The academic enmity in this field, between published authors, is huge and entertaining. These quotes from the article:
Wells’ beef with Witzel goes all the way back to his PhD dissertation on the Indus script, which Witzel tried to block, according to Wells. Later, while escorting Witzel through India, Wells would show him a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Ten reasons you don’t know what you’re talking about” while in the back of a cab.
and
“You would be better off getting medical advice from your garbage man than you would getting ideas about the Indus script from listening to Steve Farmer,”
Witzel comes across as a deeply racist person. I am told that he told an Indian person that "Hindus cant get a chair professorship to study Indology because they will be biased!". He has a long history of viciously attacking other scholars who try to criticize his work in academic fashion.
Having said that his book on world mythology is excellent.
>Witzel comes across as a deeply racist person. I am told that he told an Indian person that "Hindus cant get a chair professorship to study Indology because they will be biased!".
I just looked it up on Google and Wikipedia. It's remarkable what you can learn with the right search terms. Mostly I just wanted to see all the glyphs and a Unicode code page is a good place to start.
The problem, as TFA points out, is that 1) the inscriptions are short, on average 5 symbols, 2) the underlying language and even the language family is unknown.
Most (all?) decipherments have relied on having an idea of the language at least. What we have here are lots of seals with a bit of text, not paragraphs with real structure to analyze, maybe not even sentences.
Since they are seals, maybe they are mostly labels identifying the owner, or maybe some transactional label. In which case you will be hard pressed to extract a language from them. You probably will need longer examples to make progress.
If it does encode different languages in different places, like cuneiform, it might be worthwhile focusing on inscriptions found on the fringes, like in Iraq. Maybe some of them are actually Sumerian inscriptions or something like that.
I find it surprising that only in the past few years someone started to use statistical analysis (Markov, bigrams, trigrams) on this script. These are techniques that have been in use by cryptanalists for decades. Sounds like something very basic that you would do in the initial efforts to analyze any ancient script.
Not necessarily. IIRC, people trying to decipher Mayan glyphs with cryptanalytic methods were set on the wrong track and got nowhere, because a script is actually meant to communicate language, not to hide the message.
As a professional linguist, I think that Farmer et al. are probably right and it's almost surely not a "writing system" at all. (This is a term of art with a very specific sense.)
It's about productivity. If it's purely pictographic or idiographic, it can only encode precisely what the symbols mean. When cuneiform, for instance, went from its early pictographic/ideographic stage to a rhyme, rebus and initial stage, it went from being just a "tagging" system to an actual writing system, where anything that could be said could be encoded.
Could it simply be some sort of rope/wire wrapped around the animals head with some wooden/metal rod used for steering? There seems to be a saddle too?
Wells’ beef with Witzel goes all the way back to his PhD dissertation on the Indus script, which Witzel tried to block, according to Wells. Later, while escorting Witzel through India, Wells would show him a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Ten reasons you don’t know what you’re talking about” while in the back of a cab.
and
“You would be better off getting medical advice from your garbage man than you would getting ideas about the Indus script from listening to Steve Farmer,”