 |
| Block with Luwian hieroglyphs (from an old Turkish postcard). |
I own a single resource with texts in Hieroglyphic Luwian (also
known as Hieroglyphic Hittite) (Çambel 1999).
None of the texts in this volume come from seals – the main source of
Indus inscriptions – although Luwian hieroglyphs do appear on seals. This makes a direct comparison of statistical
measures between the two scripts invalid.
In addition, this group of texts comes from a single location and is not
necessarily representative of the script in general. So any statistical measures cannot be
generalized with any confidence.
Nevertheless, it may be of some value to compare sign
frequencies between this corpus of Luwian (all on stone monuments) and that of
Indus script (all on small objects). The
reason is that Indus script is sometimes characterized as a logo-syllabic
writing system (e.g., Parpola 1994: 85; Wells 2010: 92-93). It is worthwhile examining how the Indus
script compares with a known logo-syllabic system, of which Luwian is one
example. Luwian is, of course,
incompletely understood, but far better understood than Indus script.
I made a count of the number of times each Luwian sign occurred
in the corpus of this single volume, with the exception of the highly
fragmented portions. With a combined
total of 2,511 symbols, 133 potential signs occurred between 1 and 232 times
each. I say potential signs because I
found it impossible to identify perhaps two dozen with absolute certainty due
to broken or abraded surfaces.
Frequencies are summarized in the following table (data on Indus script
is from Possehl 2002: 133).
Table 1. Frequencies of Luwian hieroglyphs and Indus
script.
|
Frequency of sign
|
No. of signs with this
frequency in
Luwian hieroglyphs
|
No. of signs with this
frequency in
Indus script
|
|
1-9
|
83 (62%)
|
219 (45.4%)
|
|
10-19
|
19 (14%)
|
100 (20.7%)
|
|
20-49
|
14 (10.5%)
|
86 (17.8%)
|
|
50-99
|
13 (9.8%)
|
46 (9.5%)
|
|
100 or more
|
3 (2.3%)
|
31 (6.4%)
|
To simplify the information in the table, we can combine the
frequencies of all signs occurring fewer than 100 times, for which any statistical
measures are likely to be invalid. For
this sample of Luwian hieroglyphs, that would yield 129 signs making up 96.3%
of the total. For the corpus of Indus
signs, this yields 451 signs making up 93.4% of the total. In both cases, only a very small proportion
of signs occurs more than 100 times (3 Luwian signs making up 2.3% and 31 Indus
signs making up 6.4%). This broad
similarity in frequency is one piece of evidence pointing toward the Indus
script being a logo-syllabic script (along with the total number of signs).
In addition to these very general similarities in frequencies, both Luwian and Indus symbols
demonstrate regularities in position. For example, in the Indus inscriptions, POT
is the most frequent sign by far, the only one that occurs over a thousand
times. When it appears, it is most often
in final position. In the Luwian
inscriptions, the symbol for the syllable mi
occurs more often than any other, multiple times in virtually every inscription
and almost always at the top of each register (or row) of glyphs. The precise total for mi should be approximately half the number I counted since “IC”
occurs twice to make up this syllable.
Thus, instead of appearing 232 times, this syllable occurs 116
times. But since I could not always see
IC duplicated – i.e., I did not always find an even number of IC symbols – my
counted total is probably inaccurate anyway.
One of the main reasons that researchers consider the Indus
script likely to be logo-syllabic writing system is the number of total
signs. Alphabets have fewer than 100
symbols; a syllabary may have 100 or so depending on the type of syllables
represented; logographic writing such as Chinese has thousands of symbols. Thus, the mixed type termed logo-syllabic
writing is the best match with the Indus script, with symbols numbering in the
hundreds. In such a writing system, the
syllabic (or other phonetic) symbols typically occur more frequently than the
logographs. This is clearly demonstrated
in a previous post where I discussed Linear B (Mycenaean writing). However, there may be some overlap in
frequencies, with a small number of syllabic signs occurring rarely on the one
hand, and a small number of specific logographs appearing especially
frequently.
