Harappan 'non-texts'

[George Thompson]

In response to the remarks of Lance Cousins:

As an Indologist, of course, I find the problem of identifying the culture of
IVC of great interest.  But as a Vedicist I find it only of marginal
interest, both because IVC and Vedic appear to me to have little to do with
each other, and because I fail to see how Vedic can contribute to the goal of
identifying IVC culture.

I must say, though, that as an outsider to this field of study, having only a
superficial knowledge of the study of the IVC sign system [I will grant that
it is a system, for the sake of the argument], I have come to have very much
the same sort of questions in mind that Steve Farmer has raised in his recent
posts.  I think that his post articulates very well my own views [better than
I could have presented them myself].  But here are a few points that I would
add [and like Steve, I admit that these will no doubt strike the specialists
as naive, but it would help me at least to start with the basics]:

1.  Maybe it would be better to call Steve's position an argument *for*
silence, instead of an argument *from* silence*, since in fact the evidence
seems to be, in a very real sense, silent: it does not, at all, tell us all
of the amazing things that have been claimed for it.  As far as I can tell it
is way too premature to talk about the identity of the language or languages
of IVC. Before we can do that other things have to be established.

2.  What kind of sign system is represented by the IVC system of signs?  Do
we even know that these signs are tied to a specific language?  Could these
signs have been 'read' independently of a particular language?  I have raised
this question before, but I still haven't received an answer that satisfies
me.  A while back the on this list, in response to a previous post from
Steve, the subject of the Incan quipu was raised: a fascinating mnemonic
device, independent from writing, which was used by experts [rather like
scribes] to recall and reproduce remarkably extendeed and accurate
narratives.  In my view, there is a decent chance that the sign system of IVC
may be more like this Incan sign system than a true writing system.  I wish
that better informed persons would confirm or deny this possibility.  [At
least one well-informed scholar allows this possiblity, but I do not wish to
drag him into a controversy which he does not wish to enter].

3.  Let us take for granted that the IVC sign system does represent a
linguistic system.  Given that, what do we know about these signs?
Specialists talk about a system containing anywhere from 250 to over  500
distinct signs.  They have identified certain frequencies and certain
patterns.  But have they established the precise nature of the signs that
they are studying?  Take the famous jar sign.  Does it represent a syllable,
a morpheme, a word? Can we exclude the possibility that it represents a
phrase, or even an enitre narrative [what Propp called a function, or
Greimas, an actant]?

4.  Say we have a pair of signs that are in regular contiguity. Can we
legitimately talk about the second member as a 'suffix' [of course, there is
much talk of such things in the literature]?

[more in a forthcoming post]

Best wishes, and thanks again to Steve Farmer for raising these issues so
coherently.

George Thompson