Network analysis reveals structure indicative of syntax in the corpus of undeciphered Indus civilization inscriptions

Archaeological excavations in the sites of the Indus Valley civilization (2500-1900 BCE) in Pakistan and northwestern India have unearthed a large number of artifacts with inscriptions made up of hundreds of distinct signs. To date, there is no generally accepted decipherment of these sign sequences, and there have been suggestions that the signs could be non-linguistic. Here we apply complex network analysis techniques on the data-base of available Indus inscriptions, with the aim of detecting patterns indicative of syntactic structure in this sign system. Our results show the presence of regularities, e.g., in the segmentation trees of the sequences, that suggest the existence of a grammar underlying the construction of the sequences.

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