Harappan 'non-texts'?

[Koenraad Elst]

Thanks to Steve Farmer for his thought-provoking remarks on the Harappan
script, or absence thereof.

> Can anyone point to evidence of *any* sort that suggests that extended
> texts existed in Harappan culture, as a lot of Indologists assume?
> That assumption isn't limited to OIT proponents or Indian nationalists
> hoping to tie Harappan culture directly to Vedic sources. Even Asko
> Parpola (1994: 54), pointing to the Aztecs, imagines a lost Harappan
> literature that his Aztec parallels imply may have included extensive
> religious, legal, historical, scientific, and even philosophical
> texts.

> Others, like Koenraad Elst, who collaborates closely with extreme OIT
> proponents (see the acknowledgements in Talageri 2000) are
> understandably far less cautious.

Talageri "extreme"?  He is extremely logical in extracting all the
information from the Vedic data, a corpus at which numerous scholars have
been staring for the past two centuries without understanding the historical
and chronological elements in it.

> In one online paper, entitled 'The
> Vedic Harappans in Writing,' Elst writes that 'There is not the
> slightest doubt that this harvest of Harappan writings [the 4200-odd
> seals he notes] is but the tip of an iceberg, in this sense that the
> Harappan culture must have produced much more copious writings, but
> that most of them disappeared because the writing materials were not
> resistant to the ravages of time, particularly in the Indian climate.'

This is standard Parpola, as pointed out by SF himself.  This is not a
thesis I put forward, but a part of the introduction recapitulating matters
of consensus.  So i thought it was, and it is quite new to me that someone
takes the "extreme" position

>  that we'll *never* find
> even indirect evidence of extended Harappan texts -- and that no
> Rosetta stone is ever likely to appear that will allow us to
> confidently decipher the script.

and that

> this isn't the 'tip' of things but
> the whole iceberg.

Well, why not?  But then we shouldn't make things too easy for
revolutionaries, and consider the following.

> 1. Harappan script (as emphasized by Parpola 1994: 54) shows unusually
> little internal development from c. 2600 BCE to c. 1900 BCE (to use
> Parpola's dates). This is *sharply* at odds with what is known of the
> development of logo-syllabic systems in societies with fully developed
> literate traditions. Indeed, we can observe striking evolutionary
> developments in such scripts in a number of Mesopotamian scripts
> emerging in *exactly* the same period that Parpola identifies with
> mature Harappan culture. Whenever literary production was extensive --
> as Parpola himself emphasizes in respect to other historical cases --
> scribal pressures gradually pushed scripts in simplifying directions;
> expected changes included simplification of shapes, movements towards
> fully syllabic forms, and a concomitant drop in the number of symbols.

That is precisely what S.R. Rao has demonstrated in his introduction to his
own attempted decipherment (Dawn and Devolution of the Indus Civilization).
While his decipherment is flawed (though probably on the right track, and
agreeing on many points with independent decipherments by other Indians), he
may have done something very important by showing that the youngest Harappan
seals have fewer signs, and esp. fewer complicated ones.

> Nevertheless, agreement appears to be
> widespread that Harappan writing was relatively 'frozen' over many
> centuries, at least when compared with scripts that rapidly evolved in
> Mesopotamia in the same period.
> Try to imagine a modern literate society -- e.g., my beloved Italy --
> in which no radical shifts in writing took place from Dante to the
> present! Any such example would vastly understate the problem, since
> after the 15th century the evolution of script was actively inhibited
> by printed documents.

This comparison is as ill-advised as Parpola's Aztec one.  Italian uses the
same alphabet it used in Dante's days, and even orthography has evolved but
little (compared e.g. to Dutch).  Further, cuneiform was fairly fixed after
its formative period, and was in use for three times as long as Parpola's
Harappan (2600-1900 BC).  Hieroglyphics too were quite "frozen".  Chinese
was very fixed for over 22 centuries (3rd BC to 20th AD).

> 2. If extended Harappan texts were written on perishable materials,
> auxillary evidence should have survived that points to the use of such
> materials.
> Only four
> pre-Columbian Maya texts survive, but even if these didn't extant, no
> one could doubt the existence of extended Maya; thousands of stelae,
> engraved bricks, and other objects argue to the contrary. But all this
> is again lacking in Harappan culture.

> Again, no evidence of this nature has ever emerged, so
> far as I know, from Harappan sites.
> In sum, comparative history offers a lot of evidence -- from many
> sources -- that 'copious writings' of no sort ever existed in the
> Harappan script.

No comment on this point as yet.

> 3. The suggestion that it is unlikely that any urban society as
> complex as that of the Harappans could exist without literate
> traditions -- a view claimed by Parpola and others -- may seem
> obvious, but is demonstrably wrong. Parpola's choice (1994: 54) of the
> Aztecs to make his case was a disastrous choice, since it is well
> known that the Aztecs (unlike the neighboring Maya) did *not* possess
> anything approximating a full writing system.

In the IVC, by contrast, we do find a developed writing system, applied
uniformly over a vast area, even if so far only attested on seals.  The
uniformity of this and other usages does make it hard to believe that it was
all done without writing, but here we are merely speculating on what is
possible, and no doubt several different scenarios are possible.  But again,
while illiterate urban civilizations are possible, IVC literacy is a fact.

> 4. Another piece of evidence (pointed out to me off-List today by one
> well-known Vedicist) involves the surprisingly low frequency of many
> known Harappan symbols; for evidence, see the chart in Parpola 1994:
> 78. Of the 417 Harappan symbols listed in Parpola's chart, no less
> than 264 -- a whopping 63% of Parpola's total-- appear no more than 1
> to 9 times in all known inscriptions! Moreover, recent evidence
> suggests that there were probably more independent symbols around than
> Parpola thought, making this trend even more striking. This is most
> easily explained by the ad hoc introduction of logographic symbols for
> limited use -- e.g., to describe professions; the majority of these
> symbols were clearly *not* syllabic. In any fully literate tradition,
> the number of symbols like this should have lessened over time; again,
> no evidence of any sort suggests that in Harappan this simplification
> took place.

See ref. to SR Rao above.  The situation described by SF resembles that in
Japanese, where syllabic script is used in combination with Chinese
logographs.  It is unclear how SF's source decided on what is a symbol: many
distinct symbols (some of which are hapax legomenon, appearing only once or
only a few times) are very likely combinations of simpler symbols, just as
in Devanagari script consonants clusters may be rendered by combined
consonant signs.  Thus, the "man with antlers" sign may be read as a
picturesque logograph (as in most Dravidianist and other non-Sanskritic
readings of the IVC script), but it may also be analysed into several
simpler signs, with the "antlers" really being the very common "jar" signs.

> So in sum, after so many decades of excavations, all we still have are
> some 4000-odd seals, a large number of those duplicates, averaging a
> couple of characters in length, in which the largest percentage of
> symbols appear only a handful of times. This is not what one would
> expect in a fully developed writing system that produced 'copious
> writings'.  This is what we would expect of an extremely
> limited script used for ID badges, probably carried under compulsion
> by every citizen;
> communications with divine forces through votive offerings; and
> commercial tags for customs purposes. But comparative history argues
> *strongly* that the script was not used for broader 'literary'
> purposes.

In spite of my counter-arguments given above, I am quite ready to
countenance this surprising minimization of IVC literacy.  But far from
offending OIT proponents, this view of the IVC should be welcomed by them.
After all, it is said of Vedic civilization that it was entirely or very
largely oral, making it very different from the literate IVC; but now the
same thing is asserted for that very IVC.

All the best,

K. Elst