Indus Seals Deciphered: Following the Trails of a Bronze Age Civilization by Rupa Bhaty

Description

This book advances a concrete and testable proposal about the Indus script: that a substantial portion of the seal corpus records the names of places, persons, commodities, and institutions that operated within a Harappan-Mesopotamian maritime and overland trading world, and that a subset of those names can be systematically aligned with Sumerian and Akkadian toponyms and royal onomastics. The argument rests on three strands of prior scholarship: (i) quantitative work suggesting that the Indus inscriptions have the statistical structure of human language (Rao); (ii) sign-by-sign proposals for phonetic values and allographic groupings (Sullivan; Yajñadevam); and (iii) the growing archaeological map of Indus artefacts and scaling technology in Bahrain, Mesopotamia, the Gulf, Anatolia, and beyond. Against this backdrop, the central question is straightforward: if seals were embedded in such a wide trading network, why do their short inscriptions seem so mute about the ports, rulers, goods, and measures that the archaeology so clearly attests? The chapters that follow address this question by applying a transparent and falsifiable reading method to a broad range of seals, including those that sit uneasily within purely Vedic or purely Dravidian frameworks