A Computational and Inferential Methodology for Analyzing the Indus Valley Script
August Tudor · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
The Indus Valley Script (IVS) (c. 2600–1900 BCE) remains undeciphered despite a corpus of ≈5,600 inscriptions and more than 150 years of study. This paper presents CI + NIS, an original, reproducible computational framework that (i) integrates statistical inference with archaeologically derived priors (Comprehensive Inference, CI) and (ii) validates inferred structures against site-, artifact-, and position-specific constraints (Nexus Inferential System, NIS). Applied to the authenticated ICIT corpus (Fuls 2022) and a comparative set of 15,184 Tamil-Nadu graffiti marks, the framework discovers ≈200 recurring syntactic templates and confirms systematic administrative and ritual patterns.Findings demonstrate significant structural parallels with Proto-Elamite and Linear A administrative formulae, and a notable motif overlap (≈90%) with later South-Asian graffiti. Deterministic sign-fill algorithms achieved 66% top-10 accuracy for single-sign restoration on full corpus runs. These results support a cultural-convergence hypothesis while remaining agnostic about linguistic identity. The methodology emphasizes transparency, with full code, utilities, and visualizations provided for reproducibility. We incorporate 2025 advances, including the Archaeological Survey of India’s international conference (August 2025), interactive AI tools, and the maturing role of hybrid computational approaches in analyses of undeciphered scripts.