Walter Fairservis
and Indus Symbols
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In the last 20 years of his life, Walter
Fairservis joined the ranks of a long line of distinguished
researchers who concluded their careers in quixotic attempts
to decipher the 'Indus script.' Fairservis' instincts as an
archaeologist were too acute to lead him to mistake the Harappans
for a truly literate people: he was nearly alone in his period
in rejecting fantasies of Indus 'scribes' producing books on
perishable materials. By the end of his life he adopted the
strange compromise that the Harappans possessed a full syllabary
but restricted it almost exclusively to making short inscriptions
on seals.
Interestingly, in a stray paragraph in an
early survey of ancient India, Fairservis came close to being
the first major researcher to break with linguistic views of
the signs. The remarkable passage cited below from one of the
great archaeologists of the twentieth century has been forgotten,
and it is a pleasure to quote it in full. It was apparently
written in the late 1960s, but did not make it to print until
several years later:
Seal writing is not necessarily writing derived
from the oral language. It has its own meanings and in effect
need not have verb, adjective, or adverb. Rather it may be
simply a kind of label specifying the individual or his god,
house, or belongings, much as a heraldic device uses iconographic
elements limited in number in countless ways to name the
individual or an institution. Except for the numbers, which
suggest bookkeeping and thus more mundane motivations one
cannot help but feel that the Harappan script is of this
character. It appears to be a script a full step above the
potters' marks of pre-Harappan times but below the complexity
of early hieroglyphic Egyptian or Sumerian which was already
ideographic. The script has little preamble except possibly
in the potters' marks. Throughout its known history it shows
little or no change and disappears with the Harappans and
their seals. Though it is writing in one sense, it does not
appear to have been much more meaningful to the Indus people
than the repeated motifs that appear on their pottery. However,
tomorrow's shoveling may reveal a room full of tablets and
change this so limited interpretation (The Roots of Ancient
India, New York 1971: 282).
Leaving aside Fairservis' remarks on bookkeeping,
which can now be disproven, and his odd comments on how the
Harappans viewed their symbols, there is much that is prescient
in this passage. Peculiarly, however, the passage is surrounded
by others that claim that Indus inscriptions were syllabic
in nature, suggesting that the passage was written shortly
before Fairservis reverted to older linguistic models of the
inscriptions. As suggested in a paragraph he eventually placed
right before this one, what changed his mind were not finds
of rooms filled with tablets — none were forthcoming — but
the spectacular public announcement of a breakthrough by the
Finnish group led by Asko Parpola, who in 1969 announced that
his group had harnessed the infant field of computer science
to prove that the 'language' of the inscriptions was proto-Dravidian.
The fact that the Soviet team made similar claims in roughly
the same period reinforced Fairservis' about face — sending
him on his twenty-year odd quest to 'decipher' what his own
archaeological instincts suggested and much evidence today
can confirm wasn't a script in the first place.
The story of Indus inscriptions over the
past 130 years provides a cautionary tale of how early failures
to test historical assumptions can lead research down dead
ends for many decades. The initial Director General of the
Archaeological Survey of India, Alexander Cunningham, published
the first Indus seal in the mid 1870s; within two years, on
the basis of one mutilated six-sign inscription, he declared
the 'script' on the seal to be an early form of Brahmi. Five
years later, the first of many forgeries that play a role in
the Indus story was foisted on the public by the famed comparative
linguist and Sinologist Terrien de Lacouperie, who plugged
for a Chinese or Indo-Chinese tribal origins for the new-found
'script' (on Cunningham's seal and this first forgery, see
the PDF file [1 Meg] at http://www.safarmer.com/firstforgery.pdf.)
The result was that by 1882 the long Indus
'decipherment' comedy was already in full swing. It is interesting
to speculate about how the field would have evolved if from
the start anyone had asked one simple and obvious question: "Are
these really linguistic signs? And, if so, how can we tell?" It
is sobering to realize that if that question had been posed
even once by one influential early researcher, much of our
current understanding of ancient history — and even Indian
political discourse, in which the myth of a literate Indus
Valley plays a significant part — might be radically
different.
©2003, 2004 Steve Farmer
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