Reading the Indus Valley Script

Read this as a structural decipherment claim. The DOI record takes a position in a long-running debate: whether the Indus signs encode language or non-linguistic symbols.

The Indus corpus is small, formulaic, and famously disputed. The paper treats those constraints as measurable rather than disqualifying. It asks whether the signs form a structured system whose graph topology is too rich to be mere labels.

The reported dictionary contains 182 entries and covers 100% of signs in the analyzed corpus: 178 seal inscriptions and 1,003 sign tokens.

The Central Measurement

The DOI record reports treewidth 26, placing the script above a label threshold and supporting linguistic status. The argument is that a simple label system should collapse to very low structural complexity, while the Indus signs preserve richer dependency structure.

The most connected sign, P122, appears in a fixed structural position. The record gives its degree as 58 and its frequency as 7.6% of all tokens, using that regularity to infer function.

The Proposed Grammar

The seals are described as following a rigid four-part formula. Thirty readings are derived from positional and distributional analysis; 152 more are derived from cross-linguistic mapping and checked against co-occurrence context.

The resulting interpretation recovers a social class system and formulaic grammar. The companion should be read as a map of the argument, not as a substitute for the sign table itself.

What Is Claimed

• Coverage: the proposed dictionary covers the analyzed sign inventory.
• Linguistic status: treewidth is used as the invariant separating language-like structure from label-like structure.
• Formula: the seals are read as rigid, positional inscriptions rather than arbitrary emblem clusters.

What to Check

The live questions are reproducibility, archaeological fit, and whether the proposed readings predict sign order and context better than non-linguistic alternatives. The paper explicitly enters the Farmer-Sproat-Witzel versus Rao-style debate, but with treewidth rather than entropy as its main structural meter.