Linear B texts

[Steve Farmer]

Asko Parpola writes,

> If the Mycenaeans had written their administrative documents on  
> perishable material instead of clay, and all those thousands of  
> texts of this type would have been lost (like all texts written on  
> perishable material in Ashoka's empire have been lost, and  
> evidently the Harappan administrative documents -- for it is  
> difficult to imagine those large cities being managed without any  
> accounting), would the remaining other types of Linear B texts be  
> better evidence for Mycenaean literacy than what survives from the  
> Indus Civilization?

> With best regards, "Ashok"

Dear "Ashok" -- and I do like the label,  :^)

This newest speculation claim doesn't answer the evidence I raised in  
my post, Asko. First of all, we know for a fact that extensive urban  
civilizations both in Eurasia and in the New World did very well  
without writing -- both before the invention of writing and after.  
The Mesopotamian and Minoan/Mycenaean court finance systems in fact  
were apparently rather anomalous in premodern urban states. For  
extensive discussion -- and much more can be said -- see M. Fragipane  
et al. (12 named co-authors), _Arslantepe Cretulae: An Early  
Centralized Administrative System Before Writing_ (Rome, 2007, 528  
pp.), where this issue is developed at considerable length.

Also, not long after the Harvard Roundtable meeting where we first  
met, in 2002, when Michael Witzel and I were first introducing our  
non-script model, Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky (who was also there)  
published a little paper, "To write or not to write," in _Culture  
through Objects_, ed. Timothy Potts et al., Cambridge U. Press, 2003,  
that discusses at some length non-literate civilizations existing  
side-by-side with literate ones in premodern Eurasia. (I'll vastly  
expand on this theme at our upcoming Kyoto meeting, in a talk  
Michael, Richard Sproat, and I (with me presenting) will give,  
entitled "The Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis, Five Years Later:  
Massive Non-Literate Urban Civilizations of Ancient Eurasia". I  
believe that the archaeologist Dan Potts, who of course knows Gulf  
and Iranian archaeology better than anyone (see, e.g., _The  
Archaeology of Elam_, 1999; and his many other studies), may talk  
about similar topics.)

Finally, your invocation of Ashoka below doesn't help your argument.  
All real literate civilizations, like Ashoka's, whenever they wrote  
on perishable materials, also, and quite obviously, left extensive  
texts behind on durable materials. There is no exception to that rule  
that we know of in world civilizations. That's the key part of this  
one (out of many) arguments we first collected in "Collapse of the  
Indus Script Thesis" in 2004:

http://www.safarmer.com/fsw2.pdf

Of course one could claim that the Indus are the one exception! But  
then the argument gets even more circular.....

I guess I should add at the end that I have often argued (in talks  
you've attended too) that one special class of Indus inscribed  
objects -- the rather crudely made so-called miniature tablets from  
Harappa proper -- had economic uses of a type, as what I've  
tentatively characterized (e.g., at the Harvard Roundtable in 2004;  
also Kyoto 2005) as "vouchers" of a sort or as part of a "sacrificial  
tithe system" in communal seasonal festivals. (None of this in print  
yet.) But right or wrong -- I think others have made similar  
suggestions -- that's independent of the "writing" issue.

Looking forward to seeing you in Kyoto in a few weeks. We have a new  
proposal we plan to make in Kyoto for how all of us can collaborate  
in a new, well financed, way to tap the data in the inscriptions in  
innovative ways. We're hoping it will interest you.

Best wishes,
Steve

> Quoting "Steve Farmer" <saf at SAFARMER.COM>:
>
>> Asko tells us instead that the "type of texts I expect to be lost  
>> is exemplified by the Mycenaean Linear B tablets, i.e. economic  
>> accounts, not literature, which was probably handed down orally...."
>>
>> This doesn't make speculation about lost Indus archives more  
>> credible, due to the massive scale of the excavations conducted  
>> since the 1920s. Compare here -- we haven't written about this  
>> anywhere -- with finds of Linear B, of which we have many  
>> thousands of long texts. The first Minoan site ever excavated, at  
>> Knossos, quickly turned up no less than 4300 Linear B texts (plus  
>> of course seals, etc.). Nearly *all* of these texts are far longer  
>> than what is by far the longest "Indus text" on a single surface,  
>> consisting of 17 high-frequency but non-repeating signs on a  
>> square about 1 inch square.
>>
>> After the find of 4300 long Linear B texts at Knossos, another  
>> 1000 or so showed up at Pylos. Then 300 or so from Thebes. And now  
>> we have perhaps another 300 so far from other sites. Others turn  
>> up every year. These are not obscure finds.
>>
>> Archaeological science rarely proves anything outright, but  
>> eventually hypotheses based on speculation concerning *possible*  
>> finds introduced to "save" a thesis, but that never materialize  
>> are eventually quietly abandoned -- especially when that  
>> speculation conflicts with what is commonly known from cross- 
>> cultural archaeological studies from many other parts of the  
>> world. (India may be "different", as Indologists often say, but  
>> not *that* different.)
>>
>> The Indus left thousands of short symbol strings behind on many  
>> types of materials, not just "seals" -- pots, potsherds, metal  
>> plates, weapons, molded terracotta tablets, incised shells, cones  
>> and rods, etc. -- the same kinds of materials on which other  
>> civilizations (including those that routinely wrote on perishable  
>> materials) left thousands of *long* texts behind. This is  
>> especially true of potsherds, which were among the most prevalent  
>> writing materials in the ancient world, since they were far  
>> cheaper than rather expensive perishable materials (including  
>> cloth). You have to have an explanation for that, and of course  
>> for all the missing texts, and without one the traditional "Indus  
>> script" thesis quite frankly isn't credible.
>>