The function of the most frequent logographs differs between
writing systems and, indeed, between genres of inscriptions. Logographs that represent a few commodities
are the most common of this category in Linear B. This is because the Linear B tablets are
exclusively economic in nature, the texts being essentially names of
commodities and numerals measuring them, with some proper names of people and
places involved with transactions. On
Egyptian scarabs, glyphs that apparently represent wishes (such as ankh “life,” nefer “beauty, goodness” and djed
“stability”) appear to be the most frequent logographs, while certain phonetic
symbols are the highest in absolute frequency, especially the bread loaf t, zigzag n, and chick w (I have
not yet completed an exact count of glyphs from a corpus of this type). The prevalence of the ankh and similar signs, in this case, is probably due to magico-religious
reasons. Inscriptions that can be read
mostly consist of personal names and titles or descriptions of
professions. Numerals are rare. The Luwian texts I examined comprise a third
type, neither economic nor onomastic.
Names of rulers do occur with some frequency, but the texts do not
simply give names and titles, but also include descriptions of military and
religious actions. Numerals are rare in
this corpus as on Egyptian scarabs.
Now let us examine the frequencies of Chinese characters as
they appear in a small sample of oracle bone texts (Keightley 1985). Since Chinese is the logographic system most
commonly referenced in discussions of writing, it should prove
illuminating. Of course, modern Chinese could just as easily be
described as “logo-syllabic” given the latitude with which that term is used
(such as for Egyptian hieroglyphs, which do not actually represent syllables but only consonants). That is, both semantic and phonetic
information appear in most modern characters.
Often an element of the meaning resides in the “radical,” most often on
the left side of a character, while a phonetic clue appears on the right in the
form of a simple character whose pronunciation is indicated (or something
close).
 |
| A Chinese oracle bone inscripion: guei-mao [date] crack-making, [the] king divined: [in the next 10-day] week, [there will be] no disaster. In [the] 5th month, jia-chen [date], yong ritual [performed to ancestor] Da Jia (Keightley 1985: 115, rephrased). |
However, this type of combination character is not nearly as
frequent in the early stage of writing on oracle bones (Keightley 1985: 68). According to one study, 23% of oracle bone
characters are pictographs or simple pictures, 32% are compound ideographs
(such as the combination of the woman and child characters to form the word
“good”), 27% combine radical and phonetic, 11% are “loans,” and 2% are abstract
symbols. The so-called loans are other
types of characters (pictographs or compound ideographs) that have a second
function representing an unrelated but homophonous word. That is, where modern Chinese uses the
radical + phonetic to distinguish characters representing homophones, oracle
bone script often uses the same simple character for two different words that
happen to sound alike. Context
distinguishes the two functions. Of an
estimated total script “vocabulary” of 5,000 or so characters, about half are
understood by modern scholars (1985: 59).
In the small, unrepresentative sample of texts included in
this work, frequencies of characters are as shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Frequencies of Chinese oracle bone
characters.
|
Frequency
of sign
or
character
|
No.
of signs with this
frequency
in Chinese
|
|
1 occurrence
|
49 (38.6%)
|
|
2 occurrences
|
30 (23.6%)
|
|
3 occurrences
|
18 (14.2%)
|
|
4 occurrences
|
9 (7.1%)
|
|
5 occurrences
|
5 (3.9%)
|
|
6 occurrences
|
2 (1.6%)
|
|
7 occurrences
|
4 (3.1%)
|
|
8 occurrences
|
1 (0.8%)
|
|
9 occurrences
|
1 (0.8%)
|
|
10 or more
|
8 (6.3%)
|
Since no character appears more than 17 times in this small
sample, the total numbers of occurrences are much smaller than for the Luwian
or Indus samples. Again, though, one can
see that the majority of characters occur infrequently, with many
singletons. In these texts, the content
is considerably more varied than in the texts of Egyptian scarabs, Near Eastern
seals, or Linear B tablets. Some of the
Chinese texts are economic: the inscriptions may enumerate the turtle plastrons
or animal scapulae brought in and prepared for divination. But this is a relatively minor aspect. Numerals are quite frequent – at least
smaller ones – because the scribes write down the number of cracks made in the
surface in the process of divination.
