early June, where I will discuss this point at length with new data developed in a collaborative study with the Indus archaeologist Steven Weber (and his students).

    See our preliminary arguments on p. 43 ff. of the original Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel paper (1.1 Meg pdf), downloadable from:

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

    That paper has been accessed tens of thousands of times since it was first published in December.

    A few points on Wells:

    1. Wells claimed in his original post, to which Richard Sproat and I both responded, that the three of us didn’t know anything about ancient scripts — which is an odd claim to make of a computational linguist who has published a standard study on scripts in general (Sproat, A Computational Theory of Writing Systems, Cambridge U. Press, 2000), an historical linguist who is one of the world’s best-known experts on Vedic cultures (Witzel), and a comparative historian who has spent his entire adult life studying premodern manuscript traditions. In his newest post Wells corrects himself, claiming now in rather odd language that he meant that the three of us “do not control (sic) any Logo-syllabic writing systems such as Maya, Egyptian, Cuneiform, Linear-B, or Shang Chinese etc. That is the type of writing systems that may be comparable to the Indus Script.” Whatever Wells means, we would like to point out that there is obviously an enormous difference between (say) Egyptian scripts (which contain no vowels and in a technical sense no syllable signs at all) and Shang Chinese, which is certainly not ‘logo-syllabic’ in the usual sense of that term. Which of these very different script types does the Indus system supposedly resemble? For Wells to claim that we haven’t paid attention over the years to the full spectrum of known ancient scripts is nonsense. As Richard Sproat suggested in his last post, if anyone has evidence that the Indus system encoded speech, why hasn’t it been forthcoming for the past 130 years?

    2. The three of us argue at length that the extreme brevity of all Indus inscriptions — and ALL here needs emphasis — is strong prima facie evidence that they did not encode speech. Wells responds to this by pointing out the obvious — that some true scripts (and proto-scripts) also left short texts behind. Thus he points to R. Englund’s studies of Uruk IV texts, some of which are “like wise very terse.” Sure, obvious, but this has nothing to do with the fact that not NOT SOME but ALL Indus inscriptions — without exception — are short, which is unlike anything found in any known full writing system or proto-writing system (e.g., proto-cuneiform, proto-Elamite) anywhere in the world. We’ve recently put forward, half-tongue in cheek, a “One-Sentence Refutation of the Indus-Script Thesis”, that reads:

    http://www.safarmer.com/indus/simpleproof.html

    “NO ANCIENT LITERATE CIVILIZATIONS ARE KNOWN — NOT EVEN THOSE THAT WROTE EXTENSIVELY ON PERISHABLE MATERIALS — THAT DID NOT ALSO LEAVE LONG TEXTS BEHIND ON DURABLE MATERIALS.”

    Take a look sometime at the full spectrum of world scripts, e.g., in standard reference works like Daniels & Bright, eds. (1996). Compare what we know of the texts left behind in ANY of these scripts and what is left behind of Indus symbols. You’ll quickly find that if the Indus civilization had been literate, it would have been the only literate civilization known — ancient or modern, Old World or New — which did not leave texts of significant length behind someplace on durable materials. This is true even of proto-scripts (like proto-Sumerian and proto-Elamite) whose links with oral language have been recently challenged (see next comment).

    Ancient India may have been unique in many ways, but if it was unique in this way, anyone who calls himself a scientific researcher better have an explanation for it. Wells doesn’t even mention the argument.

    1. Wells at several points argues that “It can also be shown that the Indus script is most similar to Proto-Sumerian” — an admission that by itself undermines the old Indus-script myth. He cites as his authority on Proto-Sumerian (also known as proto-cuneiform) an important paper by Damerow 1999, which we earlier discussed in our paper. Damerow’s paper can be downloaded (as a 1.1 Meg PDF) from:

    http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P114.PDF

    It is ironic that Wells points to this paper, since two of Damerow’s main conclusions are that (1) proto-cuneiform [or ‘proto-Sumerian’] is NOT tied closely to oral language (see p. 7 ff.) and (2) that proto-cuneiform LACKED phonetic coding (p. 9 ff.). This is of course exactly what we argue is true of the Indus system in our paper. Wells’ newest claims takes him light-years away from what he says in his only extended study so far of Indus symbols (his 1998 Master’s thesis — which with minor changes he then had privately printed as a book, in which he supports the old view (going back to the 1920s), favored by Parpola, Tamil nationalists, etc., that the Indus system encoded an early form of Dravidian, that the system contained high levels of phonetic coding, etc. In other words, if Wells wants to compare the Indus system to proto-cuneiform, and wants to cite Damerow as evidence of how proto-cuneiform worked, he has already unwittingly broken away both from his own earlier work and from the traditional Indus-script thesis. Further on this claim, see our paper, pp. 37-8.

