'Indus script' decipherment by Steve Farmer

[Guest guest]

Steve Farmer wrote: ...go to http://www.safarmer.com/downloads and

go through slideshow #1 or my notes from my last Harvard Indology

Roundtable lecture.

 

I did; and carefully studied all the links where he claims that the

Harappans were not literate and proceeds to claim his own

decipherment of the 'Indus script' and observes: "...Parallels are

drawn to the resistance by the later Brahmin elites to the literate

encoding of Vedic traditions...those inscriptions may have survived

long enough in oral form to be absorbed in later Vedic texts, where

they syncretically fused with Indo-Aryan traditions entering India

from the Northwest."

 

I would not like to comment on this claim or the observations. I

would only present an alternative view and invite the attention of

members to the following slide show (pdf format 9 mb) which may be

downloaded at http://www.hindunet.org/saraswati/bharatiyo.pdf

 

In summary, the message is that the writing system was used by metal

artisan guilds -- bharatiyo, 'caster of metals' -- of the

civilization to record possessions (as Egyptian hieroglyphs were

used) such as: minerals, metals and furnaces.

 

Dr. S. Kalyanaraman