Harappan Horse Thieves! (Decipherment Debunked)

[Koenraad Elst]

Van: Steve Farmer <saf at SAFARMER.COM>

> 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.
> Then swifter than the Ashvins' chariot, a thought came to me -- and I
> understood why Dr. Elst posted and ducked for cover.

I don't like the endless imputation of funny motives which keeps on
poisoning the whole AIT debate; that includes all the imputations against
Dr. Farmer himself expressed on the IndianCivilization list.  I suppose the
only thing to do about it is to keep on redirecting the focus at the
evidence again and again.  As for my "minimalism", the only reason is lack
of time over the weekend (my wife etc. etc.).  Given Dr. Farmer's impatient
eagerness for the Dholavira text, I just shot off the essential.

> 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.)

The lack of evidence there is not all that total, judging from what Indian
archaeologists tell me, and the destructive Indian climate must be factored
in.

> 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":

Again that conspiratorial spin put on what I know to be Jha and Rajaram's
honestly held conviction about the correctness of their decipherment.

> 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.

Among scholars, this (even conditionally) imputed reliance on "faith" to be
"saved" by "exegesis" must be considered an insult.  I'll let that pass too.
You know enough about NASA scientist Rajaram to surmise that he bases his
theory on something better than faith.  It still remains that his method may
turn out to be flawed, but that is one thing he shares with all researchers.

> As Dr. Elst has indicated in his posts, *single* symbols are read in
> different ways by Jha/Rajaram in different inscriptions.

Not in any different ways.  There is a common phonetic element between R and
r, between ka, ke and ki, etc.

> Moreover, the
> same *vowel* symbol can be read differently even in a *single*
> inscription.

Though difficult for the decipherer (or conversely making things easier for
the lazy decipherer), it so happens that such scripts have existed and still
exist: Hebrew and Arabic, of course, but also some Indian script used for
bookkeeping until recently, e.g. the older form of Gurumukhi.

> 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. --

"fudge" etc.: see above.

You may have noticed that my own initial enthusiasm for this decipherment
has waned, but not to the point of dismissing it as an "insider's joke" or
an "exegesis" etc.  In internal consistency, it is as good as Parpola's and
better than all other proposed decipherments that I have seen.  Also, the
authors accept the limits of their interpretation, e.g. concerning some
Harappan-script seals found in West Asia, they state that they cannot make
sense of them, surmising they were written in a different language: only one
of the many reasons not to follow Dr. Farmer's imputations of funny motives.

In a number of seals, their reading fits nicely if sometimes in unexpected
ways with the picture, e.g. there is an oft-copied bull motif with a brief
text read by them as "IndraH", who is indeed likened to a bull in the RV..

More to follow.

K. Elst