How to discuss a civilization based on a journalist’s report in Science magazine (June 2008)
How to discuss a civilization based on a journalist’s report in Science magazine (June 2008)
Some discussions on an anti-Hindu hate group. It is amazing that these ‘experts’ should discuss a civilization without even referring to River Sarasvati and 80% sites (about 2000) on this river basin of the same civilization.
kalyanaraman
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10282
9 June 2008
Dear List,
Over the weekend I worked through the articles in this week's
_Science_ magazine on Indus archaeology. They include one major
article and a half dozen sidebar stories. All the stories are
credited to Andrew Lawler, a reporter who writes often in _Science_
on archaeology (see point #10 below). You can get the articles from
this link:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/320/5881/1276
I can send a PDF (2 Megs) of the stories off-List to any researcher
who can't access them.
A number of people have asked for my reactions to the articles. I've
given ten numbered points below. The post is long, for which I
apologize, since I've tried to back my criticisms with verifiable
evidence. I've also included links to further evidence.
1. The most useful part of the articles in my opinion is found in the
concluding sidebar stories, which cover some of the political issues
that affect Indus archaeology. These include the negative impact that
Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) has long had on the field; problems raised by
the India/Pakistan conflict; and topics involving looting and
destructions of Indus sites. I was happy to see Lawler discuss the
Hindutva problem, which I first alerted him to in 2004, when he was
writing a long article on the work by me, Sproat, and Witzel on the
Indus symbols.
2. Lawler doesn't take up the Indus inscription issue again in these
articles, but limits himself to pointing out that the Indus Valley
has yielded no texts and that the "script" was used "chiefly on small
seals, and some scholars believe it was not a script at all (Science,
17 December 2004, p. 2026)" -- an allusion to "Collapse of the Indus
Script Thesis". An update would
have been useful, since support for our model has grown steadily
among linguists and Indus archaelogists (also Iranian archaeologists,
including Daniel Potts) over the last four years. Moreover, our
thesis has since expanded: we now think we can show that a
massive "No Script Zone" existed from the 3rd millennium BCE down to
the start of the 1st millennium at a minimum from Central Asia to the
Indus Valley to the Gulf region and (pace Yousef Madjidzadeh, on whom
below) the Iranian plateau. All these are regions that according to
Lawler's article were in trade contact with the Indus and the
literate cultures of the Near East. Michael and I have committed to
writing a paper on the "No Script Zone" idea sometime in the next few
months. We hope to consult with Potts too, who has kindly offered
to help "on the Iranian side" of things in respect to our work. For
now on this issue, and on our views of the uses of of Indus
inscriptions, which transcend the "script" issue, see this abstract
of a paper given in Japan a few years ago (Farmer, Weber, Barela, and
Witzel 2005):
http://www.safarmer.com/indus/Kyoto.pdf
3. While the political coverage in Lawler's new articles is useful,
on archaeological issues the results are mixed. Lawler relies heavily
on a number of myths that have been used to hype Indus civilization
for decades, and sometimes takes them one step further. Despite his
criticisms of Hindu nationalists, ironically many of the myths about
the civilization that he passes on (I assume unwittingly) are favorites
in the nationalist camps.
The sensationalism of the article starts with the title and
opening lines:
> BORING NO MORE, A TRADE-SAVY INDUS EMERGES
>
> Long in the shadow of its sister civilizations in the west, the
> Indus is emerging as the powerhouse of commerce and technology
> in the 3rd millennium B.C.E.
Nothing in the archaeological record comes close to justifying these
claims. Are we really supposed to believe that the sophistication of
Indus commerce and technology surpassed that of the Mesopotamians and
Egyptians? Here I'll focus just on the technology claim. My comments
on Lawler's representations of Indus trade are found in point #8 below.
What evidence can be cited to support the claim that Indus
civilization was "the powerhouse" of 3rd millennium BCE technology?
To back this claim Lawler relies on a familiar argument that has long
been a favorite of Hindutva apologists -- that the Indus were
supposedly masters of technological standardization. As Lawler
puts it in one of many similar passages:
> the Indus penchant for precise standardization -- from tiny weights
> to bricks to houses to entire cities -- was unique in the early
> historic period.
Claims like this have been examined often on the List in the past and
have been shown to be spurious. The following three points deal with
easily debunked claims concerning standardized Indus weights,
bricks, and cities.
4. On the myth of standardized weights: this was discussed in a long
thread back in 2006. The urban myth that Indus weights were
standardized and perfectly proportioned derives from gross distortions
of data on Indus weights gathered by A.S. Hemmy in the 1920s from
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. You can look at Hemmy's original data in this
scan of his original results, which were published in 1938. I've added
some explanatory comments in the margins:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/weightchart.jpg
During our 2006 discussions I took Hemmy's data and put them in two
graphs, looking specifically at weights ranging from 13-15 grams and
26-29 grams. (I picked these as examples since one part of the myth
is that weights in this upper range should be exactly twice the
weight of those in the lower one.) The evidence demonstrates that the
distribution of weights in these samples was anything BUT
standardized. Indeed, the values were almost random. Here are the
results, which include all published data:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.13-15.gms.jpg
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.26-29.gms.jpg
As soon as I posted those data, Richard Meadow, Co-Director of the
Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP), sent me unpublished
data on all weights excavated from 1986-2001 from Harappa. These new
data were discussed in messages to the List posted on 26-27 December
2006. The data Richard had collected from Harappan weights again
indicated that the old story of standardized weights from the Indus
Valley is an urban myth. Both Richard Meadow and Mark Kenoyer (who
has in fact given at least one talk on the Harappa data) were
interviewed by Lawler for the articles published on Friday. The old
myths about the "standardization" of weights in Lawler's article
would have been caught by either of them if they or anyone else
knowledgeable had been allowed to fact-check the articles. But as
several of us know from experience, Lawler doesn't allow his sources
to fact check his articles, and they are typically laced with inaccuracies.
5. The "standardized brick" claim is just as spurious. Claims that
Indus bricks were standardized has again long been a staple of Hindu
nationalist mythology. The most usual claim (there are several
variants) is that Indus bricks were standardized in neat and
mathematical 1 x 2 x 4 proportions. Again, the story has been
repeated for decades, but it is easy to demonstrate that it is
empirically false. Here, for example, is a scan of four key pages
from Marshall 1931, the locus classicus of early discussions of this
issue. Marshall in fact distinguished 15 (!) different sized bricks
in Mohenjo-daro. Not ONE of those 15 types have 1 x 2 x 4 proportions
or anything close. See Marshall's measurements in the charts in
the following pages:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/bricks.pdf
Ironically, given the supposed mathematical acuity of the Indus
wisemen, you don't even find even-sized bricks in the so-called
"Great Bath" at Mohenjo-daro. This is particularly damaging evidence
since according at least to popular opinion (again unevidenced and
totally speculative) the "Great Bath" was supposedly a religious
facility. Marshall measured the bricks in the "Great Bath" in the
1920s, and eventually wrote elsewhere in the excavation report (1931,
vol. 1, p. 131):
> [The Great Bath] is constructed of specially cut bricks of varying
> sizes ranging from 10.15 x 5.1 x 2.2 in. to 11 x 5.15 x 2.25 in. It is
> evident that the bricks, which in the first places were moulded, were
> not cut down to a definite size; they vary particularly in length and
> breadth.
If you move on from excavation reports from Mohenjo-daro and look at
those from Harappa (e.g., in Vats 1940: Vol. 1, page 12, footnote 1)
you will find that the bricks measured in early Indus excavations
were different from those found at Mohenjo-daro. You'll also find
that NONE of them measured by Vats had 1 x 2 x 4 proportions.
You can even falsify the "standardized" brick claim by looking at the
picture in Lawler's article on p. 1279. Magnify the picture of the
brick wall you find there and you'll see that it is composed of a
wide assortment of bricks of many different sizes.
6. What about those standardized "houses" and "whole cities" that
Lawler claims as being "unique in the early historic period"? The
same story. The claim of standardization here is even contradicted in
Lawler's own article, in which at one point (momentarily forgetting
the standardization claim) he quotes one archaeologist who emotes
over the "tremendous amount of variety" found in Indus society. In
any event, despite being endless repeated, the story of standardization
of Indus houses and "whole cities" is as spurious as the claims of
standardization in Indus weights and bricks.
7. Lawler's article also gives us a familiar dose of Indus myths
that suggest possible long-range continuities between Indus and far
later "Hindu" deities or Indian religious practices. At one point he
evokes the long-ago debunked story raised by Marshall in
the 1920s concerning "proto-Siva" figures shown on a number of seals
and tablets. These figures show a divine being of some sort, often
with horns and plants on its head, sitting in what Marshall (and now
Lawler) represents as a "yogic" position -- thousands of years before
we have any evidence of yogic postures. (Early yogic texts from 2,000
years or so after the fall of Indus civilization in fact contained no
discussion of postures at all.)
In the last few years this myth too has been thoroughly debunked on
the List in discussions that have included extensive visual evidence.
The discussion culminated one year ago when in a summary post Michael
Witzel posted a new example of this figure on a broken tablet
recently found in Ganweriwala. Most importantly on the "yogic" part
of this argument, it is important to note that close examination of
photos of all known instances of these figures show that NONE of the
hands in the figures even come close to resting on the knees. (You
can even see this in the photo that Lawler includes in his article,
if you use a magnifying glass.) Their arms, which are heavily
bangled, instead hang out a bit like branches, which makes perfect
sense when you consider the trees or branches often found on their
heads, which are common signs of gods (apparently agricultural) in
the Indus Valley.
Rather than summarize all this again on the List, here is Michael's
message showing the newly discovered Ganweriwala tablet along with
links to other related images I had posted earlier:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/7063
Marshall's claims concerning "proto-Siva" figures have been debunked
many times before. But despite this, those claims remain important to
Hindu nationalists because of the supposed continuities that those
figures (supposedly) suggest between Indus and later "Hindu" deities.
This allows them to pretend that India has been "Hindu" since the
earliest times.
Why didn't anyone whom Lawler interviewed inform him of this problem?
Was the sensationalism in this old claim just too much to resist?
8. Let me turn now to Lawler's central claim -- that the Indus was
some sort of global trading "powerhouse." This too is a favorite
argument of Hindu nationalists and a few Western archaeologists. Lawler
goes even further than most of them in his hyperbole, apparently
again to add excitement to the story. He even trots out Thomas-
Friedman style "the earth is flat" corporate rhetoric, telling us a bit
embarrassingly on the first page that the Indus civilization
> was an aggressive player during humanity's first flirtation with
> globalization 5000 years.
The evidence for the Indus as a major trading power is tenuous at
best. Despite its sex appeal, claims like this have the unfortunate
result of pushing to the background a thesis that can be supported
(unlike this one) by massive evidence: that most of the economy of
Indus cities was local and agricultural (See here the tremendous work
on Indus agriculture and related topics by Steve Weber, William Belcher,
Richard Meadow, Dorian Fuller, and others in studies like those in Weber
and Belcher's _Indus Ethnobiology_, 2003). You can even use studies of
Indus symbols -- which are replete with agricultural images, but
not images of trade -- to back this thesis. A talk that Steve Weber,
Dorian Fuller, and I gave last year at UC Berkeley discussed the evidence
on this issue, which lis also discussed a bit in "Collapse".
Here is an abstract of Weber, Fuller, and Farmer 2007:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/indus.ethnobiology.pdf
I am NOT suggesting here that Indus traders didn't exist. But the
evidence suggests that the scale of Indus trade has been hyped to
death by Hindu nationalists and the handful of researchers Lawler
depended upon to build his "globalization" argument.
As evidence of long-distance trade, we have, for example, a handful of
cuneiform tablets that speak of trade with "Meluhha", which may or
may not refer to one part or another of the Indus civilization -- we
really don't know for sure. We have sparse suggestions of the origins in
the Indus Valley of some goods that apparently made it to
Mesopotamia, especially semi-precious stones. But we have no data
at all on how those goods got there. Did they come through direct
trade with the Indus? Did they come through indirect trade through
Gulf intermediaries? We don't know. On this question, out of thousands
of known Indus seals, we have a grand total of what now may be close to
50 seals that found their way out of Indus territories (most of these were
already known by the 1930s). some of these seals are cultural hybrids,
having round forms (typical of Gulf and not Indus stamp seal
types) and often display odd variants of Indus symbols. This
evidence doesn't strongly suggest that they were owned by Indus
traders. You can count on one hand the number of Indus-type seals
that are claimed to have come from Central Asia and the Iranian
plateau, a point which -- not noted by Lawler -- certainly doesn't
suggest any wide trade contacts in that direction. Most are found
instead in the Gulf and in Mesopotamia, indicating as one would
expect that whatever contact existed between Mesopotamia and the
Indus Valley took place via sea routes. But none of this gives us any
information on how those contacts were made.
Despite this ambivalent evidence, Lawler cites one confident source,
Nilofer Shaikh, of Latif University in Pakistan, who claims on the basis of
unknown evidence that
> "the Indus people were controlling the trade. They controlled the
> quarries, the trade routes, and they knew where the markets were."
> She [Lawler continues, referring to Shaikh] points out that
> although Indus artifacts spread far and wide, only a small number
> of Mesopotamian artifacts have been found at Indus sites.
How can we possibly know given the paucity of evidence who
"controlled" the trade routes? Moreover, even the claim that "only a
small number of Mesopotamian artifacts have been found at Indus
sites" may be an exaggeration. I may possibly have overlooked some
recent find, but so far as I know no one has ever turned up unambiguous
evidence of even *one* Mesopotamian artifact in Indus territories.
We don't find one cuneiform text, one seal, one seal impression --
nothing. Artifacts even of C. Asian origins are extremely scarce in Indus
territories until close to the time when the civilization fell. This
problem has long been known and presents an obvious challenge to
sensationalist claims about an imaginary "flirtation with
globalization 5000 years ago" in the Indus Valley. As we noted in
"Collapse," there is much evidence to suggest that the Indus Valley
was in fact a remarkably closed society, at least judging by the
artifactual evidence. One reason why this may be so that fits in with
our model is suggested on p. 44 of that study
, where we briefly discuss
the trade issue.
Finally it should be mentioned that Lawler's article repackages a lot
of old evidence as being novel to breath life into his globalization
argument. For example, he writes at one point about a well-known
cylinder inscription (of unknown provenance) from someplace in
Mesopotamia:
> An inscription from the late 3rd millennium B.C.E. refers to one
> Shu-ilishu, an interpreter from Meluhha, reports NYU's [Rita]
> Wright in a forthcoming book.
Besides the fact that we don't know what the historical significance
of the seal is, it is important to note that it was discovered in the
19th century, was discussed among other places by Leo Oppenheimer in
1964 in _Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization_, and
has been mulled over endlessly by Indus researchers ever since. To make
it sound like a new discovery may add a little excitement to Lawler's
article, but it is very old news, and reference to an interpreter of
an unknown language is hardly a potent argument for ancient
"globalization."
9. There are many other sensationalist but dubious or unverifiable
assertions in Lawler's article that I can't cover. These include [1]
claims by B.S. Bisht (an archaeologist and Hindu nationalist who
excavated Dholavira, but has published little formally on the site)
about a gigantic "stadium ground stretching nearly the length of
three football fields and including terraces to seat thousands of
people"; I've never met a serious researcher who has believed Bisht's
claim, but Lawler doesn't mention any skeptics; [2] really odd claims
that what since the 1920s has been assumed to be a Buddhist stupa
from a far later era found at Mohenjo-daro dates in fact to the Indus
era; one of the two named backers of this idea is the German archaeologist
Michael Jansen, who has long been one of the most fervent supporters
of the "standardization" idea, despite all the evidence to the
contrary; [3] unverifiable claims, welcome to Hindu nationalists who
long for evidence of continuity between Indus and Vedic traditions,
that Indus cities may have lingered for hundreds of years longer than
previous claimed; these claims are nearly impossible to test, since
the upper layers of Indus sites are typically heavily disturbed,
making estimations of the scale of any late habitations impossible to
estimate: what does "linger on" mean? That there was a giant
population? A few stragglers? [4] Equally unverifiable claims that
Indus urban populations "dwarfed" those of the Middle East, which I
doubt that anyone seriously believes; claims about the "1000-plus
known Indus sites" mentioned by Lawler may appear to provide
intuitive support to this idea, until we realize that most of these sites
are vanishingly small -- a fine point that Lawler doesn't mention. In
any event, the claim that the population of Indus cities "dwarfed"
those in the Middle East, which Lawler makes on his first page, is
totally off-thee-wall.
10. Finally, a bit on Lawler, whose reliability as a reporter has often been
been called into question. Lawler was one of the chief
original promoters of Yousef Madjidzadeh's huge publicity campaign
over the excavations at Jiroft in Southeast Iran. The problem of
sorting out the hyperbole from fact in respect from Jiroft will
continue for years. Lawler's part in the Jiroft hype is suggested in a
scathing article written in 2005 on Jiroft by Oscar Muscarella,
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We have discussed this article
often on the List; you can find the full article here:
http://www.bulletinasiainstitute.org/Muscarella_BAI15.pdf
Muscarella's deconstruction of the Jiroft hype came *before*
Madjidzadeh's most outrageous claims began -- that he had turned up
inscriptions at Jiroft with "writing" on it. As soon as Madjidzadeh
made those claims, Lawler picked them up and reported them in further
sensationalist articles in _Science_. After nearly two years of
skeptical discussion on the List concerning these inscriptions --
whether or not there was writing in a large civilization relatively
close to the Indus was of obvious importance to many of us -- last
year we finally got our hands on high-resolution photos of the
claimed "inscriptions." They included the following ludicrous
example, whose many linguistic absurdities were analyzed on the List
by me, Jacob Dahl, and others:
http://www.safarmer.com/Jiroft/Jiroft02.jpg
Not long after we posted these, Madjidzadeh for the first time showed
them publicly, in Ravenna, where they were widely ridiculed last
summer. At the time, Lawler began to prudently tiptoe back, which ended
in an article in early August 2007 that mentioned archaeologists at
Ravenna whispering: "Everyone is convinced they are fakes, but no one
dares say it." (Actually, a lot of us on the List had been saying it
for some time.) Lawler also cited Jacob Dahl, who had earlier implied
the same on the List, as saying in Ravenna that "no specialist in
the world would consider these to be anything but absolute fakes."
