дали и овие шират ерес?..
баткава кажуваат дека на овие простори има многу податоци за почеток на светската писменост..
The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis:
The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization
Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel1
Abstract
Archaeologists have long claimed the Indus Valley as one of the four literate centers of the early
ancient world, complete with long texts written on perishable materials. We demonstrate the
impossibility of the lost-manuscript thesis and show that Indus symbols were not even evolving in
linguistic directions after at least 600 years of use. Suggestions as to how Indus symbols were used are
noted in nonlinguistic symbol systems in the Near East that served key religious, political, and social
functions without encoding speech or serving as formal memory aids. Evidence is reviewed that the
Harappans’ lack of a true script may have been tied to the role played by their symbols in controlling
large multilinguistic populations; parallels are drawn to the later resistance of Brahmin elites to the
literate encoding of Vedic sources and to similar phenomena in esoteric traditions outside South Asia.
Discussion is provided on some of the political and academic forces that helped sustain the Indusscript
myth for over 130 years and on ways in which our findings transform current views of the Indus
Valley and of literacy in the ancient world in general.
1 Contact information: Steve Farmer, Ph.D., Portola Valley, California,
saf@safarmer.com; Richard Sproat,
Departments of Linguistics and Electrical and Computer Engineering, the University of Illinois and the Beckman
Institute,
rws@uiuc.edu; Michael Witzel, Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University,
witzel@fas.harvard.edu.