Indus script

The Indus script is a system of signs found on artifacts of the Indus Valley Civilization. Its language and meaning remain undeciphered.

Indus signs: The individual graphic forms recorded in inscriptions attributed to the Indus script. Their shapes and variants are the basic units scholars classify and compare.
Sign sequence: An ordered series of symbols or signs in a written or notation system. Repeated positions and neighboring signs are central to proposed readings of Indus texts.
Harappa: An archaeological site in Punjab, Pakistan, and one of the principal cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. Its excavations yielded artifacts bearing signs and helped establish the script’s archaeological context.
Proto-writing: A system of graphic marks that conveys information without fully representing spoken language. Some researchers question whether Indus signs encode language rather than nonlinguistic information.
Indus inscription: A sequence of signs attributed to the Indus script, usually preserved on an artifact. Most surviving texts are brief sequences, limiting syntactic analysis.
Writing direction: The direction in which a writing system’s text is conventionally read or written. Indentation patterns and sign arrangements support proposals that many Indus inscriptions run right to left.
Mohenjo-daro: A major Indus Valley Civilization city in Sindh, Pakistan, excavated extensively in the twentieth century. Its seals and other inscribed objects expanded the known corpus.
Logo-syllabic writing system: A writing system whose signs represent words or morphemes alongside syllabic sound values. This is one proposed model for how the Indus signs could encode speech.
Indus seal: A carved object, often made of steatite, bearing Indus signs and frequently an animal motif. Seals preserve many of the script’s best-known inscriptions.
Statistical linguistics: The quantitative study of patterns in language, including word and symbol frequencies. Frequency and transition patterns test whether sign sequences resemble structured communication.

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