Harappan 'non-texts'

[Steve Farmer]

K. Elst responded to random pieces of my four arguments from
comparative history that Harappan script was *not* used to create a
full literature. That makes it difficult to respond, since if I were
to answer only the points he quoted the systematic flavor of those
arguments would be lost. I'll instead limit myself to correcting some
of the glaring misinformation in just one of Dr. Elst's paragraphs --
using this as an example of problems found elsewhere in his post.

Let's pick one paragraph at random; Elst writes:

> 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).

All three points here are misleading or dead wrong:

1. On writing in Mesopotamia: My point about cuneiform scripts was
that we can watch them develop rapidly in *exactly the same period*
that Parpola's Harappan (2600-1900 BCE) was 'frozen.' It is this
contrast in the same time frame that demonstrates how anomalous the
Harappan script was. My argument was that there was no scribal
pressure for simplification in IVC because the script had very limited
uses. If an extended 'lost literature' existed, we would expect to see
the results of this scribal pressure in the evolution of the script.
This evidence strongly suggests that no 'lost literature' existed.

2. On Egypt: Despite what Dr. Elst claims, Egyptian writing was
anything *but* frozen -- no matter whether you consider its
hieroglyphic, hieratic, or demotic forms. Both hieratic and demotic
scripts were, of course, evolutionary adaptations of hieroglyphics,
arising from the same kinds of scribal pressures towards
simplification found in every premodern society in which extensive
literary records existed; this is radically different from what is
known of Harappan culture, as I've argued at length. Even the most
ancient and formal writing system in Egypt -- religious hieroglyphics
-- was anything *but* 'frozen.' New signs were constantly being
introduced and others fell rapidly out of use; the shapes of the same
hieroglyphics also changed. To cite just one example (out of
thousands) that Vedicists might find interesting: The symbols for
horse and chariot (whose glyphs clearly show spoked wheels -- see
attached jpeg file) first appeared in the New Kingdom (after c. 1570
BCE) -- about the same time that lightweight spoked chariots began
appearing elsewhere in Eurasia, including India. (OITers note!)

In sum, the changes in hieroglyphics over time in Egypt were quite
radical -- exactly, once again, what we don't find in Harappan script.
Over 6,000 symbols total are known in Egyptian hieroglyphics from the
beginning down to the Greco-Roman period; but far less than 1,000 of
those were used at any one time. (In the Middle Kingdom, the number of
active symbols is reported to have been around 700.) So again, pace Dr.
Elst, Egyptian hieroglyphics were anything but 'frozen.'

3. Elst's last claim -- concerning Chinese -- is even further off the
mark. The argument that 'Chinese was very fixed for over 22 centuries
(3rd BC to 20th AD)' would certainly startle my Sinological
colleagues, who continue to argue over the meanings of classical (let
alone more ancient) Chinese! In any case, no modern Chinese reader can
read classical Chinese without several intense years of training.
When we go back further to the Chinese of the Shang dynasty -- which
is closer in time to the Harappan case -- the problems are still
worse. Few people in the world, in fact -- including specialists in
*classical* Chinese -- can read Shang divination texts. In any event,
'guwen' (literally 'ancient writing' = classical Chinese) is radically
different from modern Chinese.

My friend E. Bruce Brooks (U. Mass. at Amherst and the Warring States
Project; see his groundbreaking destratification of the Lun yu in _The
Original Analects_ 1997) has recently posted a few sample lessons in
classical Chinese for those who want to taste ancient Chinese (and
here I quote Bruce's totally inimitable prose) "without requiring of
them the preliminary labor of first mastering a distantly related
language (modern Chinese), in which a few false friends rub elbows in
the dictionary with a host of strangers...." I recommend to Elst and
others on this List Bruce's sample lesson, which he plans to expand
if and when enough students show up. Take a look at it at
http://www.umass.edu/wsp/method/classical/index.html.

I hope it is clear that arguments in comparative history demand
just as much rigor as arguments in single scholarly fields.

Regards,
Steve Farmer
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