Structure of Indus Script

Indus script has defied decipherment. Several attempts have been made in the past to decipher the enigmatic script but there is no consensus about its content. In the present talk, I will give an overview of the material on which the Indus texts have been found and then discuss our work on Indus script in detail. The focus of our analysis is to check and identify if there is any specific order in writing and whether it has an underlying logic. I will then discuss our recent attempts to extract the syntactic structure of the same using n-gram and Markov models. Though we do not assign meaning to the signs, the study provides a glimpse of the nature and style of writing of the Indus people.

About the speaker:
Nisha Yadav joined TIFR in 2003 and worked on the instrumentation of ASTROSAT for three years. For past three years, she has been working on the project of “Archaeoastronomy in Indian context”. She is primarily involved in the study of the structure and nature of Indus script and other aspects of the Indus culture. During the period she has published several papers on leading International and Indian journals and has given lectures at a course on the subject at University of Washington.  She has been invited to present her work at various national and international meetings. Some of her published work on the Indus Script is available at the web site www.harappa.com. Her research aims at understanding the structure of Indus script using various statistical and computational techniques and explores its relation to other aspects of the culture.