    1. One important technical point that Wells brings up requires correction, although the reason for the correction might seem obscure to non-specialists. Wells claims based on very old studies (Mackay 1938 and Vats 1940) that we have misdated so-called bar seals without iconography, which we identify as coming from the “late mature Harappan period” (Harappa 3C). Our sources for this dating, which Wells doesn’t mention, are clearly identified on page 33 of our paper: they are based on “recent stratigraphical work from the Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP) (Kenoyer and Meadow 1997) and Dholavira (Bisht 1998-99: 23).” Back at the Harvard Roundtable in 2003 — the last Roundtable that Wells attended — he also objected to this dating, and he was corrected immediately by Richard Meadow (Co-Director of the Harappa excavations), who confirmed it. The fact is that the old stratigraphical data in Mackay and Vats that Wells relies on have been corrected many times in recent years, with new data changing in a deep way our dating of the inscriptions. A good instance is Vats’ old claim (1940; the same book Wells cites as a source) that the miniature steatite tablets are the “oldest” inscriptions — a view still upheld in Parpola 1994 and Possehl 1996 — whereas new data from the much more careful excavations of the last decade (e.g., reported in Kenoyer and Meadow 1997 and Meadow and Kenoyer 2000) show that this class of inscriptions came from a much later period. (The new datings in general will also be covered in the Japanese conference in early June.)

    2. Finally, in his last post before this one Wells claimed that a tiny clay ‘tag’ apparently wrapped around a smooth wooden rod was an example of Indus carving on wood. I corrected his claim in my last post, and put up a web page to demonstrate using his own sources that the evidence was spurious:

    http://www.safarmer.com/indus/evidencevswells.html

    Wells now admits that he was wrong about this piece but cites a very speculative conclusion from Mackay 1938 that the inside of the sealing had some markings that look “remarkable like pictographic signs (c), though, unfortunately little remains of them owing to the breaking of the sealing….” When you actually examine the photo in Mackay’s old work, you’ll see how tentative this conclusion is, which Mackay himself qualifies with the phrase “the original writing, if writing it be”….

    Whatever the nature of the scratches shown in the faded photo of the inside of this sealing, no serious Indus researcher has ever made anything of Mackay’s claims, which are impossible to check so many decades later. (Even in the unlikely event that this artifact survived, the awful state of preservation of most Indus artifacts collected in the 20s-30s would make these scratches even less readable today than they were in Mackay’s day.)

    In any event, none of this odd speculation about this TINY piece of stamped clay (1.34 x .96 inches in size) has anything to do with the extensive evidence we give in our paper against the “lost manuscript” thesis, which has been the main support for the old Indus-script myth since 1929. It is reasonable to assume that the Harappans put their symbols on many types of objects, maybe even painted them on their skin, for all we know, as was true of many other premodern peoples. But that doesn’t make the objects on which they placed these uniformly short groups of symbols “manuscripts” or the symbols part of a linguistic “script.”

    On the “lost manuscript” thesis, see again our detailed discussion in:

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

    and the half-in-fun (but also serious) “One-Sentence” refutation at:

    http://www.safarmer.com/indus/simpleproof.html

    Does anyone claim to have a counterexample that we may have overlooked? If so, feel free to bring it up on the new List when it opens for business next week…

    Best, Steve Farmer

  13. I’m not sure why Wells seems so confident that we don’t “control” ancient logosyllabic systems such as Egyptian, Cuneiform.

    I assume my colleagues, even if they don’t “control” them, know a lot about how they work.

    And as for me, I have certainly studied Egyptian, and I have also studied some Sumerian, and in any case I know how these scripts work.

    It’s probably dangerous to make assumptions about what others know.

  14. Steve and Richard have said the necessary.

    To echo Richard’s words about making assumptions of what others know:

    all the three of us have dealt with a variety of non-alphabetic scripts. As for me: from cuneiform Persian, and ancient Hittite to modern Japanese (which I use daily).

