Abstract: This talk argues that the combinatorial patterns and graphemic features of Indus script signs can unambiguously establish that most of the Indus inscriptions were written using meaning-units (sematograms) and/or word-units (logograms). It further contends that the archaeological contexts of Indus seals and tablets, often revealingly found concentrated near city gates (e.g., Harappa), craft-workshops (e.g., Chanhu-daro), and public buildings (e.g., Mohenjo-daro), along with standardized Indus weights, indicate that the inscribed stamp-seals and tablets were used for enforcing certain rules involving taxation, trade and craft control, commodity-control and access control. The script-internal evidence also indicates that the numerical stroke[1]signs used in the seals and tablets signified certain standardized tax-rates and licensing-fees, which were applied to specific crafts, commodities, and tax/ license types signified by the sematograms that followed the numerals. This talk will demonstrate how Indus script signs can be categorized into certain functional classes, and how members of such sign-classes generally occurred in specific inscriptional segments, arguably encoding specific types of information, such as types of taxes/licenses, names of taxed-commodities and licensed commercial activities, commodity/craft specific tax-rates and license[1]fees, modes of tax/license-fee payments, types of tax-receiving and license[1]issuing entities, etc. Finally, this talk will discuss how certain artifacts, which are identified by the speaker as gold-testing needles used along with touchstones by Indus goldsmiths, help to decode the crucible-blowpipe sign for gold ( , ), and the Abrus precatorius seed-sign used for the gold-measuring ‘ratti’symbol ( , , ). It claims that even though these gold-testing needles did not encode any bilingual text, their specific functionality and narrow semantic scope can make them the very Rosetta stones that archaeologists and Indus script researchers have searched for years. This talk shows the need of a multi-disciplinary decoding approach which should oscillate between structural, semantic, symbolic, historical, and linguistic layers of evidence, for decoding the enigmatic script of the common ancestors of the Indo-Pakistani sub-continent.

About scholar: Bahata Ansumali (nee Mukhopadhyay) is an independent researcher exploring the structural and semantic aspects of the yet undeciphered Indus script inscriptions. She is also investigating which type of languages were used in Indus valley civilization. Her research about Indus inscriptions has yielded various scholarly articles. One of them, titled "Ancestral Dravidian languages in Indus Civilization: ultra-conserved Dravidian tooth-word reveals deep linguistic ancestry and supports genetics", is published in an internationally reputed Nature group journal. Her structural analysis of Indus inscriptions, which establishes their semibiographical/ logographic nature, is published in a Nature group journal