Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay | The Semasiographic Indus Seal Inscriptions Seldom Encoded Proper Noun

Indus valley inscriptions are one of the most enigmatic aspects of the most expansive Bronze Age civilization of the world (c. 2600 BC to 1900 BC). This presentation builds on the findings of the article “Interrogating Indus inscriptions to unravel their mechanisms of meaning conveyance” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159..., and demonstrates that majority of the Indus valley inscriptions were written using “word-signs”/"meaning-units" i.e., logograms/semasiograms, and thus problematizes most of the existing claimed decipherments that have tried to read these inscriptions through spellings or using rebus principle. This presentation explores the co-occurrence restriction patterns in the inscriptions and establishes that such patterns can arise only in semantic co-occurrence restrictions, not phonological co-occurrence restrictions, proving that Indus signs were word-signs, not phonemes. This study has done a through contextualization of the Inscribed seals, seal-impressions, tablets, and pottery shards of Indus valley civilization to show that the seals and tablets were formalized data carriers, like our modern-day tax tokens, trade licenses, fiscal stamps, etc., and had used both linguistic and document specific syntaxes. It further proves that these brief inscriptions had encoded messages that were used mainly in commercial contexts where standardization and metrology played important roles. This presentation would demonstrate how several Indus signs can be clustered into certain functional classes, and how the inscriptions had used linguistic features such as subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, morphological reduplication, etc., in their process of meaning conveyance. This study forms the structural basis of the prospective semantic analyses of Indus valley inscriptions, including the author’s next study that has attempted partial decipherments of a selected set of inscriptions. A theoretical payoff from this presentation would be demonstration of the extent to which fluid movements between different branches of science can aid in the understanding of inscriptions that have obstinately defied and resisted traditional decipherment methods for 150 years since their discovery.