One week after the Ravenna conference, in July 2007, at a conference
we held at Stanford on "pseudo-decipherments" and similar topics,
attended by Jacob as well as me, Sproat, and Witzel, we got our
chance to say so again. But little skepticism was expressed in
Lawler's articles before we pushed the issue, and getting people to
publicly say the pieces were fakes took a long time.
Finally, many of us got a taste of Lawler's methods in December 2004
in his article on the Indus-symbol issue. To make the story more
spectacular, I was turned into a "street kid from Chicago"; the
archaeologist Greg Possehl was referred to as a linguist; and the
always cautious Richard Meadow was impossibly quoted as saying that
old Indus seals were thrown away "like expired credit cards." All
this would have been prevented if Lawler had stuck to his repeated
promises to allow fact checking of his story, which he researched for
months. Eventually, _Science_ was forced to print retractions of a
few of his errors, but who even sees such retractions? When I
questioned him about all the unnecessary factual errors in his
story, his only comment was "It could have been worse."
************
The public deserves better than what it is getting on the Indus
story. The next popular magazine that deals with the issue will
hopefully begin by discussing the long list of Indus Valley fantasies
that reach back to at least 1882 -- when the first Indus forgery
appeared. Those fantasies
have served the needs of sensationalizing researchers, political
mythologists, and parts of the popular press, but they certainly have
not served the interests of science or the public.
My apologies again for the inordinately long post!
Steve
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10312
12 June 2008
Dear List,
I want to make one final (I hope) comment on my long critique of
Lawler's articles on the Indus Valley, posted on Sunday (there is a
link there to access his articles):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10282
Part of Lawler's story involves old and easily debunked tales of
"standardized" Indus bricks, weights, city alignments, etc. I suspect
he was led down this path by the German architect-turned-
archaeologist Michael Jansen, who has pushed this story for years,
despite all the evidence that contradicts it.(I was surprised to
see how often Jansen is quoted in the article. He also shows up
a lot in a recent pop-science docudrama on the Indus Valley first
shown on German TV two weeks ago.)
Yesterday I found another really odd passage in Lawler on bricks. His
aim again is to push the quite absurd story that the Indus Valley
was technologically more advanced than ANE civilizations. This
sentence appears on page 1277 of his article. I assume he got this
nonsense from Jansen:
> And at Mohenjo Daro, they used expensive baked brick rather than
> the cheaper mud brick favored in the Middle East, thus leaving
> behind the only Bronze Age city on Earth where it is still possible
> to stroll down ancient alleys shaded by intact walls.
A caption on the same page to a picture points to "5000-year-
old" (sic!) walls at Mohenjo Daro, including the so-called "Great
Bath." The "Great Bath" at 3000 BCE? That's hundreds of years before
the city even existed. Someone put those dates in to align Indus
chronologies more closely with those of the much older urban
developments of Mesopotamia. (Yes, there are pre-Indus sites at 3000,
but not certainly not walled cities like those in Mesopotamia.)
On no baked brick in the Middle East: someone should have pointed
Lawler to the most famous lines in the most famous ANE text (the
Gilgamesh), about a city that is much older than 5000 years old:
> Go up and walk on the walls of Uruk,
> Inspect the base terrace, examine the brickwork:
> Is not its brickwork of burnt brick?
> Did not the Seven [Sages] lay its foundations?
The boast that Mesopotamian cities were made of burnt bricks was common in the
ANE, as Trudy Kawami pointed out to me earlier today.
Maybe someone could too have pointed Lawler to a picture of Ur, which
flourished in Indus times:
http://www.katapi.org.uk/images/Archaeology/Ur.jpg
The Ur ziggurat as shown here is partially reconstructed, but photos
taken during the excavation show that parts were remarkably well
preserved before the reconstruction. And, of course, the outer layers
were of burnt brick (glazed as well).
In a post last summer, Trudy debunked claims similar to Lawler's by
pointing to the detailed discussion of brick making in the ANE in a
work by Moorey. She reminded me this morning of her post and of
Moorey's book:
> [See] P R S Moorey, "Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries:
> The Archaeological Evidence" Oxford, UK 1994; Winona Lake,IN (USA)
> 1999, Chap 6 The Building Crafts, sec. (c) Bricks; sun-dried and
> kiln-fired. Pp. 306-08. Moorey noted baked bricks from the Late
> Uruk/Jemdet Nasr periods (later 4th mill. BCE) and has a nice
> summary on brick sizes.
She went in greater detail with citations from Moorey in her post
last summer, which you can find here; Moorey points to evidence
of apparent brick kilns from the 4th millennium -- before there
were any Indus cities:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/7303
The really interesting things in Indus studies today have little to
do with the tired old stories retold in Lawler, which should have
been caught by the magazine's editors and fact checkers (if they
actually had any). In sum, in the Indus Valley, we find
- No high-tech standardization of bricks, weights, cities; these
claims can be shown to be spurious on indisputable evidence (for
that evidence, see my original post);
- No Mesopotamian artifacts of any sort, and very few from Central
Asia until near the time the civilization was falling. This
missing evidence underlines the absurdity of Lawler's claims about the Indus
Valley "flirting" with "globalization". It's a bit like
claiming that there is massive US-Chinese trade and then walking
into a Walmart and finding nothing made in China.
- We have very little detailed information about the exact form of
Indus trade with the Middle East. E.g., we know nothing about who
controlled it, what the scale of the trade was, etc. Gulf
intermediaries may very well have been in control of it, for all we
know. The evidence is again discussed in my original post.
- There is a nearly total absence of evidence of trade involving the
Iranian plateau. This is indicated by low levels of artifactual
evidence and by the stamp-seal trail, which mainly reaches up the
Gulf and not across land. (Even in the Gulf, seals with Indus-style
emblems on them are predominantly round, not square like Indus seals,
which doesn't suggest that the traders were from Indus cities.)
A lot that is really interesting is going on in Indus archaeology. It
is a shame to see all these old stories in _Science_, of all places.
Steve
13 June 2008
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10320
Dear All,
A few points re: Steve's extensive discussions of the latest Lawler
piece in Science, (while neglecting subsequent discussion for the
moment, I have been occupied otherwise):
* What has entirely been left out by Lawler is the Japanese Indus
project of the Kyoto national "Institute for Humanity and
Nature" (RHIN < http://www.chikyu.ac.jp/index_e.html>), led by
Toshiki Osada (not mentioned). In close cooperation with Indian and
Pakistani archaeologists, they have been active in the past years at
more than four major places in Pakistan and India, including the new
project at the massive site of Ganweriwala in the E. Pakistan desert
of Cholistan.
Of the 20-odd people mentioned in the article, some of the leading
excavators right now are members of the Japanese-sponsored teams:
Qasid Mallah (Sindh), Farzand Masih (Ganweriwala), V. Shinde
(Farmana and several other places in Haryana); Kenoyer is involved
at Ganweriwala, next to his work at Harappa. (Not mentioned at all is
another member of the Jpn. teams: J. Kharakwal with his own digs such
as at Kanmer in W. Gujarat, etc.)
All of this work was discussed in a Workshop at Kyoto in June last
year, by these very scholars, incl. yours truly. (Another conference
was held a few days ago at Kyoto --more later-- including additional
scholars; it will be published in the Opera Minora of the Harvard
Oriental Series; it will include a paper by Steve and me on the East-of-
Mesopotamia "No-script Zone" that we have been referring to for some
years.)
Some detailed points not discussed at length so far, for the top down:
* Hierarchy and regionalization have been known for at least a decade
(Possehl, Kenoyer's summaries). Notable is, (not mentioned on p.
1279), the fake bangle painted red as to look like an expensive
copper bangle used by higher placed people. (The same fact turns up
in a simile quoted in the Pali canon as said by the Buddha, when he
refers to spies disguised as ascetics) ...
* Claims about the large Indus building in Mohenjo-Daro ("stupa") are
just ideas, to be justified by data.
* The map (p.1278) is wrong as far as the Ghaggar-Hakra river is
concerned. It ended in an inland delta near Ft. Derawar in Pakistani
Cholistan, much like the Helmand ends in a series of swamps and
periodic lakes (Hamum) on the Afghan/Iranian border. It did not carry
glacier waters as a 2004 study In Current Science has shown, but the
lower part sometimes carried Sutlej waters (Mughal 1997) -- The
lowest "part" of this river, the Nara channel in SIndh, is connected
(as now in flooding) to the lower Indus.
* I do not repeat the claim about standardization (p. 1276 and many
times over) which just isn't there (or only in the sense of mediaeval
"feet" or "ells" that differed from realm to realm and often from
town to town. (2 standard sizes are mentioned for early Indus at
Harappa (p. 1273) Janssen is enamored by brick and streets: he is an
architect, not an earth digging archaeologist. -- Steve could have
added that the claim for uniform bricks etc. is not upheld any more
by several leading Indus archeologists, but mindlessly copied here
from earlier work.
* I also leave aside the discussion of the "script", referred to in
passing. The so-called "signboard" at Dholavira, the only one where
Indus signs (all the 10 of them) have been found used in a size
larger than those tiny ones on seals and tablets and those marking
vessels. What that (lost) "board " -- only the inlaid signs have been
partly been preserved) actually was used for is up for grabs. We
have always joked in our yearly Round Tables (1999-
)
that this inscription meant "lasciate ogni speranza voi qui entrate" -- or
rather " 300 miles to Mohenjo Daro".
* The horned Ganweriwala person sitting in "yogalike pose" (Lawler)
that I alerted the list of after Kyoto June 2007, and which we have
then discussed at length, is always taken a Yogin, long before yoga
is attested, or worse as Shiva, 1000 years before the Vedic texts
first mention Rudra). The myth that it refers to Shiva has been
deconstructed long ago by Doris Srinivasan in her 1984 paper
(Srinivasan, D. Unhinging Siva from the Indus Civilization, JRAS
(1984). At best we have, in some of the Great Horned figures a stone
age Lord of the Animals (otherwise a Lady) with a striking parallel
found at Gundestrup in W. Denmark (the Celtic god Cernunnos).
To make this a basis for Hinduism (p. 1280) repeats the claims of the
past 80-odd years, since Marshall, that have not been substantiated,
also not in early Vedic texts (from c. 1500 BCE onwards)..
* It is even worse to construct a pre-Hindu ideology out of
(perceived) Indus great baths (p. 1280). The Vedic (and Old Iranian)
texts do not care about ponds and "tanks" at all, just about
*flowing* waters which are all-healing.
* Western contacts and Indus language (p. 1280): Steve has discussed
that in detail. People from "Meluhha" are well known in Mesopotamian
texts, nothing knew here. Possehl 1996 and Ratnagar 2004) have
collected all the references. Meluhha may refer to the western parts
of the Southern Indus civ. (the black mountains are mentioned).
However, we know something about the language spoken along the
northern and (less so) the southern Indus, see Witzel 1999. This
comes from Vedic sources, about 800-1000 years after the end of the
Mature Indus civ. Cleary, several substrate languages are in
evidence, the major one an unknown prefixing language (which I call,
unlike Kuiper 1991, Para-Munda, not to be confused with early Munda
as such). See now F. Southworth's and my work on substrate languages
with a growing substrate dictionary (
* The end of the Mature Indus (p.1281) has been discussed at nauseam.
Clearly changing climate was one of the triggers, but not the only
one. See the recent papers (2004) and Wright 2008.
The continuation of post-Mature settlements also is well-known
(Summary by the "indigenist" J. Shaffer in HOSOM 3: Shaffer, Jim G.
(1995). Cultural tradition and Palaeoethnicity in South Asian
Archaeology. In: Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia. Ed. George
Erdosy). I have then tried, for years, to draw archaeologist's
attention to the fact that such post-Indus settlements are mentioned
in the Vedic Texts, -- though not the large Indus cities with the
great walls (not necessarily for the ruling class, by the way, often
just retaining walls against flooding).
Now R. Stuhrmann has published a paper in EJVS in May,
fortifications (pur) of the "Others" (dasyu). He and I just differ in
the dating of these RV purs: he thinks they can be as old as the late
Mature Indus (1900 BCE), while I would rather opt for the post Mature
period ("Late Indus" 1900-1300 BCE): we just do not have Indo-Aryans
around at 1900 BCE (Note the Mitanni Indo-Aryans around 1400 BCE in
Mesopotamia, with a language slightly *older* than that of the RV)..
All of this is of course tied in with current Hindu nationalism, (p.
1281, 1283). Nothing to be added to this sad old story.
It is however important to note that the new settlements of this
period (*not* used by the pastoralist Indo-Aryan) are concentrated on
the Upper Ghaggar-Hakra, (only then called the Sarasvati) and in
Gujarat. The Upper Sarasvati is precisely the area (next to Gandhara)
where we have a concentration of non-Indo-Aryan river and place
names: clear substrate of late Indus people.
* Bisht's quoting from Vedic texts is that of a non-specialist: just
as you and I would use the King James translation to check on
Biblical archeology... In his (and worse in books such as by S.P.
Gupta's) ahistorical claims are made that the texts simply do not
bear up.
* The inaccessibility of certain Pakistani regions is overblown. The
British have worked in the NW Frontier Province (Bannu) until a few
years ago, and Pakistanis (and some foreigners!) have been working in
Chitral and Gandhara for years, led by Ihsan Ali of Peshawar U. Under
the recent Muslim government of that province, he established a
museum in Chitral and has excavated interesting sites, some dating
back to c. 30 kya.
* Returning to the end of the Mature Indus: the difficult question
(p. 1282-3) will be that of real urbanism connecting the late Indus
with the early 2nd urbanization of the Gangetic basin (only after 500
BCE). As mentioned, Vedic texts know of settlements (not cities) but
stay aloof of them ("One should only stay one night in village of the
Dasyu when traveling..." as a Brahma text has it, and one should take
a warrior along so that they "greet you smiling").
* The effect of politics on scholarly communication (p. 1282)
certainly is stated correctly. However, as we have repeatedly
observed, archaeologists from Pakistan and India get along just fine
when they meet at conferences such as in Kyoto or the US, and joke in
Hindustani with each other ... Foreign meeting places are a solution,
and Shinde is to be congratulated for having taken a S. Asian
initiative here (p. 1283).
* The claim of little or no publishing (p. 1277,1279) certainly is
true, most notable in India, but emulated in true S. Asian spirit by
many western archaeologists (exc. for the publ. of tee periodic
S.Asian conferences). But "we" at least have been doing so regularly
(RHIN 2005, 2006, 2008 in progress). For example, we hardly have any
publications by the nationalistic but otherwise very nice Bisht on
the important site of Dholavira, just much newspaper / journals hype,
including staged ceremonies in his "stadium". Rakhigarhi is worse.
* In sum: in general, Lawler's "update" repeats many facts that have
been well known for 2 decades or so.
Not much is really new, this is just journalistic hype and
propaganda by some of the excavators (they need money!)
Cheers,
Michael
Michael Witzel
> Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University,
> 1 Bow Street , 3rd floor, Cambridge MA 02138
> 1-617-495 3295 Fax: 496 8571
> direct line: 496 2990
>
>
>
>
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10314
Dear Steve,
I wanted to respond briefly to your posts about the Science article. I have no
great affection for Lawler, and while I'm glad that he's promoting my area of
the world in big-name journals, I wish he wasn't so sensational about
everything. He was a total gossip-monger at the Ravenna conference, and his
comments that "everyone was whispering about the Jiroft tablets being fake but
no one would say it" was complete and utter rubbish. I was at the table with
Lawler when he brought up the tablets and asked the opinions of Serge Cleuziou,
Michelle Casanova, Bertille Lyonnet, myself etc etc etc, and we had a very loud
and open discussion about them, with many people saying "I think they're fake,
but..." But I digress...
Just wanted to insert a few caveats.
First, your comment that there is no Mesopotamian material in the Indus is not
quite true. Possehl has an article in Iranica Antiqua 2002 (CCLK's festschrift)
going over the evidence, which includes certain barrel weights, small figurines,
and some possibly copper/bronze items. Certainly, there are not many purely
Mesopotamian items in Indus sites, but there are some.
Second, there is Indus material in Iran. Eg, etched carnelian beads as far away
as Shah Tepe (Gorgan Plain). However, in the long run, there is more evidence of
contact between Iran and the Baluchi and Pakistani highlands than with the Indus
lowlands, which were much more focused on the sea trade with the Gulf and
Mesopotamia (and thus skipped past the Iranian highlands).
Third, the idea that the Gulf states were in control of the sea trade and that
the Indus played only a minor role may or may not be true. If not, however, then
we are at pains to explain the rather dominant presence of Indus material at
sites throughout the Omani Peninsula, including the seaside site of Ra's al-Jinz
which is almost completely comprised of Indus material. It seems to us that as
the Harappan 'Civilization' grew, it expanded in all directions to take greater
control over trade routes and resources (eg, Shortugai up near Badakhshan; R'as
al-Jinz and Sutkagen Dor in the Gulf of Oman; and possible small sites down the
Indian coast towards Mumbai and Goa). I doubt that it ever controlled the Gulf
trade, but it certainly contributed to it!
Finally, the idea that the Indus was technologically advanced is certainly true
when one considers crafts (I'm thinking of Heather Miller, Mark Kenoyer, and
Massimo Vidale's work here). Their ability to control high temperature firing
installations (eg, production of high-fired steatite drills) was totally
unmatched by their Mesopotamian, Central Asian, or Iranian contemporaries.
Certainly, their lapidary work was outstanding (eg, etched carnelian and
drilling out those amazing long carnelian beads) as was their control of the
ceramic arts. Admittedly, their metallurgical work was rather prosaic, but we
cant have everything, can we?
Anyways, this wasnt meant to diminish your critique of Lawler nor of the Indus
Valley mantra, both of which I think are overblown, but merely to throw a bit of
grist in the mill!
Best,
Chris
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10315
Thanks very much, Chris.
I have Greg Possehl's 2002 article in my office -- he sent me a
reprint when we were writing "Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis."
I'll scan in the relevant sections today and post it for the List
(I'm off to a meeting now and have to dig it up: this is written in
haste). I think you're overblowing what Greg says there, to tell the
truth. There is not any unambiguous evidence of Mesopotamian
artifacts in the region that I know of, which is what I said in my
post. Maybe I'm overlooking something, as I also noted. But let's all
take a look together at exactly what Greg says and decide. That
article itself strongly emphasizes the problem of apparent trade
imbalance, but let's take a look later today.
