pseudochariot - pseudo-trough

[Steve Farmer]

Rajarashi Banerjee writes:

> As for the telephone/water trough object in the rajaram seal it is nothing
> more than blurred text lines...
> So it looks like s farmer and co want to keep silent on this issue. Come Mr,
> farmer if you are such an aficionado for truth why gloss over this fact.

Gloss over it? Michael Witzel and I discussed this issue *before*
Rajaram came up with his newest, lamest, excuses for his 'horse
seal' (which he still claims shows a horse!). Moreover, we
initially teased this claim out of him by making sure that a
reporter sent to interview Rajaram from Frontline asked him about
the 'horse trough.' Go to:

http://www.safarmer.com/frontline

Make sure that you hit "REFRESH" or "RELOAD" to get the newest
version. Then read the newest 8-page supplement (PDF file #5; you
can also read this more quickly in the HTML version found there)
from the current issue of Frontline. Michael Witzel and I discuss
this issue explicitly on p. 129, in the section labeled (not
obscurely) the 'feeding trough.'

When asked about this object by Frontline correspondent Anupama
Katakam, Rajaram blurted out the totally absurd that the
annotations on the seal that he sent Iravatham Mahadevan
(illustrated in our newest piece, thanks to Mahadevan's
generosity; read the article if you're not sure what I'm talking
about) "got scrambled in the scanning. This writing which has got
scrambled resembles this telephone-like thing which they refer to
as a trough." (Quoted verbatim.) Accidental "scrambling in the
scanning" like this is absolutely impossible, as anyone working
with graphics will tell you. You CANNOT replicate the doctoring
of Mackay 453 as seen in Rajaram's book by "scrambling in the
scanning" errors -- whatever that is supposed to mean. And this
from a guy who claims he is an academic expert in graphics
(letter sent to me, M. Witzel, and many others in July)! The
annotations were deliberately covered over, and much else was
changed in the published image as well. This comes out clearly
when you compared the image that Rajaram sent to Iravatham
Mahadevan with the one Rajaram placed in his book. These differ
considerably, as Mahadevan himself points out. On this, see the
images compared on p. 128 of our newest communication.

Moreover, Rajaram, way back in July, clearly admitted to a whole
slew of his admirers that the piece in his book was a "computer
enhancement" intended "to facilitate our reading." He doesn't
deny that he said that -- he hardly can -- but now he claims that
he said it under pressure (not true, in fact), and that what he
meant was that *maybe* someone (not him, of course, but maybe the
publisher) "computer enhanced" it. Supposedly, after all this
frontpage news in India for months, he still doesn't know who
doctored the photo.

Give me a break.

As far as Banerjee's claim that K.D. Sethna's supposed Harappan
"six-spoked wheels" are really "six-spoked wheels" -- on
chariots, no less -- look at the evidence. The vast majority of
these "wheels" are oval or have pointy ends and lack many other
characteristics of wheels. Moreover, the "chariots" arise from
Sethna's regularization of highly irregular data on the seals.
Nothing like a little evidence to undermine nationalistic fantasies:

http://www.safarmer.com/sethna/pseudochariot.html

Banerjee writes in his inimitable style:

> You lucked out with a cracked seal earlier but it does not mean you can just
> go ahead and make dumb assertions about everything. There is no crack here.

No crack in Sethna's piece, but willfull alteration of evidence.
Compare his diagram with the originals on the following page. The
pictorial evidence speaks for itself:

http://www.safarmer.com/sethna/pseudochariot.html

On a related note, please look at the dynamite new webpage
entitled "ANTIQUITY FRENZY" put up by the Sinologist E. Bruce
Brooks of the Warring States Project, on chauvinistic fraud
worldwide: The mythologizing of history typical of the Hindutva
"revisionists" finds parallels in China and elsewhere, as Bruce shows:

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/method/antiquity/index.html

Steve Farmer