Indus Script fish, ficus hieroglyph-multiplexes as hypertext metalwork catalogues. An interlude from a polemical excursus.

 loa 'ficus' +kolom 'three' Rebus: loh kolimi 'copper smithy/forge'

h598

large mineral ingots from smithy/forge-furnace

Mohenjodaro. Tablet.

Potsherd. Amri. Fish. Stars. 

aya 'fish' Rebus: aya, ayas 'iron, metal' PLUS meḍha 'polar star' (Marathi). meḍ 'iron' (Ho.Mu.) 

Santali glosses. Lexis.

Inscribed pot. Fish. Nal. South Baluchistan. aya 'fish' Rebus: aya, ayas 'iron, metal'

aya 'fish' Rebus: aya, ayas 'iron, metal'

The Indus script as proto-writing

Asko Parpola (July 14, 2011)

It is widely agreed that the Archaic Sumerian script or "Proto-Cuneiform" is the world's oldest writing system, used in the  Late Uruk Period (Uruk strata IV and III, c. 3400-3000 BCE).  It was  used as an administrative tool to record on clay tablets such matters  as grain distribution, land, animal and personnel management, and the  processing of fruits and cereals. "The script can be 'understood' in  some sense, but it cannot be fully read; although there has been some  doubt concerning the language that was the basis for this written  
expression, there is clear evidence that it was Sumerian" (Michalowski  
1996: 33).  Archaic Sumerian was logosyllabic writing because its signs stood for elements of a spoken language, words and morphemes,  with initially rare phonetization. It was not from the beginning able  to record everything: it took many centuries of ever increasing  phonetization for this "nuclear writing" to develop into a "full  writing" where all grammatical elements were written. Yet it is  considered "true writing", because it was a language-based system of  
visual aigns.

The Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing was certainly used in Pre-Dynastic times. The royal tomb U-j at Umm el-Qa'ab near Abydos in Upper Egypt,  dated to c 3200 BCE, contained 150 inscribed bone tags originally  attached to grave goods recording the places of origin of these goods,  as well as pottery inscriptions and sealings. These were excavated in  1988 and published ten years later (Dreyer 1998). This earliest form  of Egyptian script was already a well-formed logophonic writing  system, which can be partially understood on the basis of later  Egyptian writing. "By the early 1st Dynasty, almost all the  uniconsonantal signs are attested, as well as the use of classifiers  or determinatives, so that the writing system was in essence fully  formed even though a very limited range of material was written."  (Baines 1999: 882). "Many inscribed artifacts are preserved from the  first two Dynasties, the most numerous categories being cylinder seals  and sealings, cursive annotations on pottery, and tags originally  attached to tomb equipment, especially of the 1st Dynasty kings.  
Continuous language was still not recorded" (Baines 1999: 883). Thus  until the beginning of the Old Kingdom starting with the 3rd Dynasty  in 2686 BCE — for about 600 years equalling the duration of the Indus  Civilization — the Egyptians used a language-based, phoneticized  writing system, but did not write full sentences, only very short  texts fully comparable to the surviving texts in the Indus script.  

Early administrative documents are assumed to have existed but have  not survived (cf. Baines 1999: 884). 

When defining the Indus script as logosyllabic, I noted several  constraints to be observed in its analysis: "the linguistic elements  that are expected to correspond to the signs are morphemes rather than  phonemes. Secondly, all of the morphemes pronounced in the spoken  Indus language may not, and are not even likely to, have a counterpart  in its written form. In the third place, all preserved Indus  inscriptions are very short, appearing on objects like seals, which  are not so likely to contain even normal sentences, with such basic  
constituents as a verbal predicate or an object, let alone complex  sentences." (Parpola 1994: 89).  This was before Damerow (1999)  suggested the term 'proto-writing' for the earliest, linguistically  incomplete notations (cf. Houston ed. 2004: 11); on these earliest  writing systems see especially Houston ed. 2004.

In my opinion Farmer, Sproat and Witzel (2004: 19 and 33) err when  they suggest that "the Indus system cannot be categorized as 'script'  ... capable of systematically encoding speech", and that it "cannot  even be comfortably labeled as a 'proto-script', but apparently  belonged to a different class of symbols."  Their principal arguments,  the shortness of Indus texts, their restriction to only a few text  types, and the long duration (c 600 years) of this stage of script  evolution, are effectively annulled by what is said above about the  early Sumerian and Egyptian scripts. For their other arguments I refer  
to an earlier paper of mine (Parpola 2008).

George Hart wrote yesterday (13 July 2011): "None of this proves or  disproves that the fish symbol might have been pronounced [in  Dravidian]  mīṉ. Steve Farmer wrote in reply (13 July 2011): Probably  one of the silliest claims ever made about the symbols, with no  evidence whatsoever to back it. My reply: there is actually a lot of  evidence to back it (see Parpola 1994: 179-272; and new evidence in  Parpola 2009). Due to a complete lack of bilinguals, it is very  
difficult to verify sign interpretations, but not altogether  impossible. Perhaps the most important test stone is supplied by the  nominal compounds actually existing in languages that are historically  likely to be related to the Harappan language: these can be compared  to Harappan sign sequences that can be pictorially interpreted and  perhaps deciphered with the help of linguistically acceptable  homophonies (used in all early scripts for phonetication: the rebus  
puns). The accumulation of iconically acceptable, systematic and interconnected interpretations can eliminate chance coincidences in a process comparable to filling cross-word puzzles.

References:

Baines, John, 1999. Writing: invention and early development. Pp.882-885 in: Kathryn A. Bard (ed.), Encyclopedia of the archaeology of  ancient Egypt. London and New York: Routledge.

Dreyer, Günter, 1998. Umm el-Qaab I: Das prädynastische Königsgrab U-j  
und seine frühen Schriftzeugnisse. (Archäologische Veröffentlichungen 86.) Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern.

Farmer, Steve, Richard Sproat and Michael Witzel, 2004. The collapse  
of the Indus-scrpt thesis: The myth of a literate Harappan civilization: Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 11 (2): 19-57.

Houston, Stephen (ed.), 2004. The first writing: Script invention as  history and process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Michalowski, Piotr, 1996. Mesopotamian cuneiform: Origins. Pp. 33-36 in: Peter T. Danies & William Bright (eds.), The world's writing  systems. New York: Oxford University Press.

Parpola, Asko, 1994. Deciphering the Indus script. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Parpola, Asko, 2008. Is the Indus script indeed not a writing system? (Pp. 111-131 in: Airavati: Felicitation volume in honour of Iravatham  Mahadevan, Chennai: Varalaaru.com. Downloadable from www.harappa.com

Parpola, Asko, 2009. 'Hind leg' + 'fish': Towards further understanding of the Indus script. Scripta 1: 37-76. (Downloadable at  www.harappa.com)

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