Harappan script

[Dean Michael Anderson]

  > On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 3:59 PM, Steve Farmer <saf at safarmer.com> wrote:
   
 >>I'm convinced that the issue *can* be definitively settled this
 way. We have tried the other ways (e.g. the Conference funded in part 
by the National Science Foundation and the American Linguistic Society 
that Richard Sproat and I organized at Stanford in 2007, etc.) without 
luck, since we couldn't get Asko at the time to agree to the 
point-by-point discussion 
>>

Are the conference findings available anywhere? Or is there at least a detailed summary of the points discussed by both sides?

I've been able to locate some criticism of the FSW theory but haven't found any in-depth discussion supporting FSW by other experts in the field. Even the criticism has generally been more impressionistic than detailed.

I agree with Steve that something like a Current Anthropology discussion would be valuable. I fear, however, that while it would be very illuminating, it might still be inconclusive.
 So far I still agree with Greg Possehl's conclusion in his book, Indus Age: The Writing System -- there is a need for more basic research before we can know for sure. Ideally this would be free of
 assumptions about which language, or non-language, it represents.

Even then it may elude us. I don't think we should try to rush to a final conclusion. These things take their own time and it may be left for a future generation to finally unravel the mystery. The discussion is valuable, nevertheless, if only to clarify the issues.

To address the original question, here is a basic list of books on the subject. There's lots more but these are important to know about.

Parpola, Asko, 2000. Deciphering the Indus script.
Also his 3 volumes of: Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions.
More of his publications are at: http://www.helsinki.fi/~aparpola/index.html

Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel. The collapse of the Indus-script thesis: The myth of a literate Harappan civilization.      
 http://www.safarmer.com/fsw2.pdf

Possehl, Gregory. The Indus Age: The Writing System.

Iravatham Mahadevan. The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables.

Bryan K. Wells. 2011. Epigraphic approaches to Indus writing.


Best,

Dean





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