pseudochariot - pseudo-trough

[Steve Farmer]

Artur Karp writes:

> let me Polishly suggest that them Harappan fools may still have
> had their little reasons to want to squeeze their ole wheels a bit.
> Especially, if they tried to transform an unwieldy circular image
> into some much sleeker-looking (i.e. "oval/pointy-ended") writing
> sign - just to save precious writing space.

Sorry about mentioning "Polish jokes" in the same line as
"Rajaram horse jokes," Artur. How un-PC of me!

The old claim that the shapes of Harappan "wheels" are squeezed
horizontally to save space raises a lot of unanswered questions.
The ovals or their pointy-ended variants have or could be just as
reasonably interpreted as shields, or as celestial/kingship
signs, or as simple abstract designs similar to those found in
countless other premodern cultures. Against the old "squeezing"
suggestion: If the scribes did indeed think of them as wheels,
and were accustomed to seeing spoked wheels on chariots in daily
life, it would certainly be strange to think of them radically
changing this shape to space. The signs remain oval or pointy,
moreover, even when saving space wasn't a consideration. And why,
especially, pointy "wheels"?

There are other problems: Did you ever see a real chariot wheel?
The hubs are extremely prominent, and the spokes certainly never
meet in the middle, as these do. The outside of chariot wheels
are also flat -- they must be to work -- but this again is
missing in Sethna's examples. And, of course, there is the
unfortunate anachronism that some of these "spoked wheels" show
up over a thousand years before evidence of spoked wheels
anywhere else in the Old World. Are you claiming that the
Harappans had this technology 1,000 years or more before far more
advanced cultures like those of the Mesopotamians -- with whom
they were in trade contact?

Quite a stretch.

In sum, show me an elliptical or oval/pointy object with crossing
lines on it, lacking hubs, and not flat on the outside, and the
burden of proof is on you to show these are "six-spoked chariot
wheels" -- not on someone who denies it. This is especially true
given the clear anachronism evident in their appearance.

Comparative evidence from other civilizations also argues
strongly against your views. We find many striking examples, for
instance, of oval or round symbols with crossing diagonal lines
(certainly not "spokes") in Mesoamerican and North American
Indian artifacts. But neither civilization (leaving aside a
handful of toy objects) had any wheeled transport of any sort.
For example, I have jpeg pictures in my system of a number of
convincing "spoked wheel objects" from the Poverty Point culture
in Louisiana (the most advanced civilization in North America in
the early second millennium BCE - contemporary with the end of
Harappan culture). But this civilization had no knowledge of any
wheels of any kind, spoked or unspoked.

Want to see an awe-inspiring object associated with ray-like
projections that might make you draw roundish (or even oval!)
objects with crossing lines in it? Look at the sun at different
times of the day.

The real point of my post had less to do with spoked wheels or
chariots, which evidence suggests didn't exist anywhere in the
world in Harappan times, than with Sethna's obvious abuse of
iconographic evidence. None of the mostly reasonable questions
suggested by you, or me, or others on this List about "squeezing
to save space," or "foreshortening" (that's a stretch - literally
and figuratively!), or anything else like it is mentioned even in
passing by Sethna. Sethna, instead, presents a neat diagram in
his book of a man on a chariot-like object that has perfectly
round wheels. QED! He never mentions once that the vast majority
of these so-called "wheels" in Harappan culture weren't round.
Moreover, when you look at the original evidence on which his
diagram is based -- which he chooses not to display in his study
-- you find that the originals certainly aren't round and
certainly don't look even vaguely like wheels.

See again Figure 2 of the webpage below. Surely you can't be
defending Sethna's use of evidence!

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

Artur writes further:

> Are there any examples of such oval "wheels" represented horizontally?

I don't know if this is a real or rhetorical question. So far as
I know, there aren't. But there certainly ARE suggestive
variations -- MANY of them, in fact -- of the vertically aligned
oval or pointy "wheel" signs that LACK cross-lines (Sethna's
supposed "spokes") in the middle. Some have elongated dots in the
middle, some have three lines there, some have box-like objects,
some have plant-like objects, some (like Parpola M-309) have
curious semi-circles where the cross lines are usually found. All
are the same basic oval or "pointy" oval form in which we find
cross lines -- but in this case the cross lines are replaced with
different contents.

I could go to the trouble to scan all these in. But (better) take
a look at the seals yourself.

Want instead to see a "satellite dish" in Harappan signs too? I
can show you many extremely convincing examples -- certainly more
convincing than any "spoked wheels." (Rajaram could conceivably
claim that these "satellite dishes" were used by the prescient
Harappans to pick up the cosmic rays that, Rajaram tells us, the
Rigveda affirms strike the earth three times a day.)

Enough on Sethna's (non) spoked (non) wheels. As Confucius
supposedly puts it in  Lun yu 7.8, "When I have pointed out one
corner of a square to someone and he doesn't come back with the
other three, I won't point it out to him a second time."

And that goes for Sethna's (not round, not spoked) Harappan
wheels as well.

Steve Farmer