    The latter two happen to have a typical logographic-syllabic script if there is one (Hittite with its Sumerograms etc.; Pahlavi uses a similarly complex, though alphabet-based system involving Aramaic ‘kanji’ type sign combinations). In Jpn. the standard set of characters is nearly 2000 (Chinese = Kanji) characters plus two identical (in sound) Kana syllabaries of 50 signs each.

    But as has already been pointed out, differently from what B. Wells said, the [ancientmost and modern] Chinese script is NOT logo-syllabic, just logographic. However, most of the characters contain (1) a quasi-phonetic element that indicates the (very rough) pronunciation of the word in question (based on similar sounding words), –which seems to have been the reason for Well’s erroneously declaring Chinese a logo-syllabic script, — while (2) the rough ‘area’ of meaning is supplied by one of 214 ‘radicals’. Such a SYSTEM is not seen in the Indus signs.

    All in all, even with the modern, much reduced standard set of 2000 Jpn signs, (down from 40,000!), Jpn. has a system (not mentioned by Wells) that is much more complicated and has many more combinations forming one joint character than the 400-600 Indus signs which maximally (and rarely) join just 3 elements into a new one.

    And, of course, a system used to encode a spoken language, which has NOT yet been proven for the Indus signs.

    Once you know a system such as the ancient Hittite or Japanese one, you can indeed make interesting comparisons (I have tried out all of that years ago, involving various languages, especially pre- and infixing ones, with no pertinent results for the Indus signs.)

    We can see how (Chin.) signs are combined to convey new meanings, or how one can play with existing signs, to make a pun. For example, one of my colleagues writes ‘Munda’ as:

    (Chin. char.) MU – (Jpn. syllab.) – n- (Chin.) -DA. Figure it out… The joke lies in the meaning of ‘muda’.

    (These days, people even make written jokes involving Latin characters or English words).