On what happened in Ravenna: well, we know that Jacob Dahl was there
too, also quoted on the supposed Jiroft inscriptions being fakes. A
week later Jacob, Michael Witzel, Richard Sproat, and I all discussed
those inscriptions at the Stanford conference on "pseudo-
decipherment" Sproat and I ran as well. (I first posted a photo
of the most blatant fake on the List a few weeks earlier, as I
recall.) No one credible believes those are real, and the reasons are
multiple (linguistic, material, etc.). We've discussed the reasons at
length before on the List, and I'm willing to take the issue again,
if necessary. I in fact recall some amusing discussions you and I
have had off-List about this funny example:
http://www.safarmer.com/Jiroft/Jiroft02.jpg Hmmm. :^)
As you've told me yourself, there are obvious reasons why not
everyone who knows these are fakes says so publicly and loudly. If
you do, say, as a Univ. of Penn. archaeologist, you would incur the
wrath of Madjidzadeh, which would mean that you'd never dig at Jiroft
again. (The same is true of Indus issues, since saying the wrong
thing publicly here too can get you locked out; since I'm a comparative
historian and not an Indologist, no problem.) But,
anyway, what I said about Jiroft in this post came at the end,
and was an aside onb Lawler -- although it is relevant to the Indus issue
indirectly.
That apart, however, there is no doubt about Lawler being a "gossip-
monger," to use your words, as a lot of us know from personal
experience. Here's one example: Back in 2004 he called me early in
the morning from Maine when he was preparing his Indus story and
complained that I had been "holding out on him." I was sleepy -- his
call had awakened me -- and I asked him what he meant. He said that
he had talked to someone whose work we criticized in "Collapse" (I
know who it was now, but Lawler wouldn't identify him) who told him
that the original insight that the Indus emblems/symbols weren't part
of a "script" came when I was on a "peyote trip"! I laughed so hard
I cried, as the cliche has it. After I told him, Lawler sounded
depressed, since he had planned to put that story in the _Science_
article. That was the only fact checking of the article he ever did.
He had promised that we'd see the parts relevant to what we told him,
but he never did. We had also agreed to do the article only because
he promised that there would be a link in it to our article, but he
"forgot" to do that as well.
On more substantial issues you raise:
> Third, the idea that the Gulf states were in control of the sea
> trade and that the Indus played only a minor role may or may not be
> true.
What I said in my post was that we don't *know* what role either of
these played in that trade. Lawler didn't mention the Gulf state
option at all. There is a real problem in the seal trail, as you know
-- the supposed Indus seals in the Gulf region aren't really fully
Indus style. That's an important clue. It would be interesting to get
Daniel Potts into this discussion, BTW. We should write him and
try to draw him in.
> If not, however, then we are at pains to explain the rather
> dominant presence of Indus material at sites throughout the Omani
> Peninsula, including the seaside site of Ra's al-Jinz which is
> almost completely comprised of Indus material.
I'd like to see hard verification of that claim, Chris. "Almost
completely comprised"? Let's look at the evidence first hand.
> It seems to us that as the Harappan 'Civilization' grew, it
> expanded in all directions to take greater control over trade
> routes and resources (eg, Shortugai up near Badakhshan; R'as al-
> Jinz and Sutkagen Dor in the Gulf of Oman; and possible small sites
> down the Indian coast towards Mumbai and Goa). I doubt that it ever
> controlled the Gulf trade, but it certainly contributed to it!
Who is "us"? For what group are you speaking? That aside: what
Lawler's article implied was that there was no doubt that the Indus
controlled trade all the way up into Mesopotamia. That claim is
insupportable if you stick just to the artifactual record. The fact
that you find artifacts from one civilization doesn't tell you who
carried the artifacts there. "Pots don't speak", as the phrase has it
-- nor do they identify their owners or transporters.
On technology:
> Finally, the idea that the Indus was technologically advanced is
> certainly true when one considers crafts (I'm thinking of Heather
> Miller, Mark Kenoyer, and Massimo Vidale's work here). Their
> ability to control high temperature firing installations (eg,
> production of high-fired steatite drills) was totally unmatched by
> their Mesopotamian, Central Asian, or Iranian contemporaries.
Two points: first of all, Lawler doesn't even talk about this issue.
He talks instead about the (totally imaginary) "standardization" of
bricks, weights, houses, cities, etc. I've spent a lot of time over
the last few years demonstrating that those ideas are myths. Now we
get these other claims with that line of argument dead.
But are you really claiming now that Indus "crafts" in general were
superior to those of the ANE!? I wouldn't mind hearing the comments
of some of the ANE specialists on the List, like Trudy Kawami, on
that. :^)
> Certainly, their lapidary work was outstanding (eg, etched
> carnelian and drilling out those amazing long carnelian beads) as
> was their control of the ceramic arts. Admittedly, their
> metallurgical work was rather prosaic, but we cant have everything,
> can we?
Well, if we both lived in the 3rd millennium, I suspect both of us
would take the metallurgy over the stone work and bead making. :^)
Seriously, though, I don't even know about the bead-superiority
argument. All these claims come from Indus researchers, like Mark,
who are constantly hyping the civilization from any angle they can
find. It is easy to demonstrate that with many examples we've
discussed previously on the List. The real problem here is that it
detracts from the real issues of interest in the Indus Valley --
e.g., how a massive nonliterate society like this functioned; how
their largely agricultural economy worked; these local issues
are really interesting! A number of people on the List are
dealing with them. They are far more interesting than this
hyped "flirtation" with "globalization" in the Bronze Age nonsense.
And are you seriously claiming that Indus ceramics were as advanced
or more advanced than those in the contemporary Middle East? That
claim would be very easy to falsify, Chris -- just by juxtaposing
examples of contemporary ceramics from the civilizations. We should
perhaps post some materials on the List to test that argument.
You conclude:
> Anyways, this wasnt meant to diminish your critique of Lawler nor
> of the Indus Valley mantra, both of which I think are overblown,
> but merely to throw a bit of grist in the mill!
Useful grist indeed, Chris: let's continue. I'll post relevant
portions of Greg Possehl's article when I return later today.
This is posted on the fly: ignore any obvious idiocies.
Best,
Steve
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10317
I am rather rushed at the moment but couldn't pass up Steve's prod. :-)
Our ideas about the "progress" of technology seem rooted in the 1950's
when technological progress was the measure of American success. In
prehistory (& later) "progress" is no indication of the competency,
power, prestige, whatever, of a country or civilization. Take for
instance the Eurasian steppes in the Iron Age. Their potter is certainly
technically & esthetically "challenged" (hand-built, low fire, no
painting or glazing) but their gold work is superb. Can we argue that
they were not technologically advanced enough to use the potter's wheel?
Of course not; they did not care about pottery in the same way they
cared about personal ornaments of gold. Or look at Mesopotamian
ceramics of the Ubaid (roughly 5th mill BCE) & Uruk (4th mill BCE)
periods. Ubaid pottery is very attractive, well potted, cleverly
painted; Uruk pottery is boring (unless you are into stratigraphy). Both
periods had the slow wheel (tournette), maybe the kick-wheel (fast
wheel), & both had double chamber kilns for sophisticated firing. Their
pottery differs because of social, cultural, political, etc. factors,
not technological ones.
The Indus has been a source of wonderful lapidary work whether etched
carnelian beads in the third mill BCE or emeralds in Roman. But they
were pretty lousy furriers. The Egyptians were fabulous stoneworkers but
couldn't carve realistic feet to save their souls. So what? This attempt
to make every ancient culture "advanced" in every way is just an update
of the 19th century's crypto-imperialist views. Let's get into the 21st
century.
Trudy Kawami
PS Would people working on bricks, metrology, etc please look at what
Moorey has compiled in Ancient Mesopotamian Materials & Industries on
the topic. His summation of others' discussions of the production
techniques of mud brick & pise also throw light on the interpretation of
brick dimensions, etc. It is well worth reading.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10318
Dear Trudy,
Thank you so much...
Trudy Kawami schrieb:
......
> .... So what? This attempt
> to make every ancient culture "advanced" in every way is just an update
> of the 19th century's crypto-imperialist views. Let's get into the 21st
> century.
Dr. Volker Thewalt
Kapellenweg 8
69257 Wiesenbach
Deutschland
+49 6223 970122
http://www.bamiyan.de
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10323
Dear Chris,
Finally (speriamo di si!) on Possehl and the trade issue. You wrote:
> First, your comment that there is no Mesopotamian material in the
> Indus is not quite true. Possehl has an article in Iranica Antiqua
> 2002 (CCLK's festschrift) going over the evidence, which includes
> certain barrel weights, small figurines, and some possibly copper/
> bronze items. Certainly, there are not many purely Mesopotamian
> items in Indus sites, but there are some.
I just dug up the article, Chris. Actually, while he characterizes
these some of these artifacts as "Mesopotamian-like", he only
claims outright that ONE is Mesopotamian -- and that is on
ambiguous evidence.
I won't scan the whole article in, as planned -- it's 17 pages long
and my copy is much marked up -- but below I will quote him on all
the objects he claims may be from the "west." (He includes in this
category "Gulf-like" objects.)
First, what I originally said, just for the record, after discussing
ambiguities in the trade record:
> I may possibly have overlooked some recent find, but so far as I
> know no one has ever turned up unambiguous evidence of even *one*
> Mesopotamian artifact in Indus territories. We don't find one
> cuneiform text, one seal, one seal impression -- nothing. Artifacts
> even of C. Asian origins are extremely scarce in Indus territories
> until close to the time when the civilization fell. This problem
> has long been known and presents an obvious challenge to
> sensationalist claims about an imaginary "flirtation with
> globalization 5000 years ago" in the Indus Valley.
I don't think that view is contradicted by Greg's article. Here is a
list of what he finds:
1. As one of the "two best examples of 'western' material in Indus
contexts" he shows what he identifies as a copper-bronze toilet
article from the urban site of Harappa. This is the ONLY piece
that he claims in the article is Mesopotamian, and I have doubts.
He identifies the artifact as "comprising an earscoop, piercer,
and tweezers." He juxtaposes this with a picture
of an artifact from Ur. I wouldn't want to take bets on the
identification: the illustrations are poor and to me at least don't
seem all that similar. (The Harappan illustration shows three metal
prongs of some sort linked; the Ur piece has four prongs linked.) The
photo in the excavation report, Vats 1940, Plate CXXV which I checked
after rereading Greg's article, doesn't help. Vats himself (1940:
390) identifies the Harappan artifact as part of a "Surgical or
toilet set" in the title, and in the text as a
> bunch of three bronze instruments held together by their looped and
> interlaced ends. Of these, the right hand instrument is a double-
> edged knife damaged by corrosion, the middle one a pair of pincers
> and the left one a piercing rod.
The pieces range from 4.4 to 5.3 inches long. There is nothing in
Vats about an earscoop. As you know, it is difficult to know the
function of corroded metal artifacts. Is this one "Mesopotamian"?
Not proven. Is it "Mesopotamian like"? Perhaps. But note that this is the ONLY
artifact that he comes out directly and claims as Mesopotamian --
despite hundreds of years of supposed two-way Indus-Mesopotamian
trade. Not evidence anyone would want to cite on two-way trade.
And who knows how the thing made it all the way up the Indus
river to Harappa?
2. The second "best example of 'western' material" isn't Mesopotamian at
all, but pertains to a Gulf-style seal found at Lothal. He also finds
five other seals that he thinks are "Gulf-like". If we took scattered
seal evidence like this seriously as evidence of trade, wouldn't this
support the idea I floated of Gulf and not Indus traders
"controlling" the sea trade routes? (Just like you, I don't think the
evidence is sufficient to settle the issue -- but that was my whole
point about Lawler's suggestions to the contrary.)
3. Possehl points to four cylinder seals in the region, but
explicitly tells us that they are not "Mesopotamian per se" -- and
I can confirm that they aren't.
4. Possehl speaks of "Mesopotamian type" barrel weights found in
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. But again (pace your suggestion) he doesn't
claim that these were from Mesopotamia. He instead emphasizes (citing
Mackay 1931) that we find the same *style* weights in Egypt and
Mesopotamia too. (He says that Hemmy didn't use these weights in
his data: interesting and worth checking out if true, but not all that
relevant.) But again, he doesn't claim the weights themselves are
Mesopotamian.
5. He mentions a "few metal objects" including pins with animal heads
that "might" be imports from the west. But then he quickly notes that
"none of these seem to be specifically Mesopotamian." He also points
out that Lamberg-Karlovsky dismisses them outright as evidence of trade,
finding in them instead "a common tradition in the manufacture of pins."
6. Possehl finds several figures" in Lothal that are "Mesopotamian-
like", but the most distinctive of these he thinks is really a "local
product, but one made on a western model." He speaks of a few other
pieces, but again isn't prepared to call any of them imports from Mesopotamia.
Result: despite trying to catalog everything, there is no "unambiguous evidence"
of anything in the region from Mesopotamia. Mainly suggestions of contact
with Gulf intermediaries? I'm not sure -- nor can anyone else be sure. But
there are at least hints of that in the data.
He concludes by emphasizing the (well-known) "lack of balance between the
archaeological record regarding the trade between the Indus
Civilization and Mesopotamia." He points out as I did that there are
no Mesopotamian cuneiform texts in the Indus Valley. (Nor seal
impressions nor seals either, as I pointed out in my post.) We point
out in "Collapse" some possible reasons for this
Final sentences in Possehl's article;
> With these observations in mind I am forced to conclude that the
> 'mechanisms of trade', i.e. the institutions of commerce and the
> form of the transactions, were different in the Indus Civilization
> and Mesopotamia. this is not surprising, since the Indus
> Civilization and Mesopotamia are quite independent sociocultural
> systems. It is within the sociocultural fabric of these two
> civilizations that the explanation of the differential distribution
> of material culture lies, not just with 'invisible' products.
I agree with that conclusion, and these lines were much in my mind
when Michael, Richard, and I offered our own hypothesis (involving
the closed nature of Indus society) offered for the trade imbalance
in "Collapse", p. 44.
Thanks for prodding me to reread the article today, Chris. Very useful!
I forgot to give the full reference: Gregory L. Possehl, "Indus-Mesopotamian
Trade: The Record in the Indus." Extrait d'Iranica Antiqua, vol. XXXVII, 2002.
A bit misnamed, maybe, since there is NO clear record of that trade in the Indus
region.
Best,
Steve
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10316
[Mod. note. Thanks, Dean. Will answer in detail when I return
this afternoon & post Possehl. But do note that on "superior" Indus
technology, you aren't covering points in Lawler's article but
in Kenoyer, who has pushed that thesis hard. Chris, who has
worked a lot on metallurgy, just told us that Indus metallurgy
was "rather prosaic," and now you cite Kenoyer claiming it was
superior to that in the ANE (easy to debunk). The lesson: citing
"authorities" w/o evidence is useless here. On weights: look
not just at the charts but all full raw data already posted. On
cities laid out in cardinal directions: sorry, look at the site
maps. We already debunked this re burials on the List. - SF.]
Hi Steve,
I enjoyed your post a great deal. As usual, you have raised some
interesting questions that require us to go back and re-examine the
data, which is always a good thing lest we become hidebound by
outdated information and perspectives.
I agree with you that Lawler's article "sexed up" the Harappan
Civilization, to borrow a phrase from the British. But as someone who
holds forth on the glories of the Harappans from time to time, I also
sympathize with the author because, frankly, the Harappan artifacts
are a bit pedestrian compared to the Mesopotamians and Egyptians.
I've nothing to add to your first two numbered points so I'll start
with point 3.
3) Trade-Savvy Indus
3a) In particular, I was intrigued by Lawler's implied claim that
recent research was responsible for the perception that "a Trade-
Savvy Indus Emerges". I'll have to look deeper into this, but my
ongoing research indicates that the important facts about Indus trade
were established decades ago. New research seems to have mostly
uncovered more information about smaller sites and the important
discovery that the Indus origins and collapse were not nearly as
sudden or dramatic as previously thought. (See Kenoyer 2005: 21-49
for a good summary.)
3b) You say: "Are we really supposed to believe that the
sophistication of Indus commerce and technology surpassed that of the
Mesopotamians and Egyptians?"
Like you, I won't focus on the trade but the technology. Regarding
technology in general, I would say that, in some certain cases,
Lawler is on solid ground here. Kenoyer lists several examples where
Indus technology surpassed that of their contemporaries. An
incomplete list would include the following pages from Kenoyer
(1998): glazing (180), superior faience (157-8), bead making and
drilling (161-2), metallurgy (158).
4) Weights
Your posts about the weights are very fascinating. I'd love to see
the complete data set and look into this more closely.
I took a quick look at your two graphs:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.13-15.gms.jpg
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.26-29.gms.jpg
I'll do more later but it seems that they actually do clump pretty
closely around 13.4-14g and 26.7-27.7grams. Maybe half a gram or a
gram variation wasn't such a big deal 5000 years ago!
The anomalous data points that stream off the beginning and end and
that give the table such a continuous appearance are mystifying. For
now, I'd have to say you've proposed an interesting open question not
a solid refutation. (What's with those intermediate weights...? I
wonder if they recorded find spots...?)
5) Bricks
You say: "The most usual claim (there are several
variants) is that Indus bricks were standardized in neat and
mathematical 1 x 2 x 4 proportions. Again, the story has been
repeated for decades, but it is easy to demonstrate that it is
empirically false. Here, for example, is a scan of four key pages
from Marshall 1931, the locus classicus of early discussions of this
issue. Marshall in fact distinguished 15 (!) different sized bricks
in Mohenjo-daro."
I assume we both agree that many different sizes of bricks are not
really the issue. There are two issues: 1) the RATIO of the brick's
dimensions, not the size, and; 2) how many of each type of brick
there are. To use an exaggerated example, if there were 214 bricks
but 14 of them were of differing ratios and 200 of them were of the
same ratio, then we'd have a pattern.
> "Not ONE of those 15 types have 1 x 2 x 4 proportions
> or anything close."
Another important issue is, at the risk of sounding Clintonian, how
"close" is "close"? :-) As anyone who's been to India can tell
you, precision of measurement isn't always an overriding concern.
Given that this was also 5000 years ago, at the dawn of civilization,
I think we have to accept a somewhat larger standard of deviation.
