[INDOLOGY] Most recent iteration of the same claim

[Steve Farmer]

Hi Agnes,

You write:

> Just to remind ourselves of this paper (which for me personally settles the matter)
> https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/ejvs/article/view/620 (oddly, the links don’t seem to work?).

You can download a copy of our long 2004 paper (Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel, “The Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization,” 2004) with links that work from this URL:

https://safarmer.com/files/fsw3.pdf

The paper has been downloaded several million times from different servers since we published it 21 years ago. Michael, Richard, and I are still sent pseudo-decipherments of the symbols regularly — supposedly in Sanskrit (thousand years before it existed), Tamil (hence MK Stalin’s amusing but safely unwinnable $1 million dollar prize). 

In the paper we discussed dozens of ways that demonstrate that the Indus symbol system was nonlinguistic — which (given what Turing in the 1930s taught us about Turing machines) means that if you add enough ad hoc rules to your pseudo-decipherment algorithm you can “decipher” any strings of Indus symbols (or random marks on lavatory walls, if you prefer) into any language you want. You could even “prove” the Harappans were writing computer code, presumably to guide their Musk-like flying machines. :)

Hence, as we wrote on pp. 2-3 of our paper (pp. 20-21 following the original pagination), while discussing early failed decipherment attempts:

> ...third-millennium scripts typically omitted so much phonetic, grammatical, and semantic data, and used the same signs in so many varied (or ‘polyvalent’) ways, that even when we are certain that a body of signs encoded speech, it is impossible to identify the underlying language solely from such positional data. Conversely, by exploiting the many degrees of freedom in the ways that speech maps to scripts, it is possible by inventing enough rules as you go to generate half-convincing pseudo-decipherments of any set of ancient signs into any language — even when those signs did not encode language in the first place. The absurdity of this method only becomes obvious when it is extended to large bodies of inscriptions, and the number of required rules reaches astronomical levels; hence the tendency of claimed decipherments to provide only ‘samples’ of their results, prudently restricting the number of rules to outwardly plausible levels. The subtleties of the speech-to-text mapping problem are illustrated by the long line of world-famous linguists and archaeologists, from Cunningham and Terrien de Lacouperie (4) in the nineteenth century to Hrozný (the chief decipherer of Hittite) and Fairservis in the twentieth, who convinced themselves over long periods that they had successfully deciphered the system — in over a half dozen different languages. It should finally be noted that claimed ‘positional-statistical regularities’ in Indus inscriptions, which have played a key role in the Indus-script thesis since G.R. Hunter’s 1929 doctoral thesis, have been grossly exaggerated, and can only be maintained by ignoring or rationalizing countless exceptions to the claimed rules. (5)
> 
> Our long footnote 5, which I won’t elaborate on here, discusses among other things why, if you WERE to take ‘positional-statistical regularities’ seriously, Sanskrit and Dravidian and Munda lwould in fact be ruled out as target languages. Alas for Hindutva decipherers of all stripes, from Jha/Rajaram on (see Witzel and Farmer, “Horseplay in Harappa,” 2000).
> 
> Best,
> Steve

> On Mar 10, 2025, at 8:46 AM, KORN Agnes via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
>  
> Just to remind ourselves of this paper (which for me personally settles the matter)
> https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/ejvs/article/view/620 (oddly, the links don’t seem to work?).
>  
> Best wishes,
> Agnes
>  
> _____
> INDOLOGY mailing list
> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info <mailto:INDOLOGY at list.indology.info>
> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology

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