The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis : The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization

Archaeologists have long claimed the Indus Valley as one of the four literate centers of the early ancient world, complete with long texts written on perishable materials. We demonstrate the impossibility of the lost-manuscript thesis and show that Indus symbols were not even evolving in linguistic directions after at least 600 years of use. Suggestions as to how Indus symbols were used are noted in nonlinguistic symbol systems in the Near East that served key religious, political, and social functions without encoding speech or serving as formal memory aids. Evidence is reviewed that the Harappans’ lack of a true script may have been tied to the role played by their symbols in controlling large multilinguistic populations; parallels are drawn to the later resistance of Brahmin elites to the literate encoding of Vedic sources and to similar phenomena in esoteric traditions outside South Asia. Discussion is provided on some of the political and academic forces that helped sustain the Indusscript myth for over 130 years and on ways in which our findings transform current views of the Indus Valley and of literacy in the ancient world in general. Background of the Indus-script thesis Ever since the first Harappan seal was discovered in 1872-3, it has been nearly universally assumed that Indus inscriptions were tightly bound to language, the grounds of every major decipherment effort (Possehl 1996) and a requirement of writing according to most linguists who specialize in scripts (DeFrancis 1989; Daniels and Bright 1996; Sproat 2000). Extensive efforts have been spent over the past 130 years in attempts to identify the supposed language (or languages) underlying the inscriptions, which are often said to hold the key to understanding India’s earliest civilization (fl. c. 2600 1900 BCE). A partial list of the scripts or languages that have been tied to the inscriptions include Brahmi (ancestor of most modern South Asian scripts), the Chinese Lolo (or Yi) script, Sumerian, Egyptian, proto-Elamite, Altaic, Hittite, protoDravidian, early Indo-Aryan (or even Vedic Sanskrit), proto-Munda, Old Slavic, Easter Island rongorongo, or some lost language or putative Indus lingua franca. Starting in 1877, over a hundred claimed decipherments have made it to print; thorough debunkings of past efforts have 1 Contact information: Steve Farmer, Ph.D., Portola Valley, California, saf@safarmer.com; Richard Sproat, Departments of Linguistics and Electrical and Computer Engineering, the University of Illinois and the Beckman Institute, rws@uiuc.edu; Michael Witzel, Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, witzel@fas.harvard.edu. 2 We can leave aside here loose definitions of ‘scripts’ (e.g., Boone and Mignolo 1994: esp. 13 ff.) that include mnemonic systems like Mexican-style ‘picture writing’, Incan khipu, or Iroquois wampum, or early accounting scripts that were not tightly coupled to oral language (Damerow 1999). As noted below, the Indus system cannot be categorized as a ‘script’ even under such broad definitions of the term, since the brevity of the inscriptions alone suggests that they were no more capable of performing extensive mnemonic or accounting functions than of systematically encoding speech. On the multiple uses of the symbols, beyond the comments at the end of this paper, see the extended analysis in Farmer and Weber (forthcoming). FARMER, SPROAT, AND WITZEL 20 not kept new ones from taking their place (Possehl 1996; Witzel and Farmer 2000). Speculation regarding ‘lost’ Indus manuscripts began in the 1920s, when Sir John Marshall and his colleagues created a global sensation by comparing Indus civilization to the high-literate societies of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Elam (cf. Marshall 1924, 1931; Sayce 1924; Gadd and Smith 1924; Hunter 1929). The view that the Indus Valley was home to a literate civilization has been taken for granted ever since by nearly all historians, linguists, and Indus archaeologists (e.g., Kenoyer 1998; Possehl 2002a). Occasional skepticism on this point is not noted even in passing in book-length critiques of past decipherment efforts (Possehl 1996) or standard reviews of deciphered or undeciphered scripts (Daniels and Bright 1996; Pope 1999; Robinson 2002). So far as most researchers are concerned, the image of a literate Indus Valley is an incontrovertible historical fact. If that image were true, it should be noted, given the vast extent of its archaeological ruins, the Indus civilization would have qualified as the largest literate society in the early ancient world — underlining the importance of the Indus-script story not only for ancient Indian history, but for human history as a whole. Dravidian and Indo-Aryan models International expectations that a scientific decipherment was at hand reached their heights in the late 1960s, when a high-profile Soviet research team led by Yuri Knorozov, whose early work led to the later decipherment of Mayan, and a team of Finnish linguists and computer scientists led by the Indologist Asko Parpola, independently claimed that computer analyses of Indus sign positions had “proven” that the inscriptions encoded some early form of Dravidian (Knorozov 1965, 1968; Parpola, Koskenniemi, Parpola, and Aalto 1969), ancestor of over two dozen languages whose modern use is mainly restricted to central and southern India. The early Finnish announcements, which were much bolder than those of the Soviets, were accompanied by sample decipherments and claims that the “secret of the Indus script” or Indus “code” had been broken (Parpola, Koskenniemi, Parpola, and Aalto 1969: 50; Parpola 1970: 91). The appeal of this solution to Dravidian nationalists, the novelty in the 60s of computer linguistics, and fresh memories of the role played by sign positions in deciphering Linear B made the Dravidian thesis the dominant model of the inscriptions for the next three decades. It is easy in retrospect to spot the flaws in those claims: statistical regularities in sign positions show up in nearly all symbol systems, not just those that encode speech; moreover, 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 3 Even John Chadwick, Michael Ventris’ collaborator in deciphering Linear B, was briefly convinced by the Finnish announcements, whose effects on later Indus studies cannot be overemphasized; see Clauson and Chadwick (1969, 1970). Ironically, Walter Fairservis, who at the time came close to being the first major researcher to abandon linguistic views of the inscriptions (see Fairservis 1971: 282), was apparently converted by those announcements, and in the last 20 years of his life became one of the most extreme of would-be decipherers. Cf. Fairservis 1971: 282; 1987; 1992 and the summary discussion at http://www.safarmer.com/indus/fairservis.html. THE COLLAPSE OF THE INDUS-SCRIPT THESIS 21 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 in the nineteenth century to Hrozn ̆ (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 ‘positionalstatistical 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. The failure of the Dravidian model to generate verifiable linguistic readings of a single Indus sign has renewed claims in the last two decades that the inscriptions encoded some early form of Indo-Aryan or even Vedic Sanskrit (cf., e.g., Rao 1982; Kak 1988; Jha and Rajaram 2000), reviving a thesis that can be traced to the first attempt to decipher an Indus seal (Cunningham 1877). One corollary of recent versions of these claims is the suggestion that Indo-Aryan was native to India and not a later import from Central Asia, as historical linguists have argued for over 150 years on the basis of sound changes, word lending, and related developments in Central Asian, Iranian, and Indian languages (for recent discussions, see Witzel 1999, 2003). A second corollary, 4 On Lacouperie, who introduced the first faked evidence into the Indus-script story, see Farmer 2003. On other forgeries, most importantly Rajaram’s infamous ‘horse seal’, see Witzel and Farmer 2000. 5 Recent variations of these claims, which lay at the center of the Soviet and Finnish ‘decipherments’, show up in Mahadevan 1986, Wells 1999, and many others. Two points here merit special comment. The first is that positional regularities in Indus inscriptions are similar to those seen in countless non-linguistic sign systems, including the Near Eastern emblem systems discussed later and even modern highway and airport signs displaying multiple icons (for illustrations, see Farmer 2004a: 17-8). Similar com