That is, each crack typically has a number. Proper nouns are also common, both in the
inscriptions describing preparation of oracle bones and in the main texts. The main texts describe the charge – who performed
the divination, when, and for what purpose – as well as often indicating the
result (typically verification of the result that was foreseen). Topics of divination include sacrifices,
military campaigns, hunting expeditions, journeys, weather, agricultural
activities, illness, childbirth, the source of various troubles, meanings of
dreams, settlement building, tribute payments, and divine assistance or
approval (Keightley 1985: 33-35).
The most frequent characters include the character referring
to making cracks (bu 14 occurrences),
or divining (zheng 17 occurrences),
and those used in dates (e.g., jia 13
occurrences). Dates often contain no
numerals, instead combining the 12 celestial stems and 10 earthly (or horary)
branches. Some dates are more frequent
than others because the people evidently performed divinations at the beginning
of each 10-day “week,” to determine whether the coming period would be
auspicious. Many of the singletons in
this sample are the names of the diviners, though the character wang, “king,” is the most common diviner
referenced (14 occurrences). In a more
complete sample, particular diviners would appear frequently, each being
involved with many divinations.
It is highly improbable that the Indus seals and tablets
bear content comparable to the oracle bones.
But it is certainly possible that the inscriptions are magical and/or
religious in nature. In fact, magical
and religious elements also appear within the restricted context of Near
Eastern cylinder seals. And as noted
above, Egyptian scarabs often have magical or religious symbols alongside or
instead of regular hieroglyphs. Some
scholars maintain that Indus signs are not writing, but magico-religious
symbols (Farmer 2004). While this may
not be true of all the symbols, parallels from other Bronze Age cultures make
this a distinct possibility.
 |
| Tablet H-316A with inscription (right to left): HAIRY HUNCHBACK // POT / COMB. |
Specifically, Farmer suggests that the POT is a schematic representation
of a tree, the so-called ritual stand in front of the unicorn on so many seals also
representing a tree, pipal or fig (2004: 16). He further states that the high frequency of POT
in inscriptions indicates it was the central symbol of Harappan society (2004: 22).
He also sees the POT HATTED BEARER as the
result of syncretic merging of a sacred tree and a likely divinity of water.
 |
| Tablet H-308A with inscription (right to left): HAIRY HUNCHBACK // POT / COMB. |
The common sequence of HAIRY HUNCHBACK / POT / COMB, in this
author’s view, is a representation of a human sacrificial victim sitting before
this same sacred tree (2004: 40). This sign
sequence is mostly found on miniature steatite seals, inscribed on both sides. The reverse typically contains CUP alongside an
apparent numeral (SINGLE POST, TWO POSTS, THREE POSTS, less frequently FOUR
POSTS, and in a couple of rare cases, SIX POSTS). This group of inscriptions (CUP + “NUMERAL”) may
indicate an economic record of sacrifices (2004: 29). The miniature inscribed objects might have served
as something like vouchers for seasonal offerings. For example, each “citizen” may have been required
to present a measured amount of a particular commodity at a harvest festival. In return, the “citizen” would receive one of these
small seals showing that he had given his share. These interpretations are speculative, of course,
but provide some interesting possibilities to consider.
REFERENCES
Çambel, H. 1999. Corpus
of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions. Vol. II Karatepe-Aslantaş. The
Inscriptions: Facsimile Edition.
Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Farmer, Steve. 2004. “Mythological function sof Indus inscriptions:
Eight conclusions arising from the nonlinguistic model of Indus symbols,” Sixth
Harvard Indology Roundtable, 8-10 May 2004. Available online at http://www.safarmer.com/downloads .
Keightley, D.N. 1978 and 1985. Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age
China. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Parpola, A. 1994 and 2009. Deciphering the Indus Script. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press.
Possehl, G.L. 2002. The
Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