Of the 15 types of bricks listed, we can remove the first 3 [ (15),
(1), (6) ] listed above because they are anomalous in some way:
unique or sawn down. I've not shown my calculations and just given
the summary. I can provide the calculations, if you wish, although
they're pretty simple to see.
a) Length: Width
Taking a look at the brick dimensions listed, the most interesting
thing to note is that the largest dimension (length) is usually
pretty close to twice the middle dimension (width) � 4:2. It is the
smallest dimension (height) 2:1 that varies the most. Of course, it
makes sense that the length and width have a 4:2 (i.e. 2:1) ratio. It
allows for a solid overlap between courses which makes a stronger
wall and it makes brick-laying easier in places like corners. Some
pre-Harappan bricks tended to be 3:2:1. It was during Mature Harappan
times that the more logical 4:2(:1) ratio was standardized. (Possehl
2002:72, 107)
Half of the 12 categories of bricks have exactly a 2:1 ratio of
length to width and the others are all within .5 inch except for one.
I think we can say with confidence that the Harappans standardized
length to width on a 2:1 ratio, i.e. the 4:2 part of the 4:2:1 is
valid.
b) Width: Height
The ratio of the smallest dimension (height) is problematical
however.
Remarkably, none of the widths: heights have exactly a 2:1 ratio or
are even within .25 inches. Five have about a .5 inch deviation and
six are between 1 inch and .55 inch. The length: height ratios are
similarly imprecise when compared to the ideal 4:1.
Of course, this is from only one site and we don't know how many of
each type of brick there was but unless we have more data about the
frequency of the different types of bricks, we can't claim anything
approaching a precise 4:2:1 ratio with our current information.
So while it may be true that the Harappans used bricks that were
*roughly* 4:2:1 it may have been due more to the practical
considerations of the 4:2 ratio than any ideological consideration.
Attempts to portray them as using a precise and widely standardized
brick proportion as proof of a superior technology are an
exaggeration. Nevertheless, the widespread adoption of the 4:2 brick
ratio across their wide domain beginning around the time of the
Mature Period is another fascinating example of Harappan
standardization. Lawler cannot really be held accountable, however,
it may be that archaeologists aren't concerned with exact proportions
and just round to 4:2:1 - many of them do cite either the ratio, the
dimensions or standardized bricks, i.e. Kenoyer 1998:56-7; Possehl
2002: 68, 72, 107; Allchin 1997:155; McIntosh 2002: 50, 69.
6. What about those standardized "houses" and "whole cities" that
Lawler claims as being "unique in the early historic period"?
Some might feel that we're pulling one sentence out of a long article
and parsing it rather finely, but so be it. The full quote is "The
Indus penchant for precise standardization�from tiny weights to
bricks to houses to entire cities�was unique in the early historic
period."
So it refers primarily to their penchant for standardization in
general. I agree with you that "standardization" is probably an
unfortunate term to use in referring to Harappan houses and cities
since it gives the impression of cookie-cutter similarity. But there
was an underlying architectural philosophy shared among many of the
major cities.
It's hard to criticize Lawler when an archaeologist like McIntosh
(2002:50) says: "The layout of the cities was planned along the
cardinal directions, the streets running north-south and east-west.
The streets conform to a series of set proportions, main streets
being twice the width of minor streets, for example. Within the
blocks delineated by these streets, houses were laid out in an
orderly fashion. They were generally constructed to one of a series
of modular designs; bricks were made to a standard size."
But, like the bricks and weights, there is quite a lot of
variability. Possehl (2002: 101) sums it up well: "While there is
regularity in the layout of Mohenjo-daro, it is far from perfect."
Many of the minor streets are not well-aligned; the so-called grid
pattern is recognizable but hardly perfect; nor is it perfectly
aligned to the cardinal directions � unless the pole star weaved
erratically during construction.
It's true that "One of the most common features of a house at Mohenjo-
daro was a special platform for bathing" (Possehl 2002:106) but not
in all cities. Macintosh (2002:93) notes, accurately, I think, that
"the five massive sites all had citadels, but only some of the medium-
sized ones and number of the smaller ones." So there was a wide-
spread, but hardly universal, and often exaggerated, uniform approach
to building.
It's a huge and fascinating topic in itself, however, and I think
I'll save it for another time.
7) Yoga
Steve says: "Most importantly on the "yogic" part of this argument,
it is important to note that close examination of photos of all known
instances of these figures show that NONE of the hands in the figures
even come close to resting on the knees. (You can even see this in
the photo that Lawler includes in his article, if you use a
magnifying glass.) Their arms, which are heavily bangled, instead
hang out a bit like branches, which makes perfect sense when you
consider the trees or branches often found on their heads, which are
common signs of gods (apparently agricultural) in the Indus Valley.
We've discussed this before but it so happens I was looking at it
again when you made this post. I summarize my findings and include
links to our discussion in a graphical presentation at:
http://www.eastwestcultural.org/public/protoyogi
Steve says: "Marshall's claims concerning "proto-Siva" figures have
been debunked many times before. ... Why didn't anyone whom Lawler
interviewed inform him of this problem?
I could provide a long list of experts on South Asia who accept the
"Proto-Shiva" terminology, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the
reader (I can collect them later, if there is interest). I would say
that Proto-Shiva is the dominant understanding despite efforts of
scholars like you and Michael Witzel. I'd be interested in any other
sources you have that are critical of this.
8. Steve says: "Let me turn now to Lawler's central claim -- that the
Indus was some sort of global trading "powerhouse."
I agree with you that calling the Harappans "THE powerhouse" is
probably an exaggeration. I know of no evidence supporting it
although I'd be interested in what makes Lawler think that's the case.
I also agree with you that the majority of Harappan economic activity
was internal and agricultural. In fact, until industrial times most
societies were primarily agricultural.
It is possible to call the Harappans *A* powerhouse however. There is
no question that the Harappan region was significantly larger than
Mesopotamia or Egypt, certainly in terms of geography, but also quite
possibly in terms of total economic output, including internal trade.
At least, in part, this would have been due to their size. They kept
unified a much larger area, probably for a longer time, than the
other two civilizations and so much of their trade was internal
rather than through the often fractious relations that Mesopotamia
had, both with its neighbors and internally. I have a theory about
how this ties in with their eventual decline but I'm trying to keep
this as short as possible.
Steve says: I am NOT suggesting here that Indus traders didn't exist.
But the evidence suggests that the scale of Indus trade has been
hyped to
death by Hindu nationalists and the handful of researchers Lawler
depended upon to build his "globalization" argument.
This "handful of researchers" includes the leading scholars in the
field who seem to represent the consensus that there was major trade
with Mesopotamia. Kenoyer: (1998: 17) speaks of "vast trade
networks". The Allchins (1997: 177) concur: "considerable quantities
of trade goods of apparently Indus origin have been found in
Mesopotamia, and there are also many inscriptional references to
Meluhha...."
Regarding your mention of" a handful of cuneiform tablets that speak
of trade with "Meluhha", it's important to point out that some of
those tablets are from the ruler of the Mesopotamian region. So
Meluhhan trade must have been significant enough to get his
attention. Kenoyer (1998:98) says of "... Sargon of Akkad (2334-2279
B.C.) This famous ruler boasts of ships from Dilmun, Agad and Meluhha
that are docked at his capital city, Akkad. Most scholars agree that
... Meluhha refers to the general region of the Indus Valley.
Numerous texts describe the types of goods coming from Meluhha: hard
woods, tin or lead, copper, gold, carnelian, shell, pearls and ivory.
Animals such as a red dog, a cat, peacocks, or black partridges and
monkeys are also mentioned." But "The absence of Mesopotamian
cylinder seals and sealings would indicate that Mesopotamian traders
were not directly involved with Indus trade and that no bundles of
goods sealed by Mesopotamian merchants were being sent to the Indus
cities."
Possehl discusses the subject of Indus trade at length (2002: 218-
226).
In summary, I think you've brought to light some important
criticisms, not so much of Lawler, but of some of the accepted
Harappan doctrines of Lawler's informants that, in some cases, appear
to have been exaggerated, to say the least. I found your post to be a
valuable wake up call to my critical faculties.
But it seems to me that, on the one hand, you're questioning some of
the central doctrines about the Harappans and on the other hand,
you're disgruntled that the defenders of those doctrines don't
immediately accept your ideas. You can't have it both ways, my
friend! Don't you know the promulgators of new ideas have to first
spend some time howling in the wilderness? :-)
Best,
Dean Anderson
----------------------------------------
References:
Allchin, Frank Raymond and Allchin, Bridget. 1997. Origins of a
Civilization. New Delhi: Viking Penguin Books.
Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. 1998. Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley
Civilization. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. 2005. "Culture Change during the Late
Harappan period at Harappa: new insights on Vedic Aryan issues". In
The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history.
pp. 21-49. London & New York: Routledge.
McIntosh, Jane R. 2002. A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of the
Indus Civilization. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Possehl, Gregory. 2002. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary
Perspective. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10319
Dear Dean,
Let me answer you quickly on individual points. If we continue this,
let's focus in posts in the future on only one point at a time or we
won't get anywhere. But perhaps it is better to limit detailed
discussion in this thread to people who are working in the field or
have published in it? Nothing can be settled by pointing to old
secondary sources, especially when they are miscited (see below).
You write:
> I agree with you that Lawler's article "sexed up" the Harappan
> Civilization, to borrow a phrase from the British. But as someone who
> holds forth on the glories of the Harappans from time to time, I also
> sympathize with the author because, frankly, the Harappan artifacts
> are a bit pedestrian compared to the Mesopotamians and Egyptians.
Well, that's been the problem since Marshall's day. Nothing sexy so
you invent something sexy.
The society is interesting in its own terms. Why anyone would want to
glorify this or any other ancient civilization is beyond me. These were
very alien societies, from modern perspectives. That's what makes them
interesting to me (see also Trudy's post!). If you want to get a feel for
Harappa, maybe you might want to mention human heads being
sacrificed to tree gods, etc. :^) Not politically correct,
Not politically correct, I guess. :^) So instead we get talk about busy
merchants running around the world globalizing things that would make
the Wall Street Journal proud. Hence Lawler, picturing Harappa as
> an aggressive player during humanity's first flirtation with
> globalization 5000 years ago.
Note again that 5000 years ago there weren't any Indus cities -- just
real "global villages", maybe?
You write:
> Regarding technology in general, I would say that, in some certain
> cases, Lawler is on solid ground here. Kenoyer lists several examples where
> Indus technology surpassed that of their contemporaries. An
> incomplete list would include the following pages from Kenoyer
> (1998): glazing (180), superior faience (157-8), bead making and
> drilling (161-2), metallurgy (158).
First of all, Lawler didn't mention any of this, and the thread is supposedly
on his article. Secondly, you can hardly advance research by citing a popular
textbook from 1998. Thirdly, your citations are inaccurate:
- E.g., Kenoyer doesn't talk at all about glazing on page 180; on the
next page he mentions it but with no comparison with Mesopotamian
technology (glazing in Mesopotamia was highly developed, in fact);
- on page 157-8 he tells us that some parts of faience technology
were "broadly similar" to that in Mesopotamia and some were
different; his only claim of superiority is that only Indus bangles were strong
enough that thin bangles "would not break with normal jostling on the wrist."
I doubt if anyone has empirically tested this; even if it is true it is a pretty
weak argument for hyping a civilization;
- on page 161-2 he says that Indus craftsmen "have the distinction of
producing the longest and most slender beads of carnelian in the
world" using special cylindrical drills; but he doesn't talk about
drilling technologies in the Middle East.
- on page 158 he doesn't say anything at all about the supposed superiority
of Indus metallurgy (which Chris earlier told us wasn't superior).
This kind of miscitation of old textbooks is part of the problem in
discussions like this. And we shouldn't be citing textbooks anyway.
> 4) Weights
> Your posts about the weights are very fascinating. I'd love to see
> the complete data set and look into this more closely.
I posted "the complete data set" on which traditional claims were
made about standardized and precision weight, from Hemmy 1938. He
explicitly claims in fact that they weren't all that standardized.
You just didn't include the link in your post:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/weightchart.jpg
> I took a quick look at your two graphs:
> http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.13-15.gms.jpg
> http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.26-29.gms.jpg
>
> I'll do more later but it seems that they actually do clump pretty
> closely around 13.4-14g and 26.7-27.7grams. Maybe half a gram or a
> gram variation wasn't such a big deal 5000 years ago!
(1) None of these is from "5000 years ago" -- you are repeating
Lawler's spurious dates; (2) they don't "clump pretty closely"
around the figures you claim -- you have to look at data carefully,
not just take quick looks at it; (3) even if they did clump together in
such a range, you could hardly talk about precise standardized weights
in the Indus Valley and then say a gram or so wasn't a big deviation.
(The deviations from the claimed expected values here are much more
than a gram, however.)
The only other data available on weights are the recent data from Harappa.
I have these as noted but can't post them, since these data belong to
the Harappa Archaeological Research Project (shared with me by Richard
Meadow). These data are much more sparse, but they tell the same
story. (On claimed Middle Eastern style barrel weights not
included in Hemmy's data, mentioned by Possehl, see my next post.)
I'll largely skip most of what you say about bricks. I gave the data from the
excavation reports in my original post:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10282
(point 5)
You comment:
> Remarkably, none of the widths: heights have exactly a 2:1 ratio or
> are even within .25 inches. Five have about a .5 inch deviation and
> six are between 1 inch and .55 inch. The length: height ratios are
> similarly imprecise when compared to the ideal 4:1.
This is only remarkable if you start with the myth and try to force
fit the data to it. You are just repeating my point.
> Of course, this is from only one site and we don't know how many of
> each type of brick there was but unless we have more data about the
> frequency of the different types of bricks, we can't claim anything
> approaching a precise 4:2:1 ratio with our current information.
And in the next paragraph you tell us first that they aren't standardized
but they are:
> Attempts to portray them as using a precise and widely standardized
> brick proportion as proof of a superior technology are an
> exaggeration. Nevertheless, the widespread adoption of the 4:2 brick
> ratio across their wide domain beginning around the time of the
> Mature Period is another fascinating example of Harappan
> standardization.
You go on:
> Lawler cannot really be held accountable, however,
> it may be that archaeologists aren't concerned with exact proportions
> and just round to 4:2:1 - many of them do cite either the ratio, the
> dimensions or standardized bricks, i.e. Kenoyer 1998:56-7; Possehl
> 2002: 68, 72, 107; Allchin 1997:155; McIntosh 2002: 50, 69.
With the result that you shouldn't spend all your time repeating what is
in the secondary literature, right?
On standardized cities, houses, etc.:
> It's hard to criticize Lawler when an archaeologist like McIntosh
> (2002:50) says: "The layout of the cities was planned along the
> cardinal directions, the streets running north-south and east-west.
> The streets conform to a series of set proportions, main streets
> being twice the width of minor streets, for example. Within the
> blocks delineated by these streets, houses were laid out in an
> orderly fashion. They were generally constructed to one of a series
> of modular designs; bricks were made to a standard size."
Why is it hard to criticize Lawler for mindlessly following anyone?
People are expected to check their sources, not just repeat the most
spectacular claims. All you have to do to debunk the old whoppers in
this paragraph is to dig up site maps in the available excavation reports.
I'm looking at maps now from Mohenjo Daro. The alignment isn't anything
near N-S or E-W. Pure nonsense endlessly repeated, as has been pointed
out often on the List. Why is it necessary to repeat this sort of thing?
But now that we're told things were standardized, you cite a source
that says they weren't:
> But, like the bricks and weights, there is quite a lot of
> variability. Possehl (2002: 101) sums it up well: "While there is
> regularity in the layout of Mohenjo-daro, it is far from perfect."
> Many of the minor streets are not well-aligned; the so-called grid
> pattern is recognizable but hardly perfect; nor is it perfectly
> aligned to the cardinal directions � unless the pole star weaved
> erratically during construction.
I think Greg's last thesis is correct: the pole star must have weaved
erratically. :^)
I'll largely leave the supposed "yogic" and "proto-Siva" stuff alone.
We've talked it to death. The evidence against all this is multiple:
(1) the pose isn't Yogic and the hands don't touch the knees in a
single known example; often the separation is extremely wide; (2) if
you look at early yogic texts several millennia after the Indus fell,
there is no discussion of poses anyway; these come in the common era;
(3) seating poses of some sort that look vaguely yogic are found
all over the world, as Michael and Luis Gonzalez-Reimann and I
pointed out with many examples last year; (4) there is absolutely
nothing in these images that can be correlated with Siva images when
these appear several thousand years later. Basta and QED on this.
You write:
> I could provide a long list of experts on South Asia who accept the
> "Proto-Shiva" terminology...
No doubt, starting with Marshall 1931. The whole point of this
discussion is that historical and archaeological research doesn't
have anything to do with piling up "authorities" or citing secondary
sources. if it did, we'd all still being talking about the "lost
archives" of Indus texts that researchers talked about for decades.
Any subsequent discussions on these issues really have to take them
up one by one, or we'll be stuck talking about the same old issues
forever: they aren't interesting.
Steve
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10321
Re: Article in _Science_ on Indus archaeology
Dean Anderson said:
"I'll do more later but it seems that they actually do clump pretty
closely around 13.4-14g and 26.7-27.7grams. Maybe half a gram or a
gram variation wasn't such a big deal 5000 years ago!"
Perhaps for valuables such as precious metals and semi-precious stones, they
used something other than weights fashioned by humans. I am pretty sure I have
seen the seeds of Abrus precatorius (gunja, rosary pea, jequirity; see Wiki
article "Jequirity" < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosary_pea >) used in India
to weigh such things. They are remarkably uniform in size, except occasionally
for those from the very tip of the pod. The Pandanus Database of Indian Plants,
s.v. gunja < http://iu.ff.cuni.cz/pandanus/database/details.php?id=1 >, citing
Monier-Williams, says that they average 1 5/16 troy grains, which an online
converter reckons as 0.34 grams. So it takes 3 of a seed used for weighing
small quantities of valuable substances to make a single gram. Maybe the c. 14
g. and 27 g. weights were indeed for things middling valuable, but not valuable
enough to demand extreme precision. (What, by the way? Brass? Some sort of
stone?)
I think maybe one could work out the above argument better, but I have to leave
for the weekend.
Allen
Allen W. Thrasher, Ph.D., Senior Reference Librarian
South Asia Team, Asian Division
Library of Congress, Jefferson Building 150
101 Independence Ave., S.E.
Washington, DC 20540-4810
tel. 202-707-3732; fax 202-707-1724; athr@...
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10322
Trudy says of the IVC, " But they were pretty lousy furriers."
How in the world do we know that?
Allen
Allen W. Thrasher, Ph.D., Senior Reference Librarian
South Asia Team, Asian Division
Library of Congress, Jefferson Building 150
101 Independence Ave., S.E.
Washington, DC 20540-4810
tel. 202-707-3732; fax 202-707-1724; athr@...