    All of which presupposes a functioning script encoding spoken language…

    Cheers, M, Witzel

  15. Dear All

    Just a few brief comments: Published “recent stratigraphical work from the Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP) (Kenoyer and Meadow 1997)” refer to by Farmer consists of 308 artifacts (mostly pot sherds). There are only 6 published Rectangular Bar Seals for which provenience is given by HARP. So, unless Framer has data I do not (unlikely as Richard Meadow is on my dissertation committee) this entire line of argument is based on 6 artifacts. As for the data from Mackay you be the judge: Early I M-369, -23.6 ft Bd, Early I, @DK.G Long Lane, Silver, 11 signs M-355, -20.7 ft Bd, Early I, @DK.G(s) B1/HIV/R61, Steatite, 14 signs M-1365, -21.0 ft Bd, Early I, @DK.G(s) B1/HIII/R4, Limestone, 2 signs (questionable example) M-1367, -21.2 ft Bd, Early I, @DK.G First Street 22, Steatite, 2 signs (unusual example) DK8478 (not in CISI), -21.3 ft Bd, Early I, @DK.G First Street 22, Steatite, 2 signs M-1273, -23.7 ft Bd, Early I, @DK.G Long Lane, Steatite, 5 signs M-1324, -24.4 ft Bd, Early I, @DK.G(s) B1A/R89, Steatite, 4 signs Intermediate III M-407, -20.0 ft Bd, Inter III, @DK.G Crooked Lane, Steatite, 5 signs M-1355, -16.9 ft Bd, Inter III, @DK.G. Long Lane, Faience, 5+ signs DK H.7 (not in CISI), -17.8 ft Bd, Inter III, @DK. North of G/164, Steatite, 2+ signs M-1271, -18.1 ft Bd, Inter III, @DK.G B2/HIV/R15, Steatite, 7 signs M-1350, -18.0 ft Bd, Inter III, @DK.G(s) B1/HI/R17, Steatite, 8 signs M-1309, -17.4 ft Bd, Inter III, @DK.G Crooked Lane, Steatite, 3 signs M-1364, -16.2 ft Bd, Inter III, @DK.G(s) B12A/HII/R18, 5/4 = 9 signs total DK7406 (not in CISI), -16.1 ft Bd, Inter III, @DK.G Crooked Lane, Steatite, 7 signs Intermediate II DK6698 (not in CISI), -15.7 ft Bd, Inter II, @DK.G(s) B9A/HV/R75, Silver, 6 signs DK7694 (not in CISI), -15.7 ft Bd, Inter II, @DK.G(s) B5/HIII/R/8, Silver, 4 signs M-1336, -15.3 ft Bd, Inter II, @DK.G(s) B1/HIV/R30, Steatite, 4 signs DK9187 (not in CISI), – 14.8, Inter II, @DK.G(s) B2/HI/R7, Steatite, 3 signs M1311, -14.5 ft Bd, Inter II, @DK.G(s) B1/HIII/17, Steatite, 5 signs M-1284, -14.1 ft Bd, Inter II, @DK.G(s) B3/HIV/R45, Steatite, 8 signs M-380, -13.9 ft Bd, Inter II, @DK.G(s) B1/HI/R15, Steatite, 6 signs M-371, -13.6 ft Bd, Inter II, @DK.G Crooked Lane, Steatite, 7 signs M-1329, -13.2 ft Bd, Inter II, @DK.G(s) B7/HIX/R32, Steatite, 6 signs 2) As to Micheal Witzel’s comment on Chinese I refer him to Bottero (2004:254-256, In First Writing, Stephen Houston ed.) where he describes how Shang sings are create: Semantic+phonophoric ie. ‘river’ he is created using the logogram for ‘water’+ the phonetic sign ke etc. 3)Farmer’s comment “NO ANCIENT LITERATE CIVILIZATIONS ARE KNOWN — NOT EVEN THOSE THAT WROTE EXTENSIVELY ON PERISHABLE MATERIALS — THAT DID NOT ALSO LEAVE LONG TEXTS BEHIND ON DURABLE MATERIALS.” Is typical of the nonsensical approach he has to this whole issue. If a civilization had written on perishable material but not on durable material how would we know? The only example in contradiction to this is Rongorongo writing. But I certain that the Rapanui would not be considered a civilization. By the way does anyone have a good definition of civilization? One further question on the Indus corpus: “Isn’t steatite a durable material?” 4) Terms such as Utilitarian Communication (Baines 2004:151), and Proto-Writing (Damerow 1999) are often used to describe early scripts of every type. This need for a separate term describing writing that does not (or at least cannot be demonstrated to) express language stems from the linguistocentric definition of writing given in my earlier posting. Maybe the problem is with the definition? I propose we redefine writing as: “a system for the transmission, or storage and retrieval of information using a system of character that have a uniform meaning”. At some level all for these scripts are linked to language in the sense that that is how we structure our reality. In any case my research has lead me to believe that the Indus script is expressing a specific language. You will just have to wait a year or so until my dissertation is finished to see why. 5) Farmer mistakenly says that I cite : “as his authority on Proto-Sumerian (also known as proto-cuneiform) an important paper by Damerow 1999” Those that read my posting probably already realize that what I actually did was download the proto-Cuneiform sign list for the CDLI homepage, and counted the frequency of signs for my self. The resulting correlation of r squared = 0.982 reflect the degree of similarity of the two scripts in terms of the proportion of signs that occur 1, 2, 3
n times. For the proto-Elamite sign frequencies see Dahl (2002) also available on the CDLI homepage. Dahl’s (2005) latest article is a must for those following this discussion: Complex Graphemes in Proto-Elamite. If you are familiar with the Indus script you will immediately see the implication of this work for “The Indus is not writing” myth. 6) On a personal note Farmer is repeatedly (both in his paper and in this forum) less than complimentary to my MA thesis. Saying for example that it was widely criticized, but without actually saying who did the criticizing. The work was limited in scope (ie it was a MA thesis) and I tried to explore several avenues of research I thought interesting. If Farmer had read the section on the Indus language he would have noted that I did not support the Dravidian solution, but rather suggest that the issue is not decided. Further, this “widely criticized” work was the reason Michael Witzel invited me to the First South Asian Ethnogenisis Roundtable. It was also the main reason that I was awarded a full scholarship to Harvard the next year (just before my 50th birthday). It is a work that I am proud of, but like all academic works it represent my thinking at that moment and I reserve the right to expand, modify, amend my ideas as time passes.

    I would like to leave you with an old Plat- Deutch saying: Man word jummer to froo olt un to loot klook (roughly: One always becomes old too quickly and smart too slowly).

