Harappan Deciphered?!

[Steve Farmer]

K. Elst writes, on the book _Deciphered Harappan Script_ (2000):

> Jha and Rajaram ...[treat] the
> Indus script as a kind of proto-Brahmi, retaining a number of logographs but
> mostly already representing sounds rather than objects (kind of like
> Japanese).

On other of their views, see again their description at:

http://www.safarmer.com/pico/crackedcode.html

Thanks for the description, Dr. Elst. Let's cut to the quick: Have
Jha/Rajaram *deciphered* the script -- as promised in their title, in
online comments, and in book description? If so, it should be easy
enough to verify. In their announcements, you can almost hear the roll
of drums and the horns blaring:

> Dr. Natwar Jha...is one of the world's foremost Vedic scholars
> and palaeographers who has deciphered the 5000 year-old Indus (Harappan)
> script, thereby solving what is widely regarded as the most significant
> technical problem in historical research in our time.

> The Harappans, who until now had remained a silent enigma, speak to us
> again, and speak to us in a language and idiom that we can all comprehend
> -- the Vedic.... The Harappans belong to the later Vedic Age.
>
> Thus, the idea of the birth  of Civilization in the river valleys of
> Mesopotamia is no longer tenable. The cradle of civilization -- assuming
> there was such a thing -- can now be claimed for the Sarasvati Valley.

But what I'm most curious about -- as we all are -- is what the
deciphered tests *say*. Dr. Elst begins with some needed chronological
preliminaries (confirming what is found in the link given above):

> The Jha/Rajaram decipherment is set in a chronological framework putting the
> Rg-Veda before 3000 BC and the IVC contemporaneous with the Brahmanas,
> Upanishads and Sutras.  This is a rather ambitious (some might use a more
> derogatory term) chronology leading to some problems in the correspondence
> with the archaeological evidence, e.g. spoked wheels in the younger parts of
> the RV hence by 3500 BC or so, long before their appearance in the
> archaeo-record.

Some 1500 years before the appearance of spoked wheels in the
archaeological record *anywhere* in Eurasia, I should add -- not just
in India! Thereafter, in the second millennium, spoked wheels on
chariots pop up everywhere in Eurasia: Central Asia, Northern Europe,
Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, all within a couple of hundred years. And,
of course, in the RV as well. The Jha/Rajaram dating of the RV to 1500
years or so *before* spoked chariots appeared anywhere in the world
does indeed lead to "some problems" in the archaeological record.

Even more deadly: They can't solve this problem by adjusting their
dates, since their position commits them *absolutely* to the RV coming
*before* Harappan (as Dr. Elst presents it, going back to "3500 BCE or
so"). It also commits them absolutely, since it is essential to their
decipherment, to the "language of the Brahmanas, Upanishads and
Sutras" being contemporaneous with Harappan culture (as they date it
-- which means *damn* early). This is because their decipherment
depends on a tight correspondence between the sounds of Harappan and
"the language of the Brahmanas, Upanishads, and Sutras." If they
adjust their chronology to fit the archaeological record -- their
whole enterprise collapses immediately. And, obviously, their
chronology for these texts *is* off by 2000 years or so (!) if we
accept normal datings for these texts.

Tough row to hoe.

Continuing along similar lines: I'm extremely puzzled by the phrase
"the language of the Brahmanas, Upanishads, and Sutras." I'm a
comparative historian, not a Sanskritist or Vedicist -- so this
question might be terribly naive -- but weren't there pretty *major*
shifts in Sanskrit in the time between these three categories of
texts? If so, wouldn't the identification of Harappan sounds with
different *stages* of "the language of the Brahmanas, Upanishads, and
Sutras" by Jha/Rajaram-- allowing them potentially to associate one
inscription with one stage, or another with another, as convenient --
give them a way to force a given inscription to say a number of
different things?

I don't know the answer to this question. I defer to the Vedic
Sanskrit experts on the List. The fact that not many of the known
inscriptions can be assigned exact dates makes things even more convenient.

Be that as it may, obviously chronology is going to be the Achilles
heel of the claimed "decipherment" of Harappan of Jha/Rajaram. If
their dating of "Late Vedic" is off -- and a lot of evidence from the
history of technology (e.g., re spoked chariots, which are referred to
even more frequently in Vedic texts *after* the RV than in the RV
itself) suggests it is off by a long shot -- they are finished.

And already the sounds of those drum rolls are getting weaker. This
may not be a very long discussion after all.

Dr. Elst raises a very key issue:

>  An obvious weak point is that several sounds have
> more than one sign representing them, though care was taken to avoid cases
> where two such "allographs" appear on the same seal.

On the contrary, from the point of view of claiming that you have
"deciphered" the script, this could be viewed as another "strong" and
not "weak" point -- since it would again give you extra degrees of
freedom in forcing any inscription. Since the number of signs is very
large, and the number of sounds is rather small, any would-be
decipherer following this method would again have the freedom to drag
a wide spectrum of meanings out of *any* inscription.

Along these lines, I know a prominent Sanskritist (unnamed at his
insistence) who claims that he can "prove" using such methods that IVC
is Old Norse or Old English!! I've repeatedly him to post his proof in
Indology, but he refuses -- waiting I suspect for the suspense to
mount before making his grand announcement.

Minor digression suggested by comparative evidence: In 1489, the
Italian syncretist/philologist/theologian Pico della Mirandola used a
method not unrelated to this one to drag out secret Christian messages
from Hebrew texts (planning to use these to convert the Jews). He
started with the first word in the Hebrew Torah: "Bereshit." Pico
showed that if you applied certain rules given to us by God -- as
flexible as the sound rules apparently found in Jha/Rajaram -- you
could spy in that word the following Christian-Kabbalistic message:
"The Father, in the Son and through the Son, the Beginning and End or
Rest, created the Head, the Fire, and the Foundation of the Great Man
with a good pact." Pico convinced a lot of people at the time too:
This is a true story.

Back to the main track.

Dr. Elst: Rather than getting hung up on high-level issues in
Jha/Rajaram, for the purposes of discussion could we make things as
empirical as possible? I propose that we pick a famous Harappan text
and see what Jha/Rajaram do with it.

What does the great "Dholavira 'signboard'" -- which Jha/Rajaram claim
to decipher in Part II, Chapter 6, of their book -- say? Let's break
this down for discussion purposes:

1. What does the Dholavira inscription say, according to Jha/Rajaram?
2. How exactly do they derive their reading?
3. What alternate readings are possible in their system (arising from
the "many degrees of freedom" point raised above?
3. How do they interpret each of the characters, determinatives (if
relevant), etc.?

Getting at that question -- and leaving aside, for now, the thorny
chronology issue, to which we can return -- we should be able to get
at their deeper principles.

An image of the Dholavira inscription that we can all work from is
found at:
http://www.harappa.com/seal/14.html

In anticipation - my best to all,
Steve Farmer

PS. I'll leave aside from the discussion the fact that Michael Witzel
has already announced his reading of the Dholavira billboard. Witzel
unveiled it in a dramatic post on this List a few days ago. According
to MW -- which I freely reinterpret --the billboard contains a warning
to Indologists who enter the Dreaded Halls of Harappan Decipherment:
"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"! From Mother India, via OIT,
apparently, the inscription traveled to Italy and ended up in Dante's
Inferno 3.9.
:^)