Harappan Deciphered?!

[Koenraad Elst]

Friends,

more on the Jha/Rajaram decipherment.  First some more preliminary remarks.

There are already a dozen or so Sanskritic decipherments of the Indus
script, mostly by Indians who mostly read it as partly remainder-logographic
but largely already syllabic or alphabetic, vaguely proto-Brahmi.  In the
last decade, all authors concerned have been subscribers to the OIT, but in
earlier decades this may have been different (there have been many
AIT-to-OIT conversions, e.g. among non-decipherers the linguist SS Misra and
the archaeologist BB Lal).  There are two by Germans, one of them pen-named
Ushanas,
and both reading it as entirely logographic; in my opinion far too
spiritualistic, typically the work of New-Agers who read their
favourite themes into it.  And there is one by a Portuguese Sorbonne-based
scholar José Calazans, who has a publishing contract with OUP though for
some reason the publication has so far failed to materialize; he is
contract-bound not to show his finished product.  His position
is that the Aryans originated in Central Asia and invaded India before the
IVC floruit, becoming one among several constituent populations of the IVC;
their Vedic religion (possibly represented by the famous "priest-king") was
distinct from an existing Harappan shamanic religion of which traces are
visible
on the seals, e.g. priest(esse)s with animal headgear.  All the same, in his
view Sanskrit was the dominant IVC language and the one represented on the
seals.

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.  The OIT need not push it that far, witness Shrikant
Talageri's approach of not pinning himself down on any absolute chronology,
and in debate being provisionally willing to put the RV's later sections in
the end period of the IVC (he also keeps the Mahabharata war in the mid-2nd
millennium as against Rajaram's 3139 BC).  Yet, like Talageri and like
presumably most participants on this list, Jha and Rajaram claim that in
their chronology they merely go where the evidence is taking them.  In casu,
the texts on the seals as they understand them correspond contentswise with
the late-Vedic/Sutra period, and are read with a close eye on the cultural
or "literary" background.

The point here is not whether the IVC or Vedic society was literate or not;
whether the Upanishads etc. were passed on orally or written down.  Either
way, they
certainly were alive and influential in NW-Indian society at some point.
Jha and Rajaram claim that the Harappan seals were not commercial documents
but were religious in nature, hence the fortunate (too fortunate?) situation
that contentswise they have a lot in common with the largely religious Vedic
corpus.

Leaving aside the remaining logographic signs, the phonetic mainstream of
the script would be most comparable with the Semitic scripts.  There is an
initial vowel sign, like the Aleph, which can represent any vowel: this is
the omnipresent jar sign.  Vowels following consonants are generally not
written, so one consonant signs can be read as ka, kaa, ke, ki etc.  There
is a distant influence from Rao here: he had based his initial guesswork
about the sound value of the signs on their look-alikes in the Phoenician
script rather than in Brahmi, on the assumption that the Phoenician script
(appearing in the mid-2nd millennium) was, so to speak, the eldest daughter
of the Indus script, in some ways closer to it than the younger Ashokan
Brahmi.  Quite a number of letters retain the values which had been assigned
to them by Rao or by other Indian authors who based their readings on
similarities with Brahmi.  Thus, the crab is [ma], the 5-stroke standing man
is [ra] or [R] (no Paninian fine phonetic distinctions yet), the standing
fish is [sha] (also "100", sha-tam), the same standing fish with a little
roof overhead is [shri].  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.  The direction of
writing is not fixed, though more often left-to-right than the reverse, and
boustrophedon occurs in the not-so-numerous seals containing more than one
line of text.

Jha and Rajaram also claim that in many cases, the picture and the text on a
seal correspond directly or obliquely, somewhat like in heraldry where the
motto and the picture sometimes match (e.g. the coat-of-arms of the Dutch
province of Zealand shows a lion rising from the waves, with the obliquely
related motto "Luctor et emergo", "I wrestle and come out on top").  I'll
collect some examples over the weekend.

All the best,

K. Elst