    My best to all Bryan Wells

  16. It is good to see Dahl citing Gelb’s reference to indus writing as proto-indic.

    The lecture by Damerow on The origins of writing as a problem of historical epistemology – Invited lecture at the symposium on the multiple origins of writing: image, symbol and script in March 1999 should be an eye-opener to those claiming to have discovered the illiteracy of Harappans.

    Illiteracy is in the eyes of the beholder. When writing is viewed as a knowledge representation system, there is hope to understand the messages sought to be conveyed in proto-indic on over 4,000 inscribed objects with inscriptions. It is a cop-out to claim that all glyphs are representations of magical powers or divinities. To say that the glyphs are not a writing system because the glyphs cannot be seen as concordant with alphabetic writing systems is begging the question of early efforts at ‘written’ knowledge representation.

    No answer is forthcoming so far from FSW as to why the sign graphs and pictorial motifs of Sarasvati epigraphs are NOT hieroglyphs with underlying rebus sounds of proto-indic (as Gelb surmises) or mleccha (as Kalyanaraman says). Examples of evidence for Kalyanaraman’s claim (apart of the 7 volumes on Sarasvati which should be read by serious scholars interested in the script problem): Vatsyayana’s use of mlecchita vikalpa as one of the 64 arts — a cipher-writing system; and use of mleccha for conversation between Yudhishthira and Vidura in the Mahabharata.

    Well, anything goes for the likes of FSW who may think they have created a sensation by a novel discovery, without the hard work needed to understand cross-civilizational impulses to convey messages. A civilizational study which ignores the works of Damerow or Dahl or Bryan Wells and earlier savants, starting with Vats, Cunningham, Alan Ross, et al, will get thrown out as a study without adequate review/evaluation of evidence.

    Dahl’s piece has been already referred to by Bryan Wells in his comments on FSW civilizational illiteracy article.

    Kalyanaraman

    See: THE ORIGINS OF WRITING AS A PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL EPISTEMOLOGY INVITED LECTURE AT THE SYMPOSIUM THE MULTIPLE ORIGINS OF WRITING : IMAGE, SYMBOL,AND SCRIPT UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA , CENTER FOR ANCIENT STUDIES MARCH 26-27, 1999 by Peter Damerow

    See:

    Gelb has hypothesized that proto-Elamite, like proto-Indic (his name for the Indus writing from Harappa and Mohenjo Daro), represented a “fully developed system” with regard to phonetization (Gelb 1952: 218). Unfortunately, as Gelb himself stated, his assertion was based on a very brief look at the material (Gelb mixed both proto-Elamite and linear-Elamite texts in his analysis, as had been done, to some extent, by the publishers of the proto-Elamite material Scheil and de Mecquenem). However, it is worthwhile noting that since its discovery, proto-Elamite has often been viewed as an optimal candidate for decipherment.

    It is my working-hypothesis, in agreement with the suggestions of Meriggi and others (see for example Meriggi 1969, 157, and 1975, 105; see also Vallat 1986, 338-339), that hidden in the extensive proto-Elamite repertoire of signs, mainly consisting of pictograms, was a small group of signs used only to write proper nouns–personal and professional designations, toponyms and so on. That list represented a true syllabar.

    Complex Graphemes in Proto-Elamite Jacob L. Dahl < jacob.dahl@wanadoo.fr > Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris

    http://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/cdlj/2005/cdlj2005_003.html

  17. FSW make a big deal about the absence of ‘long’ texts. Why should there be ‘long’ texts? Can’t texts be ‘short’ and still constitute a knowledge representation by writing?

    Why should a civilization leave behind long texts? It depends on the purpose served by a text.

    I would cite punch-marked coins as a unique feature of hindu civilization.

    If an average of 5 devices are adequate to represent a text on punch-marked coin of s’ren.i metal guilds and mints of the historical periods, surely 5 sign graphs (+ pictorial motifs such as lizard, alligator, vagina, three types of bulls, types of antelopes, rhino, elephant, tiger, dotted circle, portable furnace), linear strokes as numeral counts should have been adequate to represent a text on a seal, a bangle, a potsherd, a tag, a tablet, or even a copper tablet or a weapon.

    If they are texts, what is the big deal that they are not ‘long’? Can’t short texts convey short lists of property items owned, for example, by a lapidary of a smith — technology stuff related to a metals age: like furnaces, minerals, metals, alloys, molten casts?

