How did Dr Farmer miss Shu-ilishu’s seal?

So whom can a research student really trust today?

Disclaimer: The writer understands that the following article might read like Greek to most of the people passing by (apart from those who can actually read Greek, of course – to them it would read like Latin! Or Hebrew, for that matter). The writer is also optimistic – rather unduly optimistic – that it would make at least some sense to approximately one-and-a-half of the people who would go through it – one-and-a-half individuals very well versed in the ways of the ancients. Thus, the writer does not pretend to write for the general public, and by no means expects to be understood by but a few.

Caution: Due to a lack of space and time (which was obviously not wasted by adding the disclaimer and the note of caution–nothing’s ever wasted for a good cause, mind you, and humour is the best cause!), the writer has chosen not to give the background of most of the information given below, thus, all the people other than the one-and-a-half mentioned above please proceed, if you wish, with due caution and with minimum hopes of comprehending the gibberish. The writer is very (not) sorry for the inconvenience. (Do a little background yourself now will you.)

So, now, coming to the point – the Indus Valley Civilisation Script.

Whoever has heard of the IVC Script must be aware of its famed indecipherability. Those who have ventured deeper would understand that the most frequented proposals of the script’s identity claim it to be a Proto-Dravidian language – that is, the precedent, or the mother-root of the tree of Dravidian languages of today. Other proposals suggest it to be closer to Elamite, the dead Mesopotamian language, while some propose that it was not a language at all, but a mere collection of symbols, with no linguistic significance.

This last “clan” of academics (whom this article is directed at) attempted to back its hypothesis for the first time in a 2004 paper entitled, “The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilisation”. The writers of this paper were Richard Sproat, then Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois; Michael Witzel, Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, and Steve Farmer, director of the cultural modelling research group, California.

The above-mentioned paper – which is available in full at Steve Farmer’s website, www.safarmer.com – and this group’s later publications, suggested that all “pseudo-decipherments” or even attempts at the decipherment of the Indus Script were fakes and were generated by scholars in order to advance their academic careers. The writers backed their anti-script thesis by some computerised linguistic research as well as some hypothetical judgments – such as the lack of lengthy texts and the high number of symbols used in the (non-)script – and went on to conclude that the Harappan civilisation was in fact not one of the four oldest literate societies of the world: the central premise of their research.

However, the paper completely failed to address one vital issue: the existence of Shu-ilishu’s seal.

Shu-ilushu’s seal – a cylindrical seal with cuneiform inscriptions – was documented in A. Leo Oppenheim’s Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilisation and was brought to the limelight by Gregory L Possehl in his article published in the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum’s records as “What in the World – Shu-ilishu’s Cylinder Seal”. The seal, according to Oppenheim and Possehl, states that it belongs to a man named Shu-ilishu, a resident of Akkad (c. 2020 BC) and an interpreter of the Meluhhan (Meluhha is largely believed to be the Indus Valley Civilisation) language. The Meluhhan language, I repeat.

It is odd that Farmer, Sproat and Witzel’s 2004 paper did not have a single mention of Shu-ilishu or his seal, even though they had cited many of Possehl’s works. Could it be possible that they were completely oblivious of the existence of such a seal? With a Harvard Indologist on the team, I seriously doubt that.

What is even more remarkable is that the scholars at the centre of these writers’ criticism, such as Dr Asko Parpola of Helsinki University, not only mention Shu-ilishu’s seal in their works (such as in Parpola’s famous Deciphering the Indus Script) but also include it in the foundation of their research work. Are, then, the anti-script theorists resorting to the concealment of facts in order to promote their research work – or, in other words, “advance their academic careers”?

Should these respectable researchers be asked why there was an interpreter of a language that, according to them, didn’t even exist, it is likely that they would dismiss the documenting seal as a fake. Or, if they grant the seal to be genuine – for it was the property of the prestigious Louvre – they would possibly try to reason out of the situation by insisting that Meluhha was in fact not the Indus Valley Civilisation, at all. Or maybe attempt to present some other hypothesis that challenges the academic status quo – even if it would not make any sense.

The Indus Valley Civilisation and Shu-ilishu’s seal aside, it is worrisome to see such below par performance by a team that included a Harvard Professor. If nothing else, the kind of mudslinging of respectable scholars that they indulged in (for further information, please refer to http://ontogenyphylogenyepigenetcs.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/steve-farmer-accuses-asko-parpola-i-mahadevan-and-“the-hindu-too/) was rather underwhelming for researchers of their calibre and station.

Furthermore, in a personal correspondence with this writer, Dr Asko Parpola judged one of the Indus seals presented on Steve Farmer’s website as “very probably a fake”, rendering the former’s publications unreliable for research students. (And I am quite certain that the opposing camp would render the work of Parpola unreliable!)

So whom can a research student really trust, today? In the realms of the ancient studies, it is evident that one has to be very, very careful for the world is littered with fake antiquities – as well as below par research papers.