The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of
Congress.
Some discussions on an anti-Hindu hate group. It is amazing that these ‘experts’ should discuss a civilization without even referring to River Sarasvati and 80% sites (about 2000) on this river basin of the same civilization.
kalyanaraman
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10282
9 June 2008
Dear List,
Over the weekend I worked through the articles in this week's
_Science_ magazine on Indus archaeology. They include one major
article and a half dozen sidebar stories. All the stories are
credited to Andrew Lawler, a reporter who writes often in _Science_
on archaeology (see point #10 below). You can get the articles from
this link:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/320/5881/1276
I can send a PDF (2 Megs) of the stories off-List to any researcher
who can't access them.
A number of people have asked for my reactions to the articles. I've
given ten numbered points below. The post is long, for which I
apologize, since I've tried to back my criticisms with verifiable
evidence. I've also included links to further evidence.
1. The most useful part of the articles in my opinion is found in the
concluding sidebar stories, which cover some of the political issues
that affect Indus archaeology. These include the negative impact that
Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) has long had on the field; problems raised by
the India/Pakistan conflict; and topics involving looting and
destructions of Indus sites. I was happy to see Lawler discuss the
Hindutva problem, which I first alerted him to in 2004, when he was
writing a long article on the work by me, Sproat, and Witzel on the
Indus symbols.
2. Lawler doesn't take up the Indus inscription issue again in these
articles, but limits himself to pointing out that the Indus Valley
has yielded no texts and that the "script" was used "chiefly on small
seals, and some scholars believe it was not a script at all (Science,
17 December 2004, p. 2026)" -- an allusion to "Collapse of the Indus
Script Thesis"
have been useful, since support for our model has grown steadily
among linguists and Indus archaelogists (also Iranian archaeologists,
including Daniel Potts) over the last four years. Moreover, our
thesis has since expanded: we now think we can show that a
massive "No Script Zone" existed from the 3rd millennium BCE down to
the start of the 1st millennium at a minimum from Central Asia to the
Indus Valley to the Gulf region and (pace Yousef Madjidzadeh, on whom
below) the Iranian plateau. All these are regions that according to
Lawler's article were in trade contact with the Indus and the
literate cultures of the Near East. Michael and I have committed to
writing a paper on the "No Script Zone" idea sometime in the next few
months. We hope to consult with Potts too, who has kindly offered
to help "on the Iranian side" of things in respect to our work. For
now on this issue, and on our views of the uses of of Indus
inscriptions, which transcend the "script" issue, see this abstract
of a paper given in Japan a few years ago (Farmer, Weber, Barela, and
Witzel 2005):
http://www.safarmer.com/indus/Kyoto.pdf
3. While the political coverage in Lawler's new articles is useful,
on archaeological issues the results are mixed. Lawler relies heavily
on a number of myths that have been used to hype Indus civilization
for decades, and sometimes takes them one step further. Despite his
criticisms of Hindu nationalists, ironically many of the myths about
the civilization that he passes on (I assume unwittingly) are favorites
in the nationalist camps.
The sensationalism of the article starts with the title and
opening lines:
> BORING NO MORE, A TRADE-SAVY INDUS EMERGES
>
> Long in the shadow of its sister civilizations in the west, the
> Indus is emerging as the powerhouse of commerce and technology
> in the 3rd millennium B.C.E.
Nothing in the archaeological record comes close to justifying these
claims. Are we really supposed to believe that the sophistication of
Indus commerce and technology surpassed that of the Mesopotamians and
Egyptians? Here I'll focus just on the technology claim. My comments
on Lawler's representations of Indus trade are found in point #8 below.
What evidence can be cited to support the claim that Indus
civilization was "the powerhouse" of 3rd millennium BCE technology?
To back this claim Lawler relies on a familiar argument that has long
been a favorite of Hindutva apologists -- that the Indus were
supposedly masters of technological standardization. As Lawler
puts it in one of many similar passages:
> the Indus penchant for precise standardization -- from tiny weights
> to bricks to houses to entire cities -- was unique in the early
> historic period.
Claims like this have been examined often on the List in the past and
have been shown to be spurious. The following three points deal with
easily debunked claims concerning standardized Indus weights,
bricks, and cities.
4. On the myth of standardized weights: this was discussed in a long
thread back in 2006. The urban myth that Indus weights were
standardized and perfectly proportioned derives from gross distortions
of data on Indus weights gathered by A.S. Hemmy in the 1920s from
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. You can look at Hemmy's original data in this
scan of his original results, which were published in 1938. I've added
some explanatory comments in the margins:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/weightchart.jpg
During our 2006 discussions I took Hemmy's data and put them in two
graphs, looking specifically at weights ranging from 13-15 grams and
26-29 grams. (I picked these as examples since one part of the myth
is that weights in this upper range should be exactly twice the
weight of those in the lower one.) The evidence demonstrates that the
distribution of weights in these samples was anything BUT
standardized. Indeed, the values were almost random. Here are the
results, which include all published data:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.13-15.gms.jpg
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.26-29.gms.jpg
As soon as I posted those data, Richard Meadow, Co-Director of the
Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP), sent me unpublished
data on all weights excavated from 1986-2001 from Harappa. These new
data were discussed in messages to the List posted on 26-27 December
2006. The data Richard had collected from Harappan weights again
indicated that the old story of standardized weights from the Indus
Valley is an urban myth. Both Richard Meadow and Mark Kenoyer (who
has in fact given at least one talk on the Harappa data) were
interviewed by Lawler for the articles published on Friday. The old
myths about the "standardization" of weights in Lawler's article
would have been caught by either of them if they or anyone else
knowledgeable had been allowed to fact-check the articles. But as
several of us know from experience, Lawler doesn't allow his sources
to fact check his articles, and they are typically laced with inaccuracies.
5. The "standardized brick" claim is just as spurious. Claims that
Indus bricks were standardized has again long been a staple of Hindu
nationalist mythology. The most usual claim (there are several
variants) is that Indus bricks were standardized in neat and
mathematical 1 x 2 x 4 proportions. Again, the story has been
repeated for decades, but it is easy to demonstrate that it is
empirically false. Here, for example, is a scan of four key pages
from Marshall 1931, the locus classicus of early discussions of this
issue. Marshall in fact distinguished 15 (!) different sized bricks
in Mohenjo-daro. Not ONE of those 15 types have 1 x 2 x 4 proportions
or anything close. See Marshall's measurements in the charts in
the following pages:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/bricks.pdf
Ironically, given the supposed mathematical acuity of the Indus
wisemen, you don't even find even-sized bricks in the so-called
"Great Bath" at Mohenjo-daro. This is particularly damaging evidence
since according at least to popular opinion (again unevidenced and
totally speculative) the "Great Bath" was supposedly a religious
facility. Marshall measured the bricks in the "Great Bath" in the
1920s, and eventually wrote elsewhere in the excavation report (1931,
vol. 1, p. 131):
> [The Great Bath] is constructed of specially cut bricks of varying
> sizes ranging from 10.15 x 5.1 x 2.2 in. to 11 x 5.15 x 2.25 in. It is
> evident that the bricks, which in the first places were moulded, were
> not cut down to a definite size; they vary particularly in length and
> breadth.
If you move on from excavation reports from Mohenjo-daro and look at
those from Harappa (e.g., in Vats 1940: Vol. 1, page 12, footnote 1)
you will find that the bricks measured in early Indus excavations
were different from those found at Mohenjo-daro. You'll also find
that NONE of them measured by Vats had 1 x 2 x 4 proportions.
You can even falsify the "standardized" brick claim by looking at the
picture in Lawler's article on p. 1279. Magnify the picture of the
brick wall you find there and you'll see that it is composed of a
wide assortment of bricks of many different sizes.
6. What about those standardized "houses" and "whole cities" that
Lawler claims as being "unique in the early historic period"? The
same story. The claim of standardization here is even contradicted in
Lawler's own article, in which at one point (momentarily forgetting
the standardization claim) he quotes one archaeologist who emotes
over the "tremendous amount of variety" found in Indus society. In
any event, despite being endless repeated, the story of standardization
of Indus houses and "whole cities" is as spurious as the claims of
standardization in Indus weights and bricks.
7. Lawler's article also gives us a familiar dose of Indus myths
that suggest possible long-range continuities between Indus and far
later "Hindu" deities or Indian religious practices. At one point he
evokes the long-ago debunked story raised by Marshall in
the 1920s concerning "proto-Siva" figures shown on a number of seals
and tablets. These figures show a divine being of some sort, often
with horns and plants on its head, sitting in what Marshall (and now
Lawler) represents as a "yogic" position -- thousands of years before
we have any evidence of yogic postures. (Early yogic texts from 2,000
years or so after the fall of Indus civilization in fact contained no
discussion of postures at all.)
In the last few years this myth too has been thoroughly debunked on
the List in discussions that have included extensive visual evidence.
The discussion culminated one year ago when in a summary post Michael
Witzel posted a new example of this figure on a broken tablet
recently found in Ganweriwala. Most importantly on the "yogic" part
of this argument, it is important to note that close examination of
photos of all known instances of these figures show that NONE of the
hands in the figures even come close to resting on the knees. (You
can even see this in the photo that Lawler includes in his article,
if you use a magnifying glass.) Their arms, which are heavily
bangled, instead hang out a bit like branches, which makes perfect
sense when you consider the trees or branches often found on their
heads, which are common signs of gods (apparently agricultural) in
the Indus Valley.
Rather than summarize all this again on the List, here is Michael's
message showing the newly discovered Ganweriwala tablet along with
links to other related images I had posted earlier:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/7063
Marshall's claims concerning "proto-Siva" figures have been debunked
many times before. But despite this, those claims remain important to
Hindu nationalists because of the supposed continuities that those
figures (supposedly) suggest between Indus and later "Hindu" deities.
This allows them to pretend that India has been "Hindu" since the
earliest times.
Why didn't anyone whom Lawler interviewed inform him of this problem?
Was the sensationalism in this old claim just too much to resist?
8. Let me turn now to Lawler's central claim -- that the Indus was
some sort of global trading "powerhouse." This too is a favorite
argument of Hindu nationalists and a few Western archaeologists. Lawler
goes even further than most of them in his hyperbole, apparently
again to add excitement to the story. He even trots out Thomas-
Friedman style "the earth is flat" corporate rhetoric, telling us a bit
embarrassingly on the first page that the Indus civilization
> was an aggressive player during humanity's first flirtation with
> globalization 5000 years.
The evidence for the Indus as a major trading power is tenuous at
best. Despite its sex appeal, claims like this have the unfortunate
result of pushing to the background a thesis that can be supported
(unlike this one) by massive evidence: that most of the economy of
Indus cities was local and agricultural (See here the tremendous work
on Indus agriculture and related topics by Steve Weber, William Belcher,
Richard Meadow, Dorian Fuller, and others in studies like those in Weber
and Belcher's _Indus Ethnobiology_, 2003). You can even use studies of
Indus symbols -- which are replete with agricultural images, but
not images of trade -- to back this thesis. A talk that Steve Weber,
Dorian Fuller, and I gave last year at UC Berkeley discussed the evidence
on this issue, which lis also discussed a bit in "Collapse".
Here is an abstract of Weber, Fuller, and Farmer 2007:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/indus.ethnobiology.pdf
I am NOT suggesting here that Indus traders didn't exist. But the
evidence suggests that the scale of Indus trade has been hyped to
death by Hindu nationalists and the handful of researchers Lawler
depended upon to build his "globalization" argument.
As evidence of long-distance trade, we have, for example, a handful of
cuneiform tablets that speak of trade with "Meluhha", which may or
may not refer to one part or another of the Indus civilization -- we
really don't know for sure. We have sparse suggestions of the origins in
the Indus Valley of some goods that apparently made it to
Mesopotamia, especially semi-precious stones. But we have no data
at all on how those goods got there. Did they come through direct
trade with the Indus? Did they come through indirect trade through
Gulf intermediaries? We don't know. On this question, out of thousands
of known Indus seals, we have a grand total of what now may be close to
50 seals that found their way out of Indus territories (most of these were
already known by the 1930s). some of these seals are cultural hybrids,
having round forms (typical of Gulf and not Indus stamp seal
types) and often display odd variants of Indus symbols. This
evidence doesn't strongly suggest that they were owned by Indus
traders. You can count on one hand the number of Indus-type seals
that are claimed to have come from Central Asia and the Iranian
plateau, a point which -- not noted by Lawler -- certainly doesn't
suggest any wide trade contacts in that direction. Most are found
instead in the Gulf and in Mesopotamia, indicating as one would
expect that whatever contact existed between Mesopotamia and the
Indus Valley took place via sea routes. But none of this gives us any
information on how those contacts were made.
Despite this ambivalent evidence, Lawler cites one confident source,
Nilofer Shaikh, of Latif University in Pakistan, who claims on the basis of
unknown evidence that
> "the Indus people were controlling the trade. They controlled the
> quarries, the trade routes, and they knew where the markets were."
> She [Lawler continues, referring to Shaikh] points out that
> although Indus artifacts spread far and wide, only a small number
> of Mesopotamian artifacts have been found at Indus sites.
How can we possibly know given the paucity of evidence who
"controlled" the trade routes? Moreover, even the claim that "only a
small number of Mesopotamian artifacts have been found at Indus
sites" may be an exaggeration. I may possibly have overlooked some
recent find, but so far as I know no one has ever turned up unambiguous
evidence of even *one* Mesopotamian artifact in Indus territories.
We don't find one cuneiform text, one seal, one seal impression --
nothing. Artifacts even of C. Asian origins are extremely scarce in Indus
territories until close to the time when the civilization fell. This
problem has long been known and presents an obvious challenge to
sensationalist claims about an imaginary "flirtation with
globalization 5000 years ago" in the Indus Valley. As we noted in
"Collapse," there is much evidence to suggest that the Indus Valley
was in fact a remarkably closed society, at least judging by the
artifactual evidence. One reason why this may be so that fits in with
our model is suggested on p. 44 of that study
the trade issue.
Finally it should be mentioned that Lawler's article repackages a lot
of old evidence as being novel to breath life into his globalization
argument. For example, he writes at one point about a well-known
cylinder inscription (of unknown provenance) from someplace in
Mesopotamia:
> An inscription from the late 3rd millennium B.C.E. refers to one
> Shu-ilishu, an interpreter from Meluhha, reports NYU's [Rita]
> Wright in a forthcoming book.
Besides the fact that we don't know what the historical significance
of the seal is, it is important to note that it was discovered in the
19th century, was discussed among other places by Leo Oppenheimer in
1964 in _Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization_, and
has been mulled over endlessly by Indus researchers ever since. To make
it sound like a new discovery may add a little excitement to Lawler's
article, but it is very old news, and reference to an interpreter of
an unknown language is hardly a potent argument for ancient
"globalization."
9. There are many other sensationalist but dubious or unverifiable
assertions in Lawler's article that I can't cover. These include [1]
claims by B.S. Bisht (an archaeologist and Hindu nationalist who
excavated Dholavira, but has published little formally on the site)
about a gigantic "stadium ground stretching nearly the length of
three football fields and including terraces to seat thousands of
people"; I've never met a serious researcher who has believed Bisht's
claim, but Lawler doesn't mention any skeptics; [2] really odd claims
that what since the 1920s has been assumed to be a Buddhist stupa
from a far later era found at Mohenjo-daro dates in fact to the Indus
era; one of the two named backers of this idea is the German archaeologist
Michael Jansen, who has long been one of the most fervent supporters
of the "standardization" idea, despite all the evidence to the
contrary; [3] unverifiable claims, welcome to Hindu nationalists who
long for evidence of continuity between Indus and Vedic traditions,
that Indus cities may have lingered for hundreds of years longer than
previous claimed; these claims are nearly impossible to test, since
the upper layers of Indus sites are typically heavily disturbed,
making estimations of the scale of any late habitations impossible to
estimate: what does "linger on" mean? That there was a giant
population? A few stragglers? [4] Equally unverifiable claims that
Indus urban populations "dwarfed" those of the Middle East, which I
doubt that anyone seriously believes; claims about the "1000-plus
known Indus sites" mentioned by Lawler may appear to provide
intuitive support to this idea, until we realize that most of these sites
are vanishingly small -- a fine point that Lawler doesn't mention. In
any event, the claim that the population of Indus cities "dwarfed"
those in the Middle East, which Lawler makes on his first page, is
totally off-thee-wall.
10. Finally, a bit on Lawler, whose reliability as a reporter has often been
been called into question. Lawler was one of the chief
original promoters of Yousef Madjidzadeh's huge publicity campaign
over the excavations at Jiroft in Southeast Iran. The problem of
sorting out the hyperbole from fact in respect from Jiroft will
continue for years. Lawler's part in the Jiroft hype is suggested in a
scathing article written in 2005 on Jiroft by Oscar Muscarella,
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We have discussed this article
often on the List; you can find the full article here:
http://www.bulletinasiainstitute.org/Muscarella_BAI15.pdf
Muscarella's deconstruction of the Jiroft hype came *before*
Madjidzadeh's most outrageous claims began -- that he had turned up
inscriptions at Jiroft with "writing" on it. As soon as Madjidzadeh
made those claims, Lawler picked them up and reported them in further
sensationalist articles in _Science_. After nearly two years of
skeptical discussion on the List concerning these inscriptions --
whether or not there was writing in a large civilization relatively
close to the Indus was of obvious importance to many of us -- last
year we finally got our hands on high-resolution photos of the
claimed "inscriptions." They included the following ludicrous
example, whose many linguistic absurdities were analyzed on the List
by me, Jacob Dahl, and others:
http://www.safarmer.com/Jiroft/Jiroft02.jpg
Not long after we posted these, Madjidzadeh for the first time showed
them publicly, in Ravenna, where they were widely ridiculed last
summer. At the time, Lawler began to prudently tiptoe back, which ended
in an article in early August 2007 that mentioned archaeologists at
Ravenna whispering: "Everyone is convinced they are fakes, but no one
dares say it." (Actually, a lot of us on the List had been saying it
for some time.) Lawler also cited Jacob Dahl, who had earlier implied
the same on the List, as saying in Ravenna that "no specialist in
the world would consider these to be anything but absolute fakes."
One week after the Ravenna conference, in July 2007, at a conference
we held at Stanford on "pseudo-decipherments" and similar topics,
attended by Jacob as well as me, Sproat, and Witzel, we got our
chance to say so again. But little skepticism was expressed in
Lawler's articles before we pushed the issue, and getting people to
publicly say the pieces were fakes took a long time.
