Steve Farmer Go to article downloads. Below is visual evidence to illustrate a post I made on the private ScholarlyServices List (primarily made up of Indologists) on 3 April 2004. The original post, slightly edited, is included for convenience: Naga Ganesan quotes Possehl on the unicorn: pg. 131, G. Possehl, The Indus civ., a contemporaryperspective, 2002…
M-6 a from Mohenjo-daro. Actual width approximately 5.5 cm — about twice the size of the average ‘unicorn’ seal. H-129 a from Harappa. Actual width is approximately 6.4 cm. M-1188 a, from Mohenjo-daro. Originally part of a very large seal. Estimated size of original size approximately 5 cm.
The Illiterate Harappans, No. 1 – the first of a series of illustrated mini-essays on the Indus symbol system Text © 2001 Steve Farmer Below left. King Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria (9th century BCE), pointing to symbols of his patron gods. Some of the same symbols are suspended from his necklace and worn around his wrists as…
The longest Indus ‘inscription’ (if that’s the right word) on a single flat surface is M-314, which contains 17 non-repeating symbols. Like all but one Indus ‘inscription’, it is tiny – just how tiny is clear when we compare M-314 with a proto-Elamite inscription. Indus-script adherents sometimes claim (usually quickly, and without much discussion) that the…
It is important never to rely on the linear representations of Indus inscriptions found in concordances, catalogs, and studies of Indus symbols, since these often badly distort the data. Five Cases of ‘Dubious Writing’ in Indus Inscriptions (1.6 Megs), pp. 4 and 16, give illustrations of typical types of mistranscriptions and questionable conflations of signs in…
In a recent online post at Sepia Media, Bryan Wells writes (of Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel 2004): They say there are no evidence (sic) for perishable texts in the Indus Corpus. This is not true. We have the impression on the back of a clay sealing of a text that was carved on a wooden…
Return to Steve Farmer article download page 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…
Not one ancient literate civilization is known — including those that wrote routinely on perishable materials — that didn’t also leave long texts behind on durable materials. That’s all it takes to refute the 130-year-old Indus-script myth — and it is only one of numerous obvious arguments. Despite the fact that the Indus symbols were…
in Conjunction with the Publication of The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization (PDF) (Text of the Prize Offering fixed in December 2004; Webpage formatting updated February 2007) Prize Announcement Turn up just one Indus inscription that contains at least 50 symbols distributed in the outwardly random-appearing ways typical of…