A method of identifying allographs in undeciphered scripts and its application to the Indus Valley Script

Shruti Daggumati,Peter Z Revesz

doi:10.1057/s41599-021-00713-0

Shruti Daggumati, Peter Z Revesz

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00713-0

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Abstract

This work describes a general method of testing for redundancies in the sign lists of ancient scripts by data mining the positions of the signs within the inscriptions. The redundant signs are allographs of the same grapheme. The method is applied to the undeciphered Indus Valley Script, which stands out from other ancient scripts by having a large proposed sign list that contains dozens of asymmetric signs that have mirrored pairs. By a statistical analysis of mirrored asymmetric signs, this paper shows that the Indus Valley Script was multi-directional and the mirroring of signs often denotes only the direction of writing without any difference in meaning. For this and five other specific reasons listed in the paper, 50 pairs of signs, 23 mirrored, and 27 non-mirrored, can be grouped together because each pair consists of only insignificant variations of the same original sign. The reduced sign list may make decipherment easier in the future.

Highlights

An important first step in understanding a script is being able to tell how many different signs it has
We focus on the asymmetric signs as well as similar signs
The signs noted in this work reference multiple authors (Mahadevan, 1977; Parpola, 1986, 1994; Wells, 1998), Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions (CISI) (Joshi and Parpola, 1987; Parpola et al, 2010; Shah and Parpola, 1991), and the Interactive Corpus of Indus Text (ICIT) dataset

Summary

Introduction

An important first step in understanding a script is being able to tell how many different signs it has. Variations of signs that denote the same concept need to be grouped together. The Indus Valley Script is estimated to have between 417 (Mahadevan, 1977) and 694 (Wells, 2015) signs. We show that the Indus Valley Script was multi-directional and has a smaller sign set. It is essential to correctly group signs based on their visual similarities, as earlier authors have done and by careful data analysis of their positions within the inscriptions (Fuls, 2013; Wells, 2011, 2015). Section “Multi-directionality of the Indus Valley Script shown by mirrored asymmetric signs” considers asymmetric signs that have mirrored pairs.

Data sources and methods

CISI of artifact

Reducing the Indus Valley Script sign set by data mining inscriptions

Conclusions and future work

Additional information