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Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2000 10:02:20 EST
Subject: Re: Vedas and orality
To: classics@u.washington.edu
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My apologies to Al Kriman and the List for once again sending an incomplete 
message.

First point, then: contact between Vedic and IVC has not been established, 
and in my view is likely not to have happened.  And even if it did happen, 
post-literacy might not have been an outcome at all.  The plain truth is that 
we do not know.  

Second point: we do know from later periods that there was a certain amount 
of Brahmanical disdain for writing [similar, maybe, to the disdain of 
Socrates for it]. So it may be reasonable to suppose, as AK does, that a 
similar preference for orality and memorization was at work in Vedic.  But 
one cannot disdain what one does not know. To make this model of Vedic 
orality viable, one would have to establish sustained contact with a 
*literate* IVC.  This has not been done.

Third point: the Brahmi script can be securely dated to the third cent BCE 
[with the inscriptions of Asoka].  However, shards with the script have 
recently been found in Sri Lanka.  These have been dated to the sixth cent 
BCE, but there is some dispute about the legitimacy of this early date.  It 
has been argued that the shards [with brief inscriptions, apparently proper 
names] are intrusive in the strata where they were found. [I am drawing on 
Richard Salomon's *Indian Epigraphy* [Oxford, 1998].  

This evidence would support AK's scenario, which, BTW, several Vedicists have 
also entertained.  The use of perishable materials lilke palm leaves does 
leave open the possibility that writing was present well before its earliest 
attestation in India.  But the silence of an enormous Vedic literature 
remains, I think, 'clamosus.'

BTW, Nearchos at 325 BCE mentions Indian letters [epistolas] [it is argued 
that these may have been Aramaic], whereas Megasthenes asserts that they did 
not know written characters [oude gar grammata eidenai autous].  

Explicit reference to writing starts to appear in India in the Pali Buddhist 
Canon, and the grammarian Panini mentions writing [lipi].  But these 
references place us in the same century as the rest of the evidence above.   

Final point: my general view is not very different from G.E.R. Lloyd's, when 
he expresses skepticism in response to arguments based on the notion of 
hypostasized 'mentalities': 'oral mentality' vs. 'literate mentality', 'Greek 
mentality' vs. Chinese mentality', etc.  The deconstructive philologist in me 
just says no to all that. 

[With a tip of the hat to David Lupher for that nicely suggestive collocation 
of the so-called opposites, 'deconstruction' and 'philology'].

Thanks to AK for the challenging post [and ref. to Antonsen, etc.].  

Now back to those student papers.

GT
.