Sri Lanka’s Role In South Asia’s Earliest Writing Controversy

By Darshanie Ratnawalli –June 5, 2016

Darshanie Ratnawalli

A few years ago someone came up with the campaign line ‘small miracle’ as a unique proposition to promote Sri Lanka to tourists. The Rajapaksa Government took exception to the ‘small’ and scrapped the campaign midway. This was a pity. The country has genuine small miracle credentials, tending sometimes to raise eyebrows by producing phenomena usually deemed too big, too grand for a country of its size. It can for example claim ownership of the oldest surviving, reliably dated samples of writing to be found in the whole of South Asia.

It was long thought that the earliest writing in South Asia were the inscriptions of the Indus Valley civilization. Now with the 2004 debut of an authoritative and persuasive academic thesis by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat and Michael Witzel, the word in the street (a metaphorical street populated with academics) is that this ancient urban civilization that sprawled across Northwest South Asia and had its flowering phase between 2600 and 1900 BC lacked writing.

A voice from the street “The 2004 publication of a paper by Farmer, Sproat and Witzel in the Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies has made available the results of careful statistical studies which have analyzed sign repetition rates in the Indus inscriptions and claim to show that it is not possible that the so-called Indus script could have encoded language. They propose rather to see the signs as cultic emblems of particular deities and the like, pointing to parallel widespread use of such symbols in the Near East and elsewhere.

“It seems clear that their analysis shows beyond reasonable doubt that the script used in the extant inscriptions cannot be either alphabetic or syllabic” – (‘The Early Development of Buddhist Literature and Language in India’, L.S. Cousins, 2013)

The premise of an illiterate Indus Valley civilization contained in ‘The collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization’ has tremendous implications for Sri Lanka. If the oldest South Asian symbol system unearthed so far, going back to 3000 to 2000 years before Christ, was nonlinguistic, invested with cultish, clannish and mythological significance, instead of a true script encoding speech, that means South Asians remained illiterate until the middle of the first thousand years before Christ, when according to accepted wisdom, writing was first introduced to North West South Asia by the Persians. This accepted wisdom flows from a logical surmise. That is, we know that around 518 BC, certain territories in South Asia became part of the Persian Empire and as Persians were already writing with the Aramaic script by this time, historians assume the inevitable; “Once the north-west of India had become part of the Persian empire, if not before, writing would have been employed by the Aramaic scribes in that area, and it’s hard to believe that neighbouring rulers would not realize the advantages of keeping records of regnal years and royal accounts, and treasury and armoury details in some tangible form”- (K. R. Norman reviewing in 1993, ‘The beginning of writing and early literacy in India’ by Oskar v. Hinüber).

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