    There is a saying: brevity is the soul of wit, right? Intelligent speech and writing should aim at using few words. This proverb comes from the play Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. See the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. http://www.bartleby.com/59/3/brevityisthe.html

    Why should a civilization be expected to leave behind long texts? It depends on the purpose served by a ‘written’, that is, literate text. If a researcher can’t figure out the cultural literacy involved, that is the researcher’s problem to introspect further and gather more evidence before making pontificating statements about illiteracy.

    Dhanyavaadah.

    Kalyanaraman

  19. Hi This discussion of Farmer et al, is a waste of time. The discussants in this debate are giving Farmer too much authority. Any theory must have internal and external validity. The question we must ask is “Does the theorems in the Farmer et al article measure the content they were intended to measure?” The answer to this question is a simple “No”. Farmer et al make several theorems ,generally they claim that the Indus Valley symbols must be heraldry or a bevy of magical symbols because the inscriptions are: 1) low sign frequency on the Indus seals (p.36) ; 2) signs to brief to reflect phonetic encoding (pp.31-33); 3) absence of manuscript tradition; and 4) the inability of the Dravidian theory to lead to the decipherment of the Indus Valley writing (p.20). All of these theorems are easily falsified. First of all there is a manuscript tradition for Indus valley writing. This is supported by the appearance of Harappan signs on India pottery . B.B. Lal found that 89% of the graffiti marks on the megalithic red-and-black ware had affinity to Indus Valley signs. This research indicated that the Indus Valley writing should be read from right to left. This view was later confirmed by I Mahadevan in 1986 Secondly, I have pointed out elsewhere, that the Harappan seals record “wish statements” and can be deciphered using the Tamil/Dravidian language (see):http://geocities.com/olmec982000/IndusInspiration.pdf . The ability to read Indus seals using Dravidian languages, and presentation of the grammar and morphology of the Indus Valley writing falsifies the variable of Farmer et al that we are unable to decipher the Indus Valley writing using the Dravidian hypothesis (see: http://us.share.geocities.com/olmec982000/HarWRITE.pdf ). Until, Farmer et al, can present linguistic evidence to falsify my decipherment we must reject researchers contention that Dravidian languages can not be used to read Indus inscriptions. I point out in the above article that the sayings on the seals, are similar to the messages recorded in the TiruKurral. The Holy Kural contains statements that the Dravidians used to help them attain aram, and the good life through doing Good. The Indus valley seals were probably worn by the Harappans given the presence of a hole on the back of the seals where a string could be placed to tie the seal around an ankle or neck. If Farmer knew anything about Dravidian culture and history he would have known that the Dravidians have a long tradition of wearing totems containing short messages with great import or meanings. For example, the “thaalikkodi”, talisman on a turmeric-dyed string or gold, worn around the neck, is the Tamil counterpart to the Western wedding ring now.In addition,Indians continued the practice of using a few letters to write literate text , as indicated by the punch marked coins that average 5 symbols In conclusion, the research of Farmer et al lacks validity, fails to support their conclusions and is contradicted by their own statistics. For example, Farmer et al make it clear that the mean word length for comparable Egyptian text is 6.94 and Indus text 7.39, this shows no statistical difference and should have alerted the researchers’ to the fallacy of their arguments. Farmer et al’s, contention that there is no evidence of short text in the history of writing representing literate text is contradicted by the history of writing in ancient Egypt. Dr. Gunter Dryer, an Egyptologist, has found Egyptian text with as few as two (2) symbols that phonetically readable. This is evidence that the literature review of the authors does not reflect the actual knowledge base for ancient writing. The absence of support for any of the theorems made by Farmer et al, mean that we must reject their hypothesis based on a content analysis of their work and evidence and lack of validity. Internal validity relates to the ability of the content of a research proposal to draw correct inferences from the data. In Farmer et al the researchers state that the mean word length for comparable Egyptian text is 6.94 and Indus text 7.39, this shows no statistical difference, and thus fails to support Farmer’s inference that the short length of Indus text indicate illiteracy. External validity arises in research when the experimenters draw inaccurate inferences from the sample data and apply them to external phenomena . Farmer et al maintain that no ancient writing system can produce literate text with just a few signs. This theorem is falsified by the discovery of Dr. Dreyer of readable Egyptian text with as few as 2 symbols. Continued debate of Farmer et al is giving the work of these authors more weigh than it deserves. An examination of the content of Farmer et al make it clear that the review of the literature indicate that they did not read all of the previous research in this area, it they had they would have found the work of Dr. Dreyer that contradict their proposal that short inscriptions indicate illiteracy. A cursory examination of the content of the work proves that it lacks content validity , and does not support the claims made by the authors regarding the literacy of the Harappans. It makes it clear that the data presented by Farmer et al did not accomplish the stated purpose of their article. We have only one recourse, rejection of the theories made by Farmer et al.

