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.
