{
  "author": "ChronologiaOS editorial guides",
  "date": "2026-10-09",
  "department": "Writing & Languages",
  "department_id": "WRITING",
  "epistemic_label": "Source guide",
  "epistemic_status": "SOURCE_GUIDE",
  "period": "c. 2600\u20131900 BCE",
  "place": "Indus civilization sites, Pakistan and India",
  "public_sources": [
    {
      "publisher": "Humanities and Social Sciences Communications",
      "title": "Semantic scope of Indus inscriptions comprising taxation, trade and craft licensing, commodity control and access control",
      "type": "Peer-reviewed article",
      "url": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-023-02320-7"
    },
    {
      "publisher": "Cambridge University Press",
      "title": "The Archaeology of South Asia \u2014 Chapter 6: An Era of Integration",
      "type": "Scholarly monograph",
      "url": "https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/archaeology-of-south-asia/an-era-of-integration/00DC42FB267DC54A977FD0EDFB9D3B47"
    }
  ],
  "publication_state": "PUBLIC",
  "read_time": "3 min read",
  "sections": [
    {
      "body": "A 2023 article in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications proposes that the semantic scope of Indus inscriptions covers taxation, trade and craft licensing, commodity control, and access control. This is an argument about function, built from where and how the inscribed objects were used.",
      "heading": "Start with the proposal",
      "source": 0
    },
    {
      "body": "A model of what seals and tablets did is not a reading of the signs. The research record labels the study an epigraphic synthesis and notes that semantic interpretation provides no absolute dating independent of archaeological stratigraphy. Keep the function claim, the decipherment question, and the chronology on separate shelves.",
      "heading": "Function is not translation"
    },
    {
      "body": "Coningham and Young frame the Mature Harappan phase, about 2600 to 1900 BCE, as an era of integration with standardized weights and seals across many sites. The inscriptions belong to that administrative world, whatever language they encode.",
      "heading": "The cities behind the seals",
      "source": 1
    },
    {
      "body": "If you accept that the seals controlled goods and access, what kind of evidence would still be needed before anyone could claim to have read a single word?",
      "heading": "A question to carry forward"
    }
  ],
  "short_title": "Can you study a script you cannot read?",
  "slug": "indus-inscriptions-a-function-before-a-reading",
  "summary": "The Indus script remains undeciphered. See how a 2023 study argues for what the short inscriptions were used for, and why that is a different question from what they say.",
  "tags": [
    "Indus",
    "Harappa",
    "Seals",
    "Undeciphered scripts"
  ],
  "title": "Indus inscriptions: a function before a reading."
}