  20. The main debate apart, what struck me – was the fact that the Indus script containing tablets were “mostly” found not in living places or other appropriate places, if the Indus people/civilisation had ended due to “natural causes”

    It is as if – some invading barbaric nomadic brutes threw away these “knowledge tablets” of the indus script, into some kind of trash place, after looting all the wealth, and killing the residents, and setting the towns on fire!

    Now i see the “vaidhya sigaamani” kalayanaram (why the “an” vikuthi needed Mr. K. Ram?!!) – performing a butterfly stroke in his mythical saraswati river before rushing back to “decipher” vedic “sanskrit” in the tablets that his ancestors threw into trashbin all those eons ago! 🙂

  21. Dear Adicha.Nalloor,

    My name is what my parents gave me. I don’t know why a vikuthi was needed.

    Please read the Sarasvati 7 volumes. What is deciphered is NOT vedic sanskrit. But, Tamil!

    kol is a Tamil word meaning an alloy of 5 metals, pancalogam. Cognate: kollan ‘smith’. Another Tamil word, very ancient.

    Namaskaram.

    Kalyanaraman

  22. Adicha.nalloor asks: kalayanaram (why the “an” vikuthi needed Mr. K. Ram?!!)

    Dear Adicha.nalloor,

    I forgot to add a response.

    I suppose it is for the same reason that Bharati Dasan or Anbazhagan or Mathivanan has his ‘an’ vikuthi.

    Namaskaram.

    Kalyanaraman

  23. The recent ‘discussion’ on this list has been misleading (and often offensive).

    We will now shift serious discussion of this and other important topics dealing with early/medieval India and Eurasia to a new research-oriented list that will open for business tomorrow:

    Indo-Eurasian research (IEAR) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research

    See the detailed description at: http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian.html

    The new list is open both to bona fide scholars and to the general public; however: abuse, off-tangent (as well as endless, spam-like) effusions and regurgitating of easily available information will not be tolerated.

    See you back at Indo-Eurasia.

    Cheers, M. Witzel

  24. There are eleven occurrences of the term: meluhha in Sumerian texts. Some samples:

    “May the land of Tukric hand over to you gold from Harali, lapis lazuli and ……. May the land of Meluha load precious desirable cornelian, mec wood of Magan and the best abba wood into large ships for you. May the land of Marhaci yield you precious stones, topazes. May the land of Magan offer you strong, powerful copper, dolerite, u stone and cumin stone. May the Sea-land offer you its own ebony wood, …… of a king…” Enki and Ninhursaja http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.1.1&display=Crit&charenc=j&lineid=t111.p11#t111.p11

    gul-lum me-luh-haki: The donkey of Ancan, the bear (?) of Marhaci, the cat of Meluha, the elephant of the eastern mountains, bite off Euphrates poplars as if they were leeks. Proverbs: from Nibru http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.6.2.1&display=Crit&charenc=j&lineid=t621.p20

    gul-lum ‘cat’ is not unlike kol ‘tiger’ (Santali).

    jicma2-gi4-lum me-luh-haki-a-ke4: “I will admire its green cedars. Let the lands of Meluha, Magan and Dilmun look upon me, upon Enki. Let the Dilmun boats be loaded (?) with timber. Let the Magan boats be loaded sky-high. Let the magilum boats of Meluha transport gold and silver and bring them to Nibru for Enlil, king of all the lands.” Enki and the world order http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.1.3&display=Crit&charenc=j&lineid=t113.p13#t113.p13

    Source: The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/

    The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) is based at the University of Oxford. So far it has made accessible, via the World Wide Web, more than 350 literary works composed in the Sumerian language in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) during the late third and early second millennia BCE.

    The corpus comprises Sumerian texts in transliteration, English prose translations and bibliographical information for each composition. The transliterations and the translations can be searched, browsed and read online using the tools of the website.