Finally, many of us got a taste of Lawler's methods in December 2004
in his article on the Indus-symbol issue. To make the story more
spectacular, I was turned into a "street kid from Chicago"; the
archaeologist Greg Possehl was referred to as a linguist; and the
always cautious Richard Meadow was impossibly quoted as saying that
old Indus seals were thrown away "like expired credit cards." All
this would have been prevented if Lawler had stuck to his repeated
promises to allow fact checking of his story, which he researched for
months. Eventually, _Science_ was forced to print retractions of a
few of his errors, but who even sees such retractions? When I
questioned him about all the unnecessary factual errors in his
story, his only comment was "It could have been worse."
************
The public deserves better than what it is getting on the Indus
story. The next popular magazine that deals with the issue will
hopefully begin by discussing the long list of Indus Valley fantasies
that reach back to at least 1882 -- when the first Indus forgery
appeared
have served the needs of sensationalizing researchers, political
mythologists, and parts of the popular press, but they certainly have
not served the interests of science or the public.
My apologies again for the inordinately long post!
Steve
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10312
12 June 2008
Dear List,
I want to make one final (I hope) comment on my long critique of
Lawler's articles on the Indus Valley, posted on Sunday (there is a
link there to access his articles):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10282
Part of Lawler's story involves old and easily debunked tales of
"standardized" Indus bricks, weights, city alignments, etc. I suspect
he was led down this path by the German architect-turned-
archaeologist Michael Jansen, who has pushed this story for years,
despite all the evidence that contradicts it.(I was surprised to
see how often Jansen is quoted in the article. He also shows up
a lot in a recent pop-science docudrama on the Indus Valley first
shown on German TV two weeks ago.)
Yesterday I found another really odd passage in Lawler on bricks. His
aim again is to push the quite absurd story that the Indus Valley
was technologically more advanced than ANE civilizations. This
sentence appears on page 1277 of his article. I assume he got this
nonsense from Jansen:
> And at Mohenjo Daro, they used expensive baked brick rather than
> the cheaper mud brick favored in the Middle East, thus leaving
> behind the only Bronze Age city on Earth where it is still possible
> to stroll down ancient alleys shaded by intact walls.
A caption on the same page to a picture points to "5000-year-
old" (sic!) walls at Mohenjo Daro, including the so-called "Great
Bath." The "Great Bath" at 3000 BCE? That's hundreds of years before
the city even existed. Someone put those dates in to align Indus
chronologies more closely with those of the much older urban
developments of Mesopotamia. (Yes, there are pre-Indus sites at 3000,
but not certainly not walled cities like those in Mesopotamia.)
On no baked brick in the Middle East: someone should have pointed
Lawler to the most famous lines in the most famous ANE text (the
Gilgamesh), about a city that is much older than 5000 years old:
> Go up and walk on the walls of Uruk,
> Inspect the base terrace, examine the brickwork:
> Is not its brickwork of burnt brick?
> Did not the Seven [Sages] lay its foundations?
The boast that Mesopotamian cities were made of burnt bricks was common in the
ANE, as Trudy Kawami pointed out to me earlier today.
Maybe someone could too have pointed Lawler to a picture of Ur, which
flourished in Indus times:
http://www.katapi.org.uk/images/Archaeology/Ur.jpg
The Ur ziggurat as shown here is partially reconstructed, but photos
taken during the excavation show that parts were remarkably well
preserved before the reconstruction. And, of course, the outer layers
were of burnt brick (glazed as well).
In a post last summer, Trudy debunked claims similar to Lawler's by
pointing to the detailed discussion of brick making in the ANE in a
work by Moorey. She reminded me this morning of her post and of
Moorey's book:
> [See] P R S Moorey, "Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries:
> The Archaeological Evidence" Oxford, UK 1994; Winona Lake,IN (USA)
> 1999, Chap 6 The Building Crafts, sec. (c) Bricks; sun-dried and
> kiln-fired. Pp. 306-08. Moorey noted baked bricks from the Late
> Uruk/Jemdet Nasr periods (later 4th mill. BCE) and has a nice
> summary on brick sizes.
She went in greater detail with citations from Moorey in her post
last summer, which you can find here; Moorey points to evidence
of apparent brick kilns from the 4th millennium -- before there
were any Indus cities:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/7303
The really interesting things in Indus studies today have little to
do with the tired old stories retold in Lawler, which should have
been caught by the magazine's editors and fact checkers (if they
actually had any). In sum, in the Indus Valley, we find
- No high-tech standardization of bricks, weights, cities; these
claims can be shown to be spurious on indisputable evidence (for
that evidence, see my original post);
- No Mesopotamian artifacts of any sort, and very few from Central
Asia until near the time the civilization was falling. This
missing evidence underlines the absurdity of Lawler's claims about the Indus
Valley "flirting" with "globalization". It's a bit like
claiming that there is massive US-Chinese trade and then walking
into a Walmart and finding nothing made in China.
- We have very little detailed information about the exact form of
Indus trade with the Middle East. E.g., we know nothing about who
controlled it, what the scale of the trade was, etc. Gulf
intermediaries may very well have been in control of it, for all we
know. The evidence is again discussed in my original post.
- There is a nearly total absence of evidence of trade involving the
Iranian plateau. This is indicated by low levels of artifactual
evidence and by the stamp-seal trail, which mainly reaches up the
Gulf and not across land. (Even in the Gulf, seals with Indus-style
emblems on them are predominantly round, not square like Indus seals,
which doesn't suggest that the traders were from Indus cities.)
A lot that is really interesting is going on in Indus archaeology. It
is a shame to see all these old stories in _Science_, of all places.
Steve
13 June 2008
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10320
Dear All,
A few points re: Steve's extensive discussions of the latest Lawler
piece in Science, (while neglecting subsequent discussion for the
moment, I have been occupied otherwise):
* What has entirely been left out by Lawler is the Japanese Indus
project of the Kyoto national "Institute for Humanity and
Nature" (RHIN < http://www.chikyu.ac.jp/index_e.html>), led by
Toshiki Osada (not mentioned). In close cooperation with Indian and
Pakistani archaeologists, they have been active in the past years at
more than four major places in Pakistan and India, including the new
project at the massive site of Ganweriwala in the E. Pakistan desert
of Cholistan.
Of the 20-odd people mentioned in the article, some of the leading
excavators right now are members of the Japanese-sponsored teams:
Qasid Mallah (Sindh), Farzand Masih (Ganweriwala), V. Shinde
(Farmana and several other places in Haryana); Kenoyer is involved
at Ganweriwala, next to his work at Harappa. (Not mentioned at all is
another member of the Jpn. teams: J. Kharakwal with his own digs such
as at Kanmer in W. Gujarat, etc.)
All of this work was discussed in a Workshop at Kyoto in June last
year, by these very scholars, incl. yours truly. (Another conference
was held a few days ago at Kyoto --more later-- including additional
scholars; it will be published in the Opera Minora of the Harvard
Oriental Series; it will include a paper by Steve and me on the East-of-
Mesopotamia "No-script Zone" that we have been referring to for some
years.)
Some detailed points not discussed at length so far, for the top down:
* Hierarchy and regionalization have been known for at least a decade
(Possehl, Kenoyer's summaries). Notable is, (not mentioned on p.
1279), the fake bangle painted red as to look like an expensive
copper bangle used by higher placed people. (The same fact turns up
in a simile quoted in the Pali canon as said by the Buddha, when he
refers to spies disguised as ascetics) ...
* Claims about the large Indus building in Mohenjo-Daro ("stupa") are
just ideas, to be justified by data.
* The map (p.1278) is wrong as far as the Ghaggar-Hakra river is
concerned. It ended in an inland delta near Ft. Derawar in Pakistani
Cholistan, much like the Helmand ends in a series of swamps and
periodic lakes (Hamum) on the Afghan/Iranian border. It did not carry
glacier waters as a 2004 study In Current Science has shown, but the
lower part sometimes carried Sutlej waters (Mughal 1997) -- The
lowest "part" of this river, the Nara channel in SIndh, is connected
(as now in flooding) to the lower Indus.
* I do not repeat the claim about standardization (p. 1276 and many
times over) which just isn't there (or only in the sense of mediaeval
"feet" or "ells" that differed from realm to realm and often from
town to town. (2 standard sizes are mentioned for early Indus at
Harappa (p. 1273) Janssen is enamored by brick and streets: he is an
architect, not an earth digging archaeologist. -- Steve could have
added that the claim for uniform bricks etc. is not upheld any more
by several leading Indus archeologists, but mindlessly copied here
from earlier work.
* I also leave aside the discussion of the "script", referred to in
passing. The so-called "signboard" at Dholavira, the only one where
Indus signs (all the 10 of them) have been found used in a size
larger than those tiny ones on seals and tablets and those marking
vessels. What that (lost) "board " -- only the inlaid signs have been
partly been preserved) actually was used for is up for grabs. We
have always joked in our yearly Round Tables (1999-
that this inscription meant "lasciate ogni speranza voi qui entrate" -- or
rather " 300 miles to Mohenjo Daro".
* The horned Ganweriwala person sitting in "yogalike pose" (Lawler)
that I alerted the list of after Kyoto June 2007, and which we have
then discussed at length, is always taken a Yogin, long before yoga
is attested, or worse as Shiva, 1000 years before the Vedic texts
first mention Rudra). The myth that it refers to Shiva has been
deconstructed long ago by Doris Srinivasan in her 1984 paper
(Srinivasan, D. Unhinging Siva from the Indus Civilization, JRAS
(1984). At best we have, in some of the Great Horned figures a stone
age Lord of the Animals (otherwise a Lady) with a striking parallel
found at Gundestrup in W. Denmark (the Celtic god Cernunnos).
To make this a basis for Hinduism (p. 1280) repeats the claims of the
past 80-odd years, since Marshall, that have not been substantiated,
also not in early Vedic texts (from c. 1500 BCE onwards)..
* It is even worse to construct a pre-Hindu ideology out of
(perceived) Indus great baths (p. 1280). The Vedic (and Old Iranian)
texts do not care about ponds and "tanks" at all, just about
*flowing* waters which are all-healing.
* Western contacts and Indus language (p. 1280): Steve has discussed
that in detail. People from "Meluhha" are well known in Mesopotamian
texts, nothing knew here. Possehl 1996 and Ratnagar 2004) have
collected all the references. Meluhha may refer to the western parts
of the Southern Indus civ. (the black mountains are mentioned).
However, we know something about the language spoken along the
northern and (less so) the southern Indus, see Witzel 1999. This
comes from Vedic sources, about 800-1000 years after the end of the
Mature Indus civ. Cleary, several substrate languages are in
evidence, the major one an unknown prefixing language (which I call,
unlike Kuiper 1991, Para-Munda, not to be confused with early Munda
as such). See now F. Southworth's and my work on substrate languages
with a growing substrate dictionary (
* The end of the Mature Indus (p.1281) has been discussed at nauseam.
Clearly changing climate was one of the triggers, but not the only
one. See the recent papers (2004) and Wright 2008.
The continuation of post-Mature settlements also is well-known
(Summary by the "indigenist" J. Shaffer in HOSOM 3: Shaffer, Jim G.
(1995). Cultural tradition and Palaeoethnicity in South Asian
Archaeology. In: Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia. Ed. George
Erdosy). I have then tried, for years, to draw archaeologist's
attention to the fact that such post-Indus settlements are mentioned
in the Vedic Texts, -- though not the large Indus cities with the
great walls (not necessarily for the ruling class, by the way, often
just retaining walls against flooding).
Now R. Stuhrmann has published a paper in EJVS in May,
fortifications (pur) of the "Others" (dasyu). He and I just differ in
the dating of these RV purs: he thinks they can be as old as the late
Mature Indus (1900 BCE), while I would rather opt for the post Mature
period ("Late Indus" 1900-1300 BCE): we just do not have Indo-Aryans
around at 1900 BCE (Note the Mitanni Indo-Aryans around 1400 BCE in
Mesopotamia, with a language slightly *older* than that of the RV)..
All of this is of course tied in with current Hindu nationalism, (p.
1281, 1283). Nothing to be added to this sad old story.
It is however important to note that the new settlements of this
period (*not* used by the pastoralist Indo-Aryan) are concentrated on
the Upper Ghaggar-Hakra, (only then called the Sarasvati) and in
Gujarat. The Upper Sarasvati is precisely the area (next to Gandhara)
where we have a concentration of non-Indo-Aryan river and place
names: clear substrate of late Indus people.
* Bisht's quoting from Vedic texts is that of a non-specialist: just
as you and I would use the King James translation to check on
Biblical archeology... In his (and worse in books such as by S.P.
Gupta's) ahistorical claims are made that the texts simply do not
bear up.
* The inaccessibility of certain Pakistani regions is overblown. The
British have worked in the NW Frontier Province (Bannu) until a few
years ago, and Pakistanis (and some foreigners!) have been working in
Chitral and Gandhara for years, led by Ihsan Ali of Peshawar U. Under
the recent Muslim government of that province, he established a
museum in Chitral and has excavated interesting sites, some dating
back to c. 30 kya.
* Returning to the end of the Mature Indus: the difficult question
(p. 1282-3) will be that of real urbanism connecting the late Indus
with the early 2nd urbanization of the Gangetic basin (only after 500
BCE). As mentioned, Vedic texts know of settlements (not cities) but
stay aloof of them ("One should only stay one night in village of the
Dasyu when traveling..." as a Brahma text has it, and one should take
a warrior along so that they "greet you smiling").
* The effect of politics on scholarly communication (p. 1282)
certainly is stated correctly. However, as we have repeatedly
observed, archaeologists from Pakistan and India get along just fine
when they meet at conferences such as in Kyoto or the US, and joke in
Hindustani with each other ... Foreign meeting places are a solution,
and Shinde is to be congratulated for having taken a S. Asian
initiative here (p. 1283).
* The claim of little or no publishing (p. 1277,1279) certainly is
true, most notable in India, but emulated in true S. Asian spirit by
many western archaeologists (exc. for the publ. of tee periodic
S.Asian conferences). But "we" at least have been doing so regularly
(RHIN 2005, 2006, 2008 in progress). For example, we hardly have any
publications by the nationalistic but otherwise very nice Bisht on
the important site of Dholavira, just much newspaper / journals hype,
including staged ceremonies in his "stadium". Rakhigarhi is worse.
* In sum: in general, Lawler's "update" repeats many facts that have
been well known for 2 decades or so.
Not much is really new, this is just journalistic hype and
propaganda by some of the excavators (they need money!)
Cheers,
Michael
Michael Witzel
> Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University,
> 1 Bow Street , 3rd floor, Cambridge MA 02138
> 1-617-495 3295 Fax: 496 8571
> direct line: 496 2990
>
>
>
>
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10314
Dear Steve,
I wanted to respond briefly to your posts about the Science article. I have no
great affection for Lawler, and while I'm glad that he's promoting my area of
the world in big-name journals, I wish he wasn't so sensational about
everything. He was a total gossip-monger at the Ravenna conference, and his
comments that "everyone was whispering about the Jiroft tablets being fake but
no one would say it" was complete and utter rubbish. I was at the table with
Lawler when he brought up the tablets and asked the opinions of Serge Cleuziou,
Michelle Casanova, Bertille Lyonnet, myself etc etc etc, and we had a very loud
and open discussion about them, with many people saying "I think they're fake,
but..." But I digress...
Just wanted to insert a few caveats.
First, your comment that there is no Mesopotamian material in the Indus is not
quite true. Possehl has an article in Iranica Antiqua 2002 (CCLK's festschrift)
going over the evidence, which includes certain barrel weights, small figurines,
and some possibly copper/bronze items. Certainly, there are not many purely
Mesopotamian items in Indus sites, but there are some.
Second, there is Indus material in Iran. Eg, etched carnelian beads as far away
as Shah Tepe (Gorgan Plain). However, in the long run, there is more evidence of
contact between Iran and the Baluchi and Pakistani highlands than with the Indus
lowlands, which were much more focused on the sea trade with the Gulf and
Mesopotamia (and thus skipped past the Iranian highlands).
Third, the idea that the Gulf states were in control of the sea trade and that
the Indus played only a minor role may or may not be true. If not, however, then
we are at pains to explain the rather dominant presence of Indus material at
sites throughout the Omani Peninsula, including the seaside site of Ra's al-Jinz
which is almost completely comprised of Indus material. It seems to us that as
the Harappan 'Civilization' grew, it expanded in all directions to take greater
control over trade routes and resources (eg, Shortugai up near Badakhshan; R'as
al-Jinz and Sutkagen Dor in the Gulf of Oman; and possible small sites down the
Indian coast towards Mumbai and Goa). I doubt that it ever controlled the Gulf
trade, but it certainly contributed to it!
Finally, the idea that the Indus was technologically advanced is certainly true
when one considers crafts (I'm thinking of Heather Miller, Mark Kenoyer, and
Massimo Vidale's work here). Their ability to control high temperature firing
installations (eg, production of high-fired steatite drills) was totally
unmatched by their Mesopotamian, Central Asian, or Iranian contemporaries.
Certainly, their lapidary work was outstanding (eg, etched carnelian and
drilling out those amazing long carnelian beads) as was their control of the
ceramic arts. Admittedly, their metallurgical work was rather prosaic, but we
cant have everything, can we?
Anyways, this wasnt meant to diminish your critique of Lawler nor of the Indus
Valley mantra, both of which I think are overblown, but merely to throw a bit of
grist in the mill!
Best,
Chris
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10315
Thanks very much, Chris.
I have Greg Possehl's 2002 article in my office -- he sent me a
reprint when we were writing "Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis."
I'll scan in the relevant sections today and post it for the List
(I'm off to a meeting now and have to dig it up: this is written in
haste). I think you're overblowing what Greg says there, to tell the
truth. There is not any unambiguous evidence of Mesopotamian
artifacts in the region that I know of, which is what I said in my
post. Maybe I'm overlooking something, as I also noted. But let's all
take a look together at exactly what Greg says and decide. That
article itself strongly emphasizes the problem of apparent trade
imbalance, but let's take a look later today.
