Harappan 'non-texts'

[Koenraad Elst]

Steve Farmer <saf at SAFARMER.COM> wrote
on 2 juli 2000 23:00

> 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.

Here we go again: "glaring misinformation"?  Until Dr. farmer presents his
proof for my glaring intention to misinform, I'll assume that
"misinformation" is academese for "mistaken views" if not "views
differing from my own".  Dr. Wujastyk once pointed out that the AIT debate
"is not bringing out the best in people", and the evolution in Dr. Farmer's
language from neutral and courteous outsiderspeak to the present
prosecutorial mode illustrates the point.

> My argument was that there was no scribal
> pressure for simplification in IVC because the script had very limited
> uses.

The seal inscriptions do not give the impression that the script was
all that cumbersome, provoking "pressure" on scribes.  It was considerably
less cumbersome than the hieroglyphic script was even in the 1st millennium
BC, after two thousand years of scribal pressure, or than
Chinese was before (or even after) Chairman Mao's script reform.

> 2. Despite what Dr. Elst claims, Egyptian writing was
> anything *but* frozen.

Our local library has a manual of hieroglyphic Egyptian which treats the
language and the script system as solid units stretching over more than two
millennia (unlike the usual treatment of modern and classical
Chinese as two distinct languages, or of Brahmi and
Devanagari as two distinct scripts).  Of course new items (chariot) required
new
words, but the same certainly applied in Harappan.

> In sum, the changes in hieroglyphics over time in Egypt were quite
> radical -- exactly, once again, what we don't find in Harappan script.

To compare two things, you have to know both.  No one has
knowledge of Harappan remotely comparable with what is available about
Egyptian.  Of course claims have been made on the basis of "structural
analysis",
e.g. that Harappan must be an agglutinative language, but permit me to be
highly skeptical of such claims about an unread language.

> 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.

I happen to have an MA in Sinology myself, and I stick to my position: the
Chinese SCRIPT remained unchanged for 22
centuries, from Qin Shihuang's to Chairman Mao's script reform.  The script
was used by large
numbers of people in producing a vast literature, and it was more cumbersome
than hieroglyphics and far more cumbersome than Harappan, yet in spite of
the resultant "scribal pressure", it was kept identical to a very high
extent.

> My friend E. Bruce Brooks has recently posted a few sample lessons in
> classical Chinese for those who want to taste ancient Chinese "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.

Thanks for the reference.  In case you read Dutch, there is an article on
the common misreadings of the Book of Changes on my website, discussing
precisely the "false friends" existing between ancient and later forms of
Chinese.  Thus "li zhen", translated according to medieval convention as
"steadfastness is advantageous", originally meant "auspicious oracle", so
that modern diviners treating this text as answer to the question "should I
move to Australia?" will read it as "stay where you are", while anciently it
was read as: "act according to your desire", i.e. just the opposite.  These
changes of meaning are not a point on which we can compare Chinese with
Harappan, since we
only know the looks of Harappan but
not the meanings.

At any rate, Dr. Farmer's main position that the Harappan script was frozen
in the logographic stage (which disregards recent Indian scholarship arguing
that it was neither unchanging nor logographic) and that this frozenness is
incompatible with a large living literature, is
contradicted by the example of Chinese.  But it remains possible all the
same that Harappan developed differently from Chinese and did remain
confined to the short seal inscriptions we know; in which case IVC literacy
follows the same pattern as Runic and Ogham in Germanic c.q. Celtic cultures
(as pointed out by Stephen Hodge), sisters of Vedic culture.  This would
help in closing one of the gaps between Vedic and Harappan cultures, now
jointly appearing as disinclined to writing.

K. Elst

http://members.xoom.com/KoenraadElst/