A Bushy Tail: The Piltdown Horse

Almost every month now, someone claims to have deciphered the enigmatic script of theIndus Civilisation, the last undeciphered script of any major ancient civilisation. Dozensof scholars have tried in vain to get a grip on it. This does not really surprise, forneither the value of individual signs nor the underlying language(s) are known. To be ableto read the more than 4,200 Indus seals and inscriptions would provide major and probablysurprising insights into the oldest history of India.

The most recent attempt at decipherment by .S. Rajaram and . Jha in their book TheDeciphered Indus Script has just been exposed in Frontline and a discussion has beeninitiated in The Pioneer. This ‘decipherment’ is but a collection of wildguesses, based on an incredibly flexible Indus "alphabet" and compounded andbolstered by actual fraud, Rajaram’s "Piltdown" horse. One Indus seal(Mackay 1937-8, no. 453) is supposed to read, in late Vedic Sanskrit: "Arkohaas’va, Sun indeed like the horse [sic]," a reference to the Yajurveda!According to Rajaram, it is accompanied by a picture of a horse. But this picture is foundon a broken seal, where the front part of the "horse" is missing, and only thehindquarters of a typical "unicorn" bull are visible. The very break line of theseal, fuzzily reproduced from a clear original, is reconstructed by Rajaram as the neckand head of a horse and made "visible" in an added "artist’simpression".

The search for the original seal, badly referenced by Rajaram, is virtually impossiblefor the lay reader but not so for an insider, due to A. Parpola’s concordances andhis magnificent photo collections of the Indus inscriptions. There are in fact two sealsof that type, with the same inscription (Parpola, 1991, no. M-772, M-1034). Both arebroken and without the "horse’s" neck and head that have been liberallysupplied by "computer enhancement" (as Rajaram privately admitted later on). ButM-1034 clearly shows the genitals of a bull, not those of a horse.

What kind of motive drives expatriate writers such as a Rajaram to wildly imagine oreven to invent their evidence? Just as the infamous British Piltdown man (this 1912 hoaxtried to establish the "missing link" between ape and man), this Piltdown horseis composed of fake parts, put together with the same intention: to show something thatsimply is not there but is wished for, and, therefore, manufactured.

Why a horse? Horses are badly needed in the Indus Civilisation, as zoology andarchaeology tell us they were not found in South Asia then. Domesticated horses, animalsof the northern steppes, were imported into South Asia (and Mesopotamia) only early in thesecond millennium bce (same as BC, or Before Christ, which scholars don’t use due toits religious connotation. bce is Before Common Era). The first archaeologically-attestedbones come from the plains below Bolan Pass (in what’s now west-central Pakistan), at1700 bce, 200 years after the Indus Civilisation disintegrated. All other early finds ofequid bones, despite some excavators’ insistence, belong to the half-ass (onager,hemione, equus heminonus khur) or come from archaeologically unclear levels.

As Rajaram and Jha, along with many autochthonists, want to let the horse-rich Rig Vedaprecede the Indus Civilisation (2600-1900 bce), they need Indus horses and chariots badly. The Piltdown horse seal now proves their point! They also find an Indus sign which lookslike a spoked wheel (but which may be the south Indian potter’s wheel-or just aboutanything else). Finally, they read many seals as referring to horses, which proves:"The supposed ‘horselessness’ of the Harappans is a dogma that has beenexploded by evidence. But like its cousin, the Aryan invasion, it persists for reasonshaving little to do with evidence or scholarship." (In other words, the prevalence ofthe horse will disprove the commonly-accepted theory that the speakers of Indo-Aryan camefrom outside and were responsible for the disintegration of the Indus Civilisation.)

Not surprisingly, the rest of the decipherment is of the same quality. Rajaram and Jhasuppose the Indus inscriptions are written in late Vedic Sanskrit, spoken in the Indusvalley. The seals would contain a Vedic synonym dictionary (Nighantu, preserved inYaska’s Nirukta) and mathematical formulae of early ritualistic geometry from thecontemporaneous Shulbasutras. However, it appears from archaeological evidence that atleast some the seals were used to stamp bales of merchandise while others seem to havebeen tokens and identification tags.

Which hard-nosed merchant would put the formula for the circumference of a circle (pi =3.1415...) or part of a dictionary on his seals? Virtually anything goes in this"decipherment". The script can be read from left to right or the other wayround, though the former director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India, B.B. Lal,has shown decades ago that it is almost exclusively written from right to left. Next,about 100 of the 400-800 signs of the Indus script are supposed to be an alphabet-longbefore alphabets anywhere else in the world: the earliest Indus signs now come from layersof 3500-2800 bce (discovered at Harappa in 1999 by Harvard’s R. Meadow). The rest ofthe signs is said to be logographs, as in Chinese writing.

