The Myth of Indus Valley Script

Title: The Myth of Indus Valley Script

Authors: Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, John B Henderson, Michael Witzel

Publisher: Academic Excellence 2008 (First)

ISBN: 978-81-89901-80-6

Pages: 161

This book is really a cheat. Nothing is there, save a research paper running through 52 most boring pages from which the title of the book is borrowed. The paper is written by three above mentioned authors, except Henderson. The book is presented by Sunil Roy who happily takes the precaution to explain the subject matter a bit, thus excusing himself from any consumer protection litigation from readers who have purchased this book. Though the theme of the book is historical, its price is astronomical! Paying Rs. 650 for a research paper which you can easily download from the internet for free (legally, I am not alluding piracy sites) is not what any sane person would do. Outside India, the rate is US$ 40! In addition to the paper mentioned above, 48 pages of a Powerpoint presentation (probably the one used by the authors in one of their mock assemblies!) is given. The third part is another paper, titled “Neurobiology, Layered Texts and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History”, of another 52 pages which doesn’t have any relevance at all, to the subject matter of our concern. So, take this book only if you pick it up from a library and you are willing to waddle through historical muck and conjuration.

The Indus Valley Civilization is considered to be one of the four literate centres of early ancient world. The Indian nation owes its existence in its present form to the practises and mode of life originated on the vast region covered under this great ancient culture. The archeological findings of the civilization was made in 1921-22 by Sir John Marshall, the Director General of Archeological Survey of India, mainly at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, which are now in Pakistan. The excavations covering areas of tens of thousands of square kilometres reaped huge benefits as about 4000 seals carrying inscriptions were recovered from many places. The intentions of the British in actively digging out the remains were not entirely benevolent as evidenced by the comment by Alexander Cunningham, the first director of the Survey. He said, “an undertaking of vast importance to the Indian Government politically, and to British public religiously. To the first body, it would show that India had generally been divided into numerous petty chiefdoms, which had invariably been the case upon every successful invasion, while whenever she had been under one ruler, she had always repelled foreign conquest with determined resolution. To other body, it would show that Brahminism, instead of being unchanged and unchangeable religion which has subsisted for ages, was comparatively modern origin and had been constantly receiving additions and alterations; facts which proved that the establishment of the Christian religion in India must ultimately succeed” (p.2, from Cunningham’s record in 1843).

The authors’ assertion is that the Indus civilization was not literate and they argue that the ‘writing’ which was in vogue for about 600 years was not even evolving towards linguistical ideas. The brevity of inscriptions, (average signs per inscription is 4.6, the longest being 17 symbols long) indicate that the signs are symbolic and mythological in character and do not convey any language at all. In fact, they compare it to the airport and highway signs of present-day world! Efforts to link these signs to the linguistic origins of Dravidian, and Vedic dialects are manifestations of the political pressures of the people conducting those studies. Such outright affront on the socio-political conditions in India does not take into serious account the researches by Parpola, the noted Finnish historian who had carried out extensive studies on the topic. Another scholar, Iravatham Mahadevan’s contributions are not even given the decent mention it deserves. The authors blame all scholars, right from Marshall himself, for assuming that the ancient people were literate and attempting to decrypt the symbols. When all the cobwebs of rhetoric and pedantic references are filtered out, the skeleton of the argument is concise, “since you have not been able to decrypt the script, it doesn’t have a solution!”. Any literate civilization which wrote on perishable materials like the Indus people have also left behind longer texts on more durable materials.

Another argument is that about 400-600 different symbols were used in all the inscriptions and this huge number indicates that such a complex system cannot be used to encode speech. The authors’ selective myopia is self-evident if we remember that the Chinese syllabary contains about 2000 different characters, but still records speech? The high frequency signs compiled by Mahadevan are not repeated in a single inscription. Also, ‘singletons’ (the symbols which appear only once or very few times) constitute about 79% of the total. The authors give two probable reasons for the culture not going literate.

1) The ruling elite didn’t want to spread information among the lay people, which is substantiated by the attitudes of Brahmins who followed the Indus people in their footsteps as their Vedas are recited, remembered and taught to disciples, without resorting to any written format. The Indus society were insulated from outside linguistic pressures, as many Indus seals were recovered from Mesopotamian sites, but not vice versa.

2) The Indus culture extended over a far wider geographic area than any of the early ancient civilization. Such a large conglomeration of societies meant that they were multi-linguistic and a common language could not form. In the absence of it, they resorted to non-verbal signs and symbols which can be understood by all.

To summarize, the seven conclusions drawn by the authors are listed below.

1) Indus signs were symbolic and mythological in character – not linguistic.

2) Like other nonlinguistic sign systems, Indus symbols have multiple and not single referents (‘multivocality’)

3) The oldest and most persistent use of Indus signs shows up in agricultural magic and rituals – not in accounting contexts, as in Mesopotamia or Persia.

4) We find both male and female imagery in Indus agricultural mythology, but in the inscriptional evidence (as opposed to other sources), male imagery prevails.

5) Much of Indus mythology was apparently reenacted in outdoor rituals involving mass-produced inscriptions and sacrifice in front of Holy Trees – implying the use of Indus inscriptions in some type of communal indoctrination.

6) Sacrificial tithe system? – Possible functions of mass-produced miniature steatite tablets and one class of molded terra-cotta and faience inscriptions.

7) High levels of standardization – in both inscription types and myths – imply significant political integration, at least in the mature Indus period (ca. 2200-1900 BCE).

8) We find surprisingly few intrusive myths or iconography in most periods, and then many (reflecting Central Asian/BMAC influences) just before the Indus symbol system disappeared.

The authors have managed to acquire a semblance of scientific enquiry and some grace, by claiming that their assertions are falsifiable under the five scenarios listed below, though they believe that the chances of such things happening is exceedingly rare.

1) If remnants were discovered of an Indus inscription on any medium, even if imperfectly preserved, that contained clear evidence that the original contained several hundred signs.

2) If any Indus inscription carrying at least 50 symbols were found that contained unambiguous evidence of the random-looking types of sign duplications typical of ancient scripts.

3) If any bilingual inscription were discovered that carried a minimum of 30 or so Indus symbols juxtaposed with a comparable number of signs in a previously deciphered script.

4) If a clear set of rules were published that allowed any researcher, besides the original proposer of those rules, to decipher a significantly large body of Indus inscriptions using phonetic, syntactic, and semantic principles of no greater number or complexity than those needed to interpret already deciphered scripts.

5) If a ‘lexical list’ were discovered that arranged a significantly large number of Indus signs in ways similar to those found in Near Eastern school texts.

The only advantage that can be pointed out is the very good introduction given by Sunil Roy and the impressively huge list of references at the end of each paper. The good number of images of Indus seals and signs are also to be mentioned to do justice to the authors.

On the other hand, there are far too many problems to be noticed. The book is full of spelling and syntactical errors, giving us the suspicion that it is not proof-read at any stage of the publication. The book resembles a research paper more than a proper title with the general reader in mind. The language is terse and hard to follow. Only a historian of no mean merit can extract something worthwhile or enjoy reading this book. The book is printed in monochrome, thus cancelling the worthiness of colour charts which show legends as constituting different colours.

The book is not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star