The Indus script is unread. Can we still learn what it was for?
The short inscriptions of the Indus civilization remain undeciphered. A study proposes how they were used, but that is not a translation.
What the study proposes
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. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications ↗
Function is not translation
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.
The cities behind the seals
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. Cambridge University Press ↗
What would count as a first translation?
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?