On what happened in Ravenna: well, we know that Jacob Dahl was there
too, also quoted on the supposed Jiroft inscriptions being fakes. A
week later Jacob, Michael Witzel, Richard Sproat, and I all discussed
those inscriptions at the Stanford conference on "pseudo-
decipherment" Sproat and I ran as well. (I first posted a photo
of the most blatant fake on the List a few weeks earlier, as I
recall.) No one credible believes those are real, and the reasons are
multiple (linguistic, material, etc.). We've discussed the reasons at
length before on the List, and I'm willing to take the issue again,
if necessary. I in fact recall some amusing discussions you and I
have had off-List about this funny example:
http://www.safarmer.com/Jiroft/Jiroft02.jpg Hmmm. :^)
As you've told me yourself, there are obvious reasons why not
everyone who knows these are fakes says so publicly and loudly. If
you do, say, as a Univ. of Penn. archaeologist, you would incur the
wrath of Madjidzadeh, which would mean that you'd never dig at Jiroft
again. (The same is true of Indus issues, since saying the wrong
thing publicly here too can get you locked out; since I'm a comparative
historian and not an Indologist, no problem.) But,
anyway, what I said about Jiroft in this post came at the end,
and was an aside onb Lawler -- although it is relevant to the Indus issue
indirectly.
That apart, however, there is no doubt about Lawler being a "gossip-
monger," to use your words, as a lot of us know from personal
experience. Here's one example: Back in 2004 he called me early in
the morning from Maine when he was preparing his Indus story and
complained that I had been "holding out on him." I was sleepy -- his
call had awakened me -- and I asked him what he meant. He said that
he had talked to someone whose work we criticized in "Collapse" (I
know who it was now, but Lawler wouldn't identify him) who told him
that the original insight that the Indus emblems/symbols weren't part
of a "script" came when I was on a "peyote trip"! I laughed so hard
I cried, as the cliche has it. After I told him, Lawler sounded
depressed, since he had planned to put that story in the _Science_
article. That was the only fact checking of the article he ever did.
He had promised that we'd see the parts relevant to what we told him,
but he never did. We had also agreed to do the article only because
he promised that there would be a link in it to our article, but he
"forgot" to do that as well.
On more substantial issues you raise:
> Third, the idea that the Gulf states were in control of the sea
> trade and that the Indus played only a minor role may or may not be
> true.
What I said in my post was that we don't *know* what role either of
these played in that trade. Lawler didn't mention the Gulf state
option at all. There is a real problem in the seal trail, as you know
-- the supposed Indus seals in the Gulf region aren't really fully
Indus style. That's an important clue. It would be interesting to get
Daniel Potts into this discussion, BTW. We should write him and
try to draw him in.
> If not, however, then we are at pains to explain the rather
> dominant presence of Indus material at sites throughout the Omani
> Peninsula, including the seaside site of Ra's al-Jinz which is
> almost completely comprised of Indus material.
I'd like to see hard verification of that claim, Chris. "Almost
completely comprised"? Let's look at the evidence first hand.
> It seems to us that as the Harappan 'Civilization' grew, it
> expanded in all directions to take greater control over trade
> routes and resources (eg, Shortugai up near Badakhshan; R'as al-
> Jinz and Sutkagen Dor in the Gulf of Oman; and possible small sites
> down the Indian coast towards Mumbai and Goa). I doubt that it ever
> controlled the Gulf trade, but it certainly contributed to it!
Who is "us"? For what group are you speaking? That aside: what
Lawler's article implied was that there was no doubt that the Indus
controlled trade all the way up into Mesopotamia. That claim is
insupportable if you stick just to the artifactual record. The fact
that you find artifacts from one civilization doesn't tell you who
carried the artifacts there. "Pots don't speak", as the phrase has it
-- nor do they identify their owners or transporters.
On technology:
> Finally, the idea that the Indus was technologically advanced is
> certainly true when one considers crafts (I'm thinking of Heather
> Miller, Mark Kenoyer, and Massimo Vidale's work here). Their
> ability to control high temperature firing installations (eg,
> production of high-fired steatite drills) was totally unmatched by
> their Mesopotamian, Central Asian, or Iranian contemporaries.
Two points: first of all, Lawler doesn't even talk about this issue.
He talks instead about the (totally imaginary) "standardization" of
bricks, weights, houses, cities, etc. I've spent a lot of time over
the last few years demonstrating that those ideas are myths. Now we
get these other claims with that line of argument dead.
But are you really claiming now that Indus "crafts" in general were
superior to those of the ANE!? I wouldn't mind hearing the comments
of some of the ANE specialists on the List, like Trudy Kawami, on
that. :^)
> Certainly, their lapidary work was outstanding (eg, etched
> carnelian and drilling out those amazing long carnelian beads) as
> was their control of the ceramic arts. Admittedly, their
> metallurgical work was rather prosaic, but we cant have everything,
> can we?
Well, if we both lived in the 3rd millennium, I suspect both of us
would take the metallurgy over the stone work and bead making. :^)
Seriously, though, I don't even know about the bead-superiority
argument. All these claims come from Indus researchers, like Mark,
who are constantly hyping the civilization from any angle they can
find. It is easy to demonstrate that with many examples we've
discussed previously on the List. The real problem here is that it
detracts from the real issues of interest in the Indus Valley --
e.g., how a massive nonliterate society like this functioned; how
their largely agricultural economy worked; these local issues
are really interesting! A number of people on the List are
dealing with them. They are far more interesting than this
hyped "flirtation" with "globalization" in the Bronze Age nonsense.
And are you seriously claiming that Indus ceramics were as advanced
or more advanced than those in the contemporary Middle East? That
claim would be very easy to falsify, Chris -- just by juxtaposing
examples of contemporary ceramics from the civilizations. We should
perhaps post some materials on the List to test that argument.
You conclude:
> Anyways, this wasnt meant to diminish your critique of Lawler nor
> of the Indus Valley mantra, both of which I think are overblown,
> but merely to throw a bit of grist in the mill!
Useful grist indeed, Chris: let's continue. I'll post relevant
portions of Greg Possehl's article when I return later today.
This is posted on the fly: ignore any obvious idiocies.
Best,
Steve
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10317
I am rather rushed at the moment but couldn't pass up Steve's prod. :-)
Our ideas about the "progress" of technology seem rooted in the 1950's
when technological progress was the measure of American success. In
prehistory (& later) "progress" is no indication of the competency,
power, prestige, whatever, of a country or civilization. Take for
instance the Eurasian steppes in the Iron Age. Their potter is certainly
technically & esthetically "challenged" (hand-built, low fire, no
painting or glazing) but their gold work is superb. Can we argue that
they were not technologically advanced enough to use the potter's wheel?
Of course not; they did not care about pottery in the same way they
cared about personal ornaments of gold. Or look at Mesopotamian
ceramics of the Ubaid (roughly 5th mill BCE) & Uruk (4th mill BCE)
periods. Ubaid pottery is very attractive, well potted, cleverly
painted; Uruk pottery is boring (unless you are into stratigraphy). Both
periods had the slow wheel (tournette), maybe the kick-wheel (fast
wheel), & both had double chamber kilns for sophisticated firing. Their
pottery differs because of social, cultural, political, etc. factors,
not technological ones.
The Indus has been a source of wonderful lapidary work whether etched
carnelian beads in the third mill BCE or emeralds in Roman. But they
were pretty lousy furriers. The Egyptians were fabulous stoneworkers but
couldn't carve realistic feet to save their souls. So what? This attempt
to make every ancient culture "advanced" in every way is just an update
of the 19th century's crypto-imperialist views. Let's get into the 21st
century.
Trudy Kawami
PS Would people working on bricks, metrology, etc please look at what
Moorey has compiled in Ancient Mesopotamian Materials & Industries on
the topic. His summation of others' discussions of the production
techniques of mud brick & pise also throw light on the interpretation of
brick dimensions, etc. It is well worth reading.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10318
Dear Trudy,
Thank you so much...
Trudy Kawami schrieb:
......
> .... So what? This attempt
> to make every ancient culture "advanced" in every way is just an update
> of the 19th century's crypto-imperialist views. Let's get into the 21st
> century.
Dr. Volker Thewalt
Kapellenweg 8
69257 Wiesenbach
Deutschland
+49 6223 970122
http://www.bamiyan.de
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10323
Dear Chris,
Finally (speriamo di si!) on Possehl and the trade issue. You wrote:
> First, your comment that there is no Mesopotamian material in the
> Indus is not quite true. Possehl has an article in Iranica Antiqua
> 2002 (CCLK's festschrift) going over the evidence, which includes
> certain barrel weights, small figurines, and some possibly copper/
> bronze items. Certainly, there are not many purely Mesopotamian
> items in Indus sites, but there are some.
I just dug up the article, Chris. Actually, while he characterizes
these some of these artifacts as "Mesopotamian-like", he only
claims outright that ONE is Mesopotamian -- and that is on
ambiguous evidence.
I won't scan the whole article in, as planned -- it's 17 pages long
and my copy is much marked up -- but below I will quote him on all
the objects he claims may be from the "west." (He includes in this
category "Gulf-like" objects.)
First, what I originally said, just for the record, after discussing
ambiguities in the trade record:
> I may possibly have overlooked some recent find, but so far as I
> know no one has ever turned up unambiguous evidence of even *one*
> Mesopotamian artifact in Indus territories. We don't find one
> cuneiform text, one seal, one seal impression -- nothing. Artifacts
> even of C. Asian origins are extremely scarce in Indus territories
> until close to the time when the civilization fell. This problem
> has long been known and presents an obvious challenge to
> sensationalist claims about an imaginary "flirtation with
> globalization 5000 years ago" in the Indus Valley.
I don't think that view is contradicted by Greg's article. Here is a
list of what he finds:
1. As one of the "two best examples of 'western' material in Indus
contexts" he shows what he identifies as a copper-bronze toilet
article from the urban site of Harappa. This is the ONLY piece
that he claims in the article is Mesopotamian, and I have doubts.
He identifies the artifact as "comprising an earscoop, piercer,
and tweezers." He juxtaposes this with a picture
of an artifact from Ur. I wouldn't want to take bets on the
identification: the illustrations are poor and to me at least don't
seem all that similar. (The Harappan illustration shows three metal
prongs of some sort linked; the Ur piece has four prongs linked.) The
photo in the excavation report, Vats 1940, Plate CXXV which I checked
after rereading Greg's article, doesn't help. Vats himself (1940:
390) identifies the Harappan artifact as part of a "Surgical or
toilet set" in the title, and in the text as a
> bunch of three bronze instruments held together by their looped and
> interlaced ends. Of these, the right hand instrument is a double-
> edged knife damaged by corrosion, the middle one a pair of pincers
> and the left one a piercing rod.
The pieces range from 4.4 to 5.3 inches long. There is nothing in
Vats about an earscoop. As you know, it is difficult to know the
function of corroded metal artifacts. Is this one "Mesopotamian"?
Not proven. Is it "Mesopotamian like"? Perhaps. But note that this is the ONLY
artifact that he comes out directly and claims as Mesopotamian --
despite hundreds of years of supposed two-way Indus-Mesopotamian
trade. Not evidence anyone would want to cite on two-way trade.
And who knows how the thing made it all the way up the Indus
river to Harappa?
2. The second "best example of 'western' material" isn't Mesopotamian at
all, but pertains to a Gulf-style seal found at Lothal. He also finds
five other seals that he thinks are "Gulf-like". If we took scattered
seal evidence like this seriously as evidence of trade, wouldn't this
support the idea I floated of Gulf and not Indus traders
"controlling" the sea trade routes? (Just like you, I don't think the
evidence is sufficient to settle the issue -- but that was my whole
point about Lawler's suggestions to the contrary.)
3. Possehl points to four cylinder seals in the region, but
explicitly tells us that they are not "Mesopotamian per se" -- and
I can confirm that they aren't.
4. Possehl speaks of "Mesopotamian type" barrel weights found in
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. But again (pace your suggestion) he doesn't
claim that these were from Mesopotamia. He instead emphasizes (citing
Mackay 1931) that we find the same *style* weights in Egypt and
Mesopotamia too. (He says that Hemmy didn't use these weights in
his data: interesting and worth checking out if true, but not all that
relevant.) But again, he doesn't claim the weights themselves are
Mesopotamian.
5. He mentions a "few metal objects" including pins with animal heads
that "might" be imports from the west. But then he quickly notes that
"none of these seem to be specifically Mesopotamian." He also points
out that Lamberg-Karlovsky dismisses them outright as evidence of trade,
finding in them instead "a common tradition in the manufacture of pins."
6. Possehl finds several figures" in Lothal that are "Mesopotamian-
like", but the most distinctive of these he thinks is really a "local
product, but one made on a western model." He speaks of a few other
pieces, but again isn't prepared to call any of them imports from Mesopotamia.
Result: despite trying to catalog everything, there is no "unambiguous evidence"
of anything in the region from Mesopotamia. Mainly suggestions of contact
with Gulf intermediaries? I'm not sure -- nor can anyone else be sure. But
there are at least hints of that in the data.
He concludes by emphasizing the (well-known) "lack of balance between the
archaeological record regarding the trade between the Indus
Civilization and Mesopotamia." He points out as I did that there are
no Mesopotamian cuneiform texts in the Indus Valley. (Nor seal
impressions nor seals either, as I pointed out in my post.) We point
out in "Collapse" some possible reasons for this
Final sentences in Possehl's article;
> With these observations in mind I am forced to conclude that the
> 'mechanisms of trade', i.e. the institutions of commerce and the
> form of the transactions, were different in the Indus Civilization
> and Mesopotamia. this is not surprising, since the Indus
> Civilization and Mesopotamia are quite independent sociocultural
> systems. It is within the sociocultural fabric of these two
> civilizations that the explanation of the differential distribution
> of material culture lies, not just with 'invisible' products.
I agree with that conclusion, and these lines were much in my mind
when Michael, Richard, and I offered our own hypothesis (involving
the closed nature of Indus society) offered for the trade imbalance
in "Collapse", p. 44
Thanks for prodding me to reread the article today, Chris. Very useful!
I forgot to give the full reference: Gregory L. Possehl, "Indus-Mesopotamian
Trade: The Record in the Indus." Extrait d'Iranica Antiqua, vol. XXXVII, 2002.
A bit misnamed, maybe, since there is NO clear record of that trade in the Indus
region.
Best,
Steve
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10316
[Mod. note. Thanks, Dean. Will answer in detail when I return
this afternoon & post Possehl. But do note that on "superior" Indus
technology, you aren't covering points in Lawler's article but
in Kenoyer, who has pushed that thesis hard. Chris, who has
worked a lot on metallurgy, just told us that Indus metallurgy
was "rather prosaic," and now you cite Kenoyer claiming it was
superior to that in the ANE (easy to debunk). The lesson: citing
"authorities" w/o evidence is useless here. On weights: look
not just at the charts but all full raw data already posted. On
cities laid out in cardinal directions: sorry, look at the site
maps. We already debunked this re burials on the List. - SF.]
Hi Steve,
I enjoyed your post a great deal. As usual, you have raised some
interesting questions that require us to go back and re-examine the
data, which is always a good thing lest we become hidebound by
outdated information and perspectives.
I agree with you that Lawler's article "sexed up" the Harappan
Civilization, to borrow a phrase from the British. But as someone who
holds forth on the glories of the Harappans from time to time, I also
sympathize with the author because, frankly, the Harappan artifacts
are a bit pedestrian compared to the Mesopotamians and Egyptians.
I've nothing to add to your first two numbered points so I'll start
with point 3.
3) Trade-Savvy Indus
3a) In particular, I was intrigued by Lawler's implied claim that
recent research was responsible for the perception that "a Trade-
Savvy Indus Emerges". I'll have to look deeper into this, but my
ongoing research indicates that the important facts about Indus trade
were established decades ago. New research seems to have mostly
uncovered more information about smaller sites and the important
discovery that the Indus origins and collapse were not nearly as
sudden or dramatic as previously thought. (See Kenoyer 2005: 21-49
for a good summary.)
3b) You say: "Are we really supposed to believe that the
sophistication of Indus commerce and technology surpassed that of the
Mesopotamians and Egyptians?"
Like you, I won't focus on the trade but the technology. Regarding
technology in general, I would say that, in some certain cases,
Lawler is on solid ground here. Kenoyer lists several examples where
Indus technology surpassed that of their contemporaries. An
incomplete list would include the following pages from Kenoyer
(1998): glazing (180), superior faience (157-8), bead making and
drilling (161-2), metallurgy (158).
4) Weights
Your posts about the weights are very fascinating. I'd love to see
the complete data set and look into this more closely.
I took a quick look at your two graphs:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.13-15.gms.jpg
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.26-29.gms.jpg
I'll do more later but it seems that they actually do clump pretty
closely around 13.4-14g and 26.7-27.7grams. Maybe half a gram or a
gram variation wasn't such a big deal 5000 years ago!
The anomalous data points that stream off the beginning and end and
that give the table such a continuous appearance are mystifying. For
now, I'd have to say you've proposed an interesting open question not
a solid refutation. (What's with those intermediate weights...? I
wonder if they recorded find spots...?)
5) Bricks
You say: "The most usual claim (there are several
variants) is that Indus bricks were standardized in neat and
mathematical 1 x 2 x 4 proportions. Again, the story has been
repeated for decades, but it is easy to demonstrate that it is
empirically false. Here, for example, is a scan of four key pages
from Marshall 1931, the locus classicus of early discussions of this
issue. Marshall in fact distinguished 15 (!) different sized bricks
in Mohenjo-daro."
I assume we both agree that many different sizes of bricks are not
really the issue. There are two issues: 1) the RATIO of the brick's
dimensions, not the size, and; 2) how many of each type of brick
there are. To use an exaggerated example, if there were 214 bricks
but 14 of them were of differing ratios and 200 of them were of the
same ratio, then we'd have a pattern.
> "Not ONE of those 15 types have 1 x 2 x 4 proportions
> or anything close."
Another important issue is, at the risk of sounding Clintonian, how
"close" is "close"? :-) As anyone who's been to India can tell
you, precision of measurement isn't always an overriding concern.
Given that this was also 5000 years ago, at the dawn of civilization,
I think we have to accept a somewhat larger standard of deviation.
Of the 15 types of bricks listed, we can remove the first 3 [ (15),
(1), (6) ] listed above because they are anomalous in some way:
unique or sawn down. I've not shown my calculations and just given
the summary. I can provide the calculations, if you wish, although
they're pretty simple to see.
a) Length: Width
Taking a look at the brick dimensions listed, the most interesting
thing to note is that the largest dimension (length) is usually
pretty close to twice the middle dimension (width) � 4:2. It is the
smallest dimension (height) 2:1 that varies the most. Of course, it
makes sense that the length and width have a 4:2 (i.e. 2:1) ratio. It
allows for a solid overlap between courses which makes a stronger
wall and it makes brick-laying easier in places like corners. Some
pre-Harappan bricks tended to be 3:2:1. It was during Mature Harappan
times that the more logical 4:2(:1) ratio was standardized. (Possehl
2002:72, 107)
Half of the 12 categories of bricks have exactly a 2:1 ratio of
length to width and the others are all within .5 inch except for one.
