Harappan Horse Thieves! (Decipherment Debunked)

[Steve Farmer]

K. Elst writes, of the long-awaited decipherment of Harappan by Jha/Rajaram:

> Dholavira signboard acc. to Jha/Rajaram ("late phase of the script, ca. 2000
> BC"):
>
> "mad-dvaidhah-raaga-vedhaashvaih-sahasra-dhaa" ... approximately:
>
> "I was a thousand times victorious over avaricious raiders desirous of my
> wealth of horses"

I couldn't at first figure out why Dr. Elst offered this minimalist
post and so abruptly left the scene, since he was asked for data on
*how* the Dholavira sign was deciphered. That data would have given us
an empirical foundation for detailed discussion of the methodology of
Jha/Rajaram. And that in turn would have allowed a fair test of the
validity of their decipherments -- something that Dr. Elst himself
first asked for in this List.

Then swifter than the Ashvins' chariot, a thought came to me -- and I
understood why Dr. Elst posted and ducked for cover. He *must* have
known that someone would soon point out the obvious:

One of the Achilles heels of Out-of-India theories (OIT) -- at least
the type that Drs. Rajaram and Jha and Kak and Kalyanaraman endorse,
placing the Rigveda *before* Harappa -- is the mass of evidence in the
RV for horses and spoked wheels and and lightweight two-wheeled
chariots and razor-tires and ratha-carriers and so on, when compared
with the total *lack* of evidence for such things in Harappa. (No
spoked chariots showed up *anyplace* in Eurasia before around 2000
BCE, in fact. Quickly thereafter they popped up all over the place --
from Central Asia to Egypt to China.)

Solution? Come up with a amazingly flexible "decipherment system" --
linguistically deconstructed by Michael Witzel in his last posts --
that provides evidence of "avaricious raiders" defeated "a thousand
times" by the Harappans when those raiders tried to steal IVC's
"WEALTH of horses":

> "I was a thousand times victorious over avaricious raiders desirous of my
> wealth of horses"

It was an accident that I asked specifically for Jha/Rajaram's
decipherment of the Dholavira inscription. And, by chance, by asking
for it, I hit the methodological jackpot.

Recall that this inscription was supposedly written (but see M.
Witzel's debunking in his last post) in "Late Vedic" Sanskrit -- the
Sanskrit of the Suutras, which Patrick Olivelle, for one, using
external and internal evidence, dates in his recent book on the
Dharmasuutras to the last third of the first millennium BCE (see
Olivelle 1999: xxv ff.). This is, of course, a minimum of nearly 2000
years *after* the dating of Jha/Rajaram. There surely is scholarly
disagreement over *exact* dating of the Suutras, but the documents can
be dated easily enough to the last half of the first millennium BCE by
comparing the Sanskrit found in them with other, more easily datable,
sources -- as well by other kinds of evidence cited by Olivelle.

Unless, of course, it is an unquestionable matter of unquestionable
OIT Faith for you that the Suutras *must* be of hoary antiquity. If
that's the case, a large arsenal of traditional exegetical strategies
or reconciliative hermeneutical techniques can be invoked to help you
"save" your thesis. On some of these, see the cross-cultural study by
my collaborator John B. Henderson, _Scripture, Canon, and Commentary:
A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis_ (Princeton University
Press, 1991). John doesn't deal in that book with Vedic exegesis, but
the same techniques were used in India nonetheless. The exegetical
methods of religious commentators are strikingly similar, varying
within known and definable limits.

For now let's leave this question (of a mere 2000 years!) aside, and
look at sources of ambiguity in Jha/Rajaram that let you draw
virtually *any* text that you want out of any inscription.

As Dr. Elst has indicated in his posts, *single* symbols are read in
different ways by Jha/Rajaram in different inscriptions. Moreover, the
same *vowel* symbol can be read differently even in a *single*
inscription. This gives you more than enough flexibility so that you
can derive almost *anything* that you want out of any inscription --
even perhaps the English or Old Norse readings claimed by my unnamed
Sanskritist friend.

To my unnamed Sanskritist friend, who I know is listening in: Please
post your decipherment before it is too late!

Or, if you are an OITer, you can generate with your flexible methods
"avaricious horse thieves" defeated "a thousand times" when they
foolishly try to steal away the "wealth of horses" owned by the heroic Harappans.

Were these horse thieves really Aryan invaders from the Northwest --
much denied by OIT proponents -- reappearing in a new guise?

The revival by Jha/Rajaram of avaricious invaders might be used to
explain why no evidence is found in Harappa of horses: No seal emblems
of horses, no horse pictograms, no horse iconography, no toy horses in
wood or bronze or clay -- niente affatto. (And cf. here the copious
comparative evidence of this sort in premodern Egypt, Mesopotamia,
China, Greece, elsewhere.) Was all evidence of horses secreted away by
the Harappans to protect them from the avaricious horse thieves of
unknown origins? (Were horses in this case = a carefully guarded
military secret?)

To recall different parts of Dr. Elst's earlier, and extremely
helpful, summary of the methods of Jha/Rajaram:

There are four major sources of ambiguity in Jha/Rajaram that let you
pull just about any text that you need out of any inscription
(reminding me of Giovanni Pico's infamous method, which I noted in an
earlier post, of evoking Christian Truths out of Hebrew Scriptures 500
years ago; he was trying to bring about the end of the world):

Fudge factor #1 (quoting here and below Dr. Elst):
> There is an
> initial vowel sign, like the Aleph, which can represent any vowel: this is
> the omnipresent jar sign.

Fudge factor #2 (and more concrete examples undoubtably exist):
>  the 5-stroke standing man
> is [ra] or [R] (no Paninian fine phonetic distinctions yet), the standing
> fish is [sha] (also "100", sha-tam)

Fudge factor #3:
> An obvious weak point is that several sounds have
> more than one sign representing them

Fudge factor #4:
> The direction of
> writing is not fixed

And still, as Prof. Witzel points out in depth, Jha/Rajaram couldn't
generate a grammatical Sanskrit construction out of their "decipherment"!!

I'm sure there are lots of other fudge factors in the Jha/Rajaram
"method." I also imagine (make this a prediction) that their book is
filled with lots of decipherments concerning horses, chariots, etc. --
 all the needed "missing" evidence to hook up an RV hoary with age
with a "Late Vedic" (!) Harappan. I seriously doubt that the
Dholhavira decipherment is an isolated case.

I'll know soon -- and will report back -- since I was told today that
*another* copy of the book is being airmailed to me from India.
(Promised copy #3.)

Funny field Indologists inhabit -- filled with really tough and
interesting scholarly questions but also a lot of crackpots and lots
of unintentional (?) humor. I put a question mark after
"unintentional" since the "decipherment" of the Dholavira inscription
by Jha/Rajaram looks to me *a lot* like an AIT/OIT insider's joke!

> "I was a thousand times victorious over avaricious raiders desirous of my
> wealth of horses"

Let's add an extra Harappan symbol to the text -- recently discovered
and not yet found in any existing Harappan catalogs:  :^)

Cheers!
Steve Farmer