Metal-smithy, Bead-making, Jeweler’s weight, Trade-permit, Tax-stamp: Indus Script’s Semasiography Partly Decoded

Abstract

This paper claims to have partly decoded the Indus script. It not only explains how the brief formulaic inscriptions found on seals and tablets helped in taxation and trade control, by recording taxed commodity-types, licensed commercial activities, tax-rates, mode of tax-payment, license-issuing entities etc., but also decisively identifies several semasiograms signifying metal-smithy, lapidary-works, related metrology and taxation. It shows how the sign resembling a “blowpipe inside a crucible”, repeatedly occurs in inscribed seals/tablets discovered from workshops of metal-workers, goldsmiths and bead-makers, and directly occurs on certain inscribed gold and copper implements. Crucibles and blowpipes being ancient smelting tools, their ideograms ( , , ) denoted gold-smithy in Egyptian hieroglyphs too. Moreover, certain Indo-Aryan and Dravidian words for metal-smith directly translates to “blowpipe-blower”. Thus archaeological, script-internal and linguistic evidence confirm that sign signified precious metals and metal-smithy in different contexts. Similarly, fish-like signs ( , , etc.), which repeatedly occur in inscriptions discovered from bead-makers’ and jewelers’ workshops across Indus settlements, arguably signified meanings associated with gemstones, bead-making and related metrological standards. Interestingly, in Proto-Dravidian, “mīn” means fish, shining, bright, and gemstone. Moreover, Indus valley’s eye-patterned gemstone beads were famous as “fish-eye beads” in Mesopotamia. The gemstone related fish-signs sometimes co-occur with , possibly because, the bead-makers and goldsmiths, who physically shared same workshops, were part of related trade license and taxation mechanisms. This paper also claims that the frequent terminal signs symbolized different volumetric ( ) and weight-based ( ) metrological units used in revenue collection and thus metonymically signified certain tax categories. Specifically, the terminal arrow-like sign , which mostly co-occurs with gemstone and gold-smithy related semasiograms, arguably symbolized a goldsmith’s balance, and metonymically signified tax-payments and trade-permits associated with precious commodities. Since ancient assay balances generally used arrow-like pointers for precise weight measurement (a comparable balance is discovered from Harappa), Indic words for assay balance (eṣaṇī, nārācī) are often etymologically rooted to arrow-words. This study claims that sign (allograph ), symbolized the abrus precatorious seeds, the traditional Indian jeweller’s weight, and metonymically signified goldsmith’s weight system and treasury. Many other related conjectures of this study significantly advance our understanding of Indus script.