I think we can say with confidence that the Harappans standardized
length to width on a 2:1 ratio, i.e. the 4:2 part of the 4:2:1 is
valid.
b) Width: Height
The ratio of the smallest dimension (height) is problematical
however.
Remarkably, none of the widths: heights have exactly a 2:1 ratio or
are even within .25 inches. Five have about a .5 inch deviation and
six are between 1 inch and .55 inch. The length: height ratios are
similarly imprecise when compared to the ideal 4:1.
Of course, this is from only one site and we don't know how many of
each type of brick there was but unless we have more data about the
frequency of the different types of bricks, we can't claim anything
approaching a precise 4:2:1 ratio with our current information.
So while it may be true that the Harappans used bricks that were
*roughly* 4:2:1 it may have been due more to the practical
considerations of the 4:2 ratio than any ideological consideration.
Attempts to portray them as using a precise and widely standardized
brick proportion as proof of a superior technology are an
exaggeration. Nevertheless, the widespread adoption of the 4:2 brick
ratio across their wide domain beginning around the time of the
Mature Period is another fascinating example of Harappan
standardization. Lawler cannot really be held accountable, however,
it may be that archaeologists aren't concerned with exact proportions
and just round to 4:2:1 - many of them do cite either the ratio, the
dimensions or standardized bricks, i.e. Kenoyer 1998:56-7; Possehl
2002: 68, 72, 107; Allchin 1997:155; McIntosh 2002: 50, 69.
6. What about those standardized "houses" and "whole cities" that
Lawler claims as being "unique in the early historic period"?
Some might feel that we're pulling one sentence out of a long article
and parsing it rather finely, but so be it. The full quote is "The
Indus penchant for precise standardization�from tiny weights to
bricks to houses to entire cities�was unique in the early historic
period."
So it refers primarily to their penchant for standardization in
general. I agree with you that "standardization" is probably an
unfortunate term to use in referring to Harappan houses and cities
since it gives the impression of cookie-cutter similarity. But there
was an underlying architectural philosophy shared among many of the
major cities.
It's hard to criticize Lawler when an archaeologist like McIntosh
(2002:50) says: "The layout of the cities was planned along the
cardinal directions, the streets running north-south and east-west.
The streets conform to a series of set proportions, main streets
being twice the width of minor streets, for example. Within the
blocks delineated by these streets, houses were laid out in an
orderly fashion. They were generally constructed to one of a series
of modular designs; bricks were made to a standard size."
But, like the bricks and weights, there is quite a lot of
variability. Possehl (2002: 101) sums it up well: "While there is
regularity in the layout of Mohenjo-daro, it is far from perfect."
Many of the minor streets are not well-aligned; the so-called grid
pattern is recognizable but hardly perfect; nor is it perfectly
aligned to the cardinal directions � unless the pole star weaved
erratically during construction.
It's true that "One of the most common features of a house at Mohenjo-
daro was a special platform for bathing" (Possehl 2002:106) but not
in all cities. Macintosh (2002:93) notes, accurately, I think, that
"the five massive sites all had citadels, but only some of the medium-
sized ones and number of the smaller ones." So there was a wide-
spread, but hardly universal, and often exaggerated, uniform approach
to building.
It's a huge and fascinating topic in itself, however, and I think
I'll save it for another time.
7) Yoga
Steve says: "Most importantly on the "yogic" part of this argument,
it is important to note that close examination of photos of all known
instances of these figures show that NONE of the hands in the figures
even come close to resting on the knees. (You can even see this in
the photo that Lawler includes in his article, if you use a
magnifying glass.) Their arms, which are heavily bangled, instead
hang out a bit like branches, which makes perfect sense when you
consider the trees or branches often found on their heads, which are
common signs of gods (apparently agricultural) in the Indus Valley.
We've discussed this before but it so happens I was looking at it
again when you made this post. I summarize my findings and include
links to our discussion in a graphical presentation at:
http://www.eastwestcultural.org/public/protoyogi
Steve says: "Marshall's claims concerning "proto-Siva" figures have
been debunked many times before. ... Why didn't anyone whom Lawler
interviewed inform him of this problem?
I could provide a long list of experts on South Asia who accept the
"Proto-Shiva" terminology, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the
reader (I can collect them later, if there is interest). I would say
that Proto-Shiva is the dominant understanding despite efforts of
scholars like you and Michael Witzel. I'd be interested in any other
sources you have that are critical of this.
8. Steve says: "Let me turn now to Lawler's central claim -- that the
Indus was some sort of global trading "powerhouse."
I agree with you that calling the Harappans "THE powerhouse" is
probably an exaggeration. I know of no evidence supporting it
although I'd be interested in what makes Lawler think that's the case.
I also agree with you that the majority of Harappan economic activity
was internal and agricultural. In fact, until industrial times most
societies were primarily agricultural.
It is possible to call the Harappans *A* powerhouse however. There is
no question that the Harappan region was significantly larger than
Mesopotamia or Egypt, certainly in terms of geography, but also quite
possibly in terms of total economic output, including internal trade.
At least, in part, this would have been due to their size. They kept
unified a much larger area, probably for a longer time, than the
other two civilizations and so much of their trade was internal
rather than through the often fractious relations that Mesopotamia
had, both with its neighbors and internally. I have a theory about
how this ties in with their eventual decline but I'm trying to keep
this as short as possible.
Steve says: I am NOT suggesting here that Indus traders didn't exist.
But the evidence suggests that the scale of Indus trade has been
hyped to
death by Hindu nationalists and the handful of researchers Lawler
depended upon to build his "globalization" argument.
This "handful of researchers" includes the leading scholars in the
field who seem to represent the consensus that there was major trade
with Mesopotamia. Kenoyer: (1998: 17) speaks of "vast trade
networks". The Allchins (1997: 177) concur: "considerable quantities
of trade goods of apparently Indus origin have been found in
Mesopotamia, and there are also many inscriptional references to
Meluhha...."
Regarding your mention of" a handful of cuneiform tablets that speak
of trade with "Meluhha", it's important to point out that some of
those tablets are from the ruler of the Mesopotamian region. So
Meluhhan trade must have been significant enough to get his
attention. Kenoyer (1998:98) says of "... Sargon of Akkad (2334-2279
B.C.) This famous ruler boasts of ships from Dilmun, Agad and Meluhha
that are docked at his capital city, Akkad. Most scholars agree that
... Meluhha refers to the general region of the Indus Valley.
Numerous texts describe the types of goods coming from Meluhha: hard
woods, tin or lead, copper, gold, carnelian, shell, pearls and ivory.
Animals such as a red dog, a cat, peacocks, or black partridges and
monkeys are also mentioned." But "The absence of Mesopotamian
cylinder seals and sealings would indicate that Mesopotamian traders
were not directly involved with Indus trade and that no bundles of
goods sealed by Mesopotamian merchants were being sent to the Indus
cities."
Possehl discusses the subject of Indus trade at length (2002: 218-
226).
In summary, I think you've brought to light some important
criticisms, not so much of Lawler, but of some of the accepted
Harappan doctrines of Lawler's informants that, in some cases, appear
to have been exaggerated, to say the least. I found your post to be a
valuable wake up call to my critical faculties.
But it seems to me that, on the one hand, you're questioning some of
the central doctrines about the Harappans and on the other hand,
you're disgruntled that the defenders of those doctrines don't
immediately accept your ideas. You can't have it both ways, my
friend! Don't you know the promulgators of new ideas have to first
spend some time howling in the wilderness? :-)
Best,
Dean Anderson
----------------------------------------
References:
Allchin, Frank Raymond and Allchin, Bridget. 1997. Origins of a
Civilization. New Delhi: Viking Penguin Books.
Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. 1998. Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley
Civilization. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. 2005. "Culture Change during the Late
Harappan period at Harappa: new insights on Vedic Aryan issues". In
The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history.
pp. 21-49. London & New York: Routledge.
McIntosh, Jane R. 2002. A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of the
Indus Civilization. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Possehl, Gregory. 2002. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary
Perspective. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10319
Dear Dean,
Let me answer you quickly on individual points. If we continue this,
let's focus in posts in the future on only one point at a time or we
won't get anywhere. But perhaps it is better to limit detailed
discussion in this thread to people who are working in the field or
have published in it? Nothing can be settled by pointing to old
secondary sources, especially when they are miscited (see below).
You write:
> I agree with you that Lawler's article "sexed up" the Harappan
> Civilization, to borrow a phrase from the British. But as someone who
> holds forth on the glories of the Harappans from time to time, I also
> sympathize with the author because, frankly, the Harappan artifacts
> are a bit pedestrian compared to the Mesopotamians and Egyptians.
Well, that's been the problem since Marshall's day. Nothing sexy so
you invent something sexy.
The society is interesting in its own terms. Why anyone would want to
glorify this or any other ancient civilization is beyond me. These were
very alien societies, from modern perspectives. That's what makes them
interesting to me (see also Trudy's post!). If you want to get a feel for
Harappa, maybe you might want to mention human heads being
sacrificed to tree gods, etc. :^) Not politically correct,
Not politically correct, I guess. :^) So instead we get talk about busy
merchants running around the world globalizing things that would make
the Wall Street Journal proud. Hence Lawler, picturing Harappa as
> an aggressive player during humanity's first flirtation with
> globalization 5000 years ago.
Note again that 5000 years ago there weren't any Indus cities -- just
real "global villages", maybe?
You write:
> Regarding technology in general, I would say that, in some certain
> cases, Lawler is on solid ground here. Kenoyer lists several examples where
> Indus technology surpassed that of their contemporaries. An
> incomplete list would include the following pages from Kenoyer
> (1998): glazing (180), superior faience (157-8), bead making and
> drilling (161-2), metallurgy (158).
First of all, Lawler didn't mention any of this, and the thread is supposedly
on his article. Secondly, you can hardly advance research by citing a popular
textbook from 1998. Thirdly, your citations are inaccurate:
- E.g., Kenoyer doesn't talk at all about glazing on page 180; on the
next page he mentions it but with no comparison with Mesopotamian
technology (glazing in Mesopotamia was highly developed, in fact);
- on page 157-8 he tells us that some parts of faience technology
were "broadly similar" to that in Mesopotamia and some were
different; his only claim of superiority is that only Indus bangles were strong
enough that thin bangles "would not break with normal jostling on the wrist."
I doubt if anyone has empirically tested this; even if it is true it is a pretty
weak argument for hyping a civilization;
- on page 161-2 he says that Indus craftsmen "have the distinction of
producing the longest and most slender beads of carnelian in the
world" using special cylindrical drills; but he doesn't talk about
drilling technologies in the Middle East.
- on page 158 he doesn't say anything at all about the supposed superiority
of Indus metallurgy (which Chris earlier told us wasn't superior).
This kind of miscitation of old textbooks is part of the problem in
discussions like this. And we shouldn't be citing textbooks anyway.
> 4) Weights
> Your posts about the weights are very fascinating. I'd love to see
> the complete data set and look into this more closely.
I posted "the complete data set" on which traditional claims were
made about standardized and precision weight, from Hemmy 1938. He
explicitly claims in fact that they weren't all that standardized.
You just didn't include the link in your post:
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/weightchart.jpg
> I took a quick look at your two graphs:
> http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.13-15.gms.jpg
> http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/IndusWeights.26-29.gms.jpg
>
> I'll do more later but it seems that they actually do clump pretty
> closely around 13.4-14g and 26.7-27.7grams. Maybe half a gram or a
> gram variation wasn't such a big deal 5000 years ago!
(1) None of these is from "5000 years ago" -- you are repeating
Lawler's spurious dates; (2) they don't "clump pretty closely"
around the figures you claim -- you have to look at data carefully,
not just take quick looks at it; (3) even if they did clump together in
such a range, you could hardly talk about precise standardized weights
in the Indus Valley and then say a gram or so wasn't a big deviation.
(The deviations from the claimed expected values here are much more
than a gram, however.)
The only other data available on weights are the recent data from Harappa.
I have these as noted but can't post them, since these data belong to
the Harappa Archaeological Research Project (shared with me by Richard
Meadow). These data are much more sparse, but they tell the same
story. (On claimed Middle Eastern style barrel weights not
included in Hemmy's data, mentioned by Possehl, see my next post.)
I'll largely skip most of what you say about bricks. I gave the data from the
excavation reports in my original post:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10282
(point 5)
You comment:
> Remarkably, none of the widths: heights have exactly a 2:1 ratio or
> are even within .25 inches. Five have about a .5 inch deviation and
> six are between 1 inch and .55 inch. The length: height ratios are
> similarly imprecise when compared to the ideal 4:1.
This is only remarkable if you start with the myth and try to force
fit the data to it. You are just repeating my point.
> Of course, this is from only one site and we don't know how many of
> each type of brick there was but unless we have more data about the
> frequency of the different types of bricks, we can't claim anything
> approaching a precise 4:2:1 ratio with our current information.
And in the next paragraph you tell us first that they aren't standardized
but they are:
> Attempts to portray them as using a precise and widely standardized
> brick proportion as proof of a superior technology are an
> exaggeration. Nevertheless, the widespread adoption of the 4:2 brick
> ratio across their wide domain beginning around the time of the
> Mature Period is another fascinating example of Harappan
> standardization.
You go on:
> Lawler cannot really be held accountable, however,
> it may be that archaeologists aren't concerned with exact proportions
> and just round to 4:2:1 - many of them do cite either the ratio, the
> dimensions or standardized bricks, i.e. Kenoyer 1998:56-7; Possehl
> 2002: 68, 72, 107; Allchin 1997:155; McIntosh 2002: 50, 69.
With the result that you shouldn't spend all your time repeating what is
in the secondary literature, right?
On standardized cities, houses, etc.:
> It's hard to criticize Lawler when an archaeologist like McIntosh
> (2002:50) says: "The layout of the cities was planned along the
> cardinal directions, the streets running north-south and east-west.
> The streets conform to a series of set proportions, main streets
> being twice the width of minor streets, for example. Within the
> blocks delineated by these streets, houses were laid out in an
> orderly fashion. They were generally constructed to one of a series
> of modular designs; bricks were made to a standard size."
Why is it hard to criticize Lawler for mindlessly following anyone?
People are expected to check their sources, not just repeat the most
spectacular claims. All you have to do to debunk the old whoppers in
this paragraph is to dig up site maps in the available excavation reports.
I'm looking at maps now from Mohenjo Daro. The alignment isn't anything
near N-S or E-W. Pure nonsense endlessly repeated, as has been pointed
out often on the List. Why is it necessary to repeat this sort of thing?
But now that we're told things were standardized, you cite a source
that says they weren't:
> But, like the bricks and weights, there is quite a lot of
> variability. Possehl (2002: 101) sums it up well: "While there is
> regularity in the layout of Mohenjo-daro, it is far from perfect."
> Many of the minor streets are not well-aligned; the so-called grid
> pattern is recognizable but hardly perfect; nor is it perfectly
> aligned to the cardinal directions � unless the pole star weaved
> erratically during construction.
I think Greg's last thesis is correct: the pole star must have weaved
erratically. :^)
I'll largely leave the supposed "yogic" and "proto-Siva" stuff alone.
We've talked it to death. The evidence against all this is multiple:
(1) the pose isn't Yogic and the hands don't touch the knees in a
single known example; often the separation is extremely wide; (2) if
you look at early yogic texts several millennia after the Indus fell,
there is no discussion of poses anyway; these come in the common era;
(3) seating poses of some sort that look vaguely yogic are found
all over the world, as Michael and Luis Gonzalez-Reimann and I
pointed out with many examples last year; (4) there is absolutely
nothing in these images that can be correlated with Siva images when
these appear several thousand years later. Basta and QED on this.
You write:
> I could provide a long list of experts on South Asia who accept the
> "Proto-Shiva" terminology...
No doubt, starting with Marshall 1931. The whole point of this
discussion is that historical and archaeological research doesn't
have anything to do with piling up "authorities" or citing secondary
sources. if it did, we'd all still being talking about the "lost
archives" of Indus texts that researchers talked about for decades.
Any subsequent discussions on these issues really have to take them
up one by one, or we'll be stuck talking about the same old issues
forever: they aren't interesting.
Steve
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10321
Re: Article in _Science_ on Indus archaeology
Dean Anderson said:
"I'll do more later but it seems that they actually do clump pretty
closely around 13.4-14g and 26.7-27.7grams. Maybe half a gram or a
gram variation wasn't such a big deal 5000 years ago!"
Perhaps for valuables such as precious metals and semi-precious stones, they
used something other than weights fashioned by humans. I am pretty sure I have
seen the seeds of Abrus precatorius (gunja, rosary pea, jequirity; see Wiki
article "Jequirity" < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosary_pea >) used in India
to weigh such things. They are remarkably uniform in size, except occasionally
for those from the very tip of the pod. The Pandanus Database of Indian Plants,
s.v. gunja < http://iu.ff.cuni.cz/pandanus/database/details.php?id=1 >, citing
Monier-Williams, says that they average 1 5/16 troy grains, which an online
converter reckons as 0.34 grams. So it takes 3 of a seed used for weighing
small quantities of valuable substances to make a single gram. Maybe the c. 14
g. and 27 g. weights were indeed for things middling valuable, but not valuable
enough to demand extreme precision. (What, by the way? Brass? Some sort of
stone?)
I think maybe one could work out the above argument better, but I have to leave
for the weekend.
Allen
Allen W. Thrasher, Ph.D., Senior Reference Librarian
South Asia Team, Asian Division
Library of Congress, Jefferson Building 150
101 Independence Ave., S.E.
Washington, DC 20540-4810
tel. 202-707-3732; fax 202-707-1724; athr@...
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10322
Trudy says of the IVC, " But they were pretty lousy furriers."
How in the world do we know that?
Allen
Allen W. Thrasher, Ph.D., Senior Reference Librarian
South Asia Team, Asian Division
Library of Congress, Jefferson Building 150
101 Independence Ave., S.E.
Washington, DC 20540-4810
tel. 202-707-3732; fax 202-707-1724; athr@...
The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of
Congress.
posted by kalyan97 at 7:01 PM
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