ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF VEDIC STUDIES (EJVS) Vol. 11 (2004) Issue 2 (December 13) : 19-57 (©) ISSN 1084-7561 Editor's note This issue discusses a critical problem related to the beginnings of the Vedic period: the supposed literate nature of the pre-Vedic Harappan (or Indus) civilization (c. 2600-1900 BCE). The (Rg)vedic texts contain a large number of words derived from pre-Vedic substrate languages that refer to nature, village life, agriculture, music, and folk religion (see EJVS 5-1, 1999). Therefore, it would be of great interest to have access to any texts of preceding cultures in order to expand on our knowledge of the genesis of early Indian civilization. However, as argued in this issue, it is no longer tenable to claim that the thousands of Indus inscriptions on 'seals', small tablets, and over a dozen other media represent the systematic encoding of spoken language, let alone to imagine 'lost' Indus literature. The degree to which hints of language substrates may lay hidden in less systematic puns involving Indus symbols is a matter of debate. We must now seek other approaches to studying Indus symbols. This topic will be explored in a forthcoming paper by S. Farmer, S. Weber, et al., discussed in latter sections of the present article, that looks at regional and temporal variations in Indus sign use in different classes of inscribed objects. The resistance to writing of the Harappans (also apparent in the contemporary Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex and other nearby urban civilizations), in spite of their many centuries of contacts with Mesopotamian writing, is of considerable interest to Vedicists, given the post-Indus stress on oral composition and transmission seen in the Rgveda, in later Vedic texts, and in early Sanskrit literature. This topic will be explored in a future paper by M. Witzel, S. Farmer and G. Thompson, that proposes a new model of the dating and canonization of the Vedas. A discussion of the topics presented in the current issue of EJVS is scheduled to appear in SCIENCE Magazine on Dec. 17, 2004. M.W. ======================================================================== EJVS Vol. 11, Issue 2 : 19-57 The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization By Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel Abstract 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 of how Indus inscriptions were used are examined in nonlinguistic symbol systems in the Near East that served important 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 priestly 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 academic and political forces that helped sustain the Indus-script myth for over 130 years and on ways in which our findings transform current views of the Indus Valley and of the place of writing in ancient civilizations in general. The paper is available at: http://www.safarmer.com/fsw2.pdf http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm (fsw2.pdf) and, of course, the EJVS website: http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/issues.html A discussion of the present paper is scheduled to appear in SCIENCE Magazine on Dec. 17, 2004. ======================================================================== COLOPHON Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies ======================= Editor-in-Chief: Michael Witzel, Harvard University Managing Editor: Enrica Garzilli, University of Macerata Assistant Editor: Makoto Fushimi, Harvard University Technical Assistance: Ludovico Magnocavallo, Milano Editorial Board: Madhav Deshpande University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Harry Falk Freie Universitaet Berlin Yasuke Ikari Kyoto University Boris Oguibenine University of Strasbourg Asko Parpola University of Helsinki ------------------------------------------------------------------------ email: ejvs-list@shore.net http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs witzel@fas.harvard.edu European mirror: http://www.asiatica.org or http://www.asiatica.org/publications/ejvs/ (©) COPYRIGHT NOTICE ISSN 1084-7561 The Materials in this journal are copyrighted. 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