The Ledger of