But Rajaram’s and Jha’s ingenious alphabet has no vowels, except for aninitial, general purpose vowel (as in A-rya, I-ndra, U-ma). This is the famous U-shaped"rimmed vessel sign" that almost always ends an inscription but which theycommonly read left to right, as the first sign! The virtual lack of vowels makes thescript practically unreadable in any Indian language, Vedic Sanskrit included. A simplecombination like m-- has a dozen or more possibilities: how to distinguish between"Manu" and mina, "fish"? In stark contrast, the script is supposed tobe full of technical, Paninean signs, including even Vedic pitch accents (svara). Ifsomething still remains unreadable, fill it in! For, the Indus script is a "rough andready script" which "follows no hard and fast rules". As Voltairesupposedly said: consonants count little, vowels-nothing!

Since the proof of the pudding is its eating, one may consider the actualdecipherments, such as "mosquito", "the house is in the grip of cold","a hundred noisy crows", "an angry mother-in-law". Do we put anythinglike this on our seals? Since the seals refer to late Vedic texts and science, we canexpect not only pi but also Vedic gods, tribes, kings and rishis, such as Rudra, Soma,Yama, Aayu, Yadu, Puru (sic!), Madra, Sudaas, Paila, Ajiigarta, or the name of Dwarka(S’riitiirtha). And, of course, horses. Even Epic/Puranic details such asKrishna’s friend Akruura or Rama’s hi-tech weapon, agni-vaana, are not missing.After all, the Indus-Saraswati Valley is "the cradle of civilisation"!

Apparently, Rajaram and Jha do not realise how ridiculous all of this reads outside theconfines of the revisionists’ rewriting of Indian history along autochthonous lines.They have an alphabet at the very dawn of writing anywhere, be it in Egypt, Mesopotamia orthe Indus. They have a northern import, the horse, in South Asia long before it isattested. They have horse-drawn, wheeled chariots long before they are found anywheresouth of the Uralic steppes or outside Mesopotamia. They have Vedic Sanskrit spoken in4000/2600 bce, when its closest relative, the linguistically slightly pre-Rig VedicIndo-Aryan of the Mitanni realm in Syria/Iraq, dates only to circa 1400 bce-which also iscontemporaneous with the closely related Archaic Iranian of Zarathustra, as found in theAvesta texts of the Parsis.

In short, Rajaram’s and Jha’s claims are historically impossible and arebased on an unsubstantiated reading of the script. As typical proof they use the"enhanced" picture of the Piltdown horse, along with an idiosyncratic reading ofthe accompanying inscription.

Most scholars, after checking some of the "facts" presented in the book,would simply put it aside laughing or would shake their head and regard the principalauthor as one more, albeit blatant, example among the currently growing guild of ferventrewriters of history. The book, by its very improbability, further taints the present waveof revisionist writing (S.S. Misra, S. Talageri, K.D. Sethna, S.P. Gupta, Bh. Singh, M.Shendge, Bh. Gidwani, P. Choudhuri, A. Shourie, S.R. Goel, and their expatriate or foreignfellow travellers such as S. Kak, S. Kalyanaraman, D. Frawley, G. Feuerstein, K. Elst, K.Klostermaier). The Piltdown case casts a revealing beam of light on what is happeningright now in academics and in society at large and it does not go unnoticed outside thesubcontinent.

Finally, Rajaram also is a "specialist" in many other fields, from the2,000-year-old Jewish Qumran scrolls to modern Christianity and from European history tocosmological science (matching his touted but very lacuneous pre-1990 US career as"nasa and Artificial Intelligence scientist"). He writes in newspapers, journalsand on some of the supposedly Indian but in fact US-based Internet sites, such as TheSword of Truth, Hindu Vivek Kendra, Hindutva. One of the most prolific chauvinisticwriters, he indiscriminately lashes out, with boring repetitiveness, at"western" Indological studies (which, even in this day and age, can only be"Euro-centric" and "missionary"!) or at the supposedly "MarxistDelhi historians", at Muslims and Christians inside India, fanning communal hatredand promoting an imagined, ideal and perennial India that never existed. To what desperatemeans he must take is now abundantly made clear by his Piltdown horse. In the end, one canonly agree with his decipherment No. 64: "A great disgrace indeed!"

And yet, he has not retracted anything but boasts that his "many friends ingovernment" have advised the Book Depot to publish his "popular book on theSaraswati river in English and 13 other languages". May the goddess of learning,Saraswati, save us all!

(Prof Michael Witzel, a reputed Indologist, teaches at the Department of Sanskritand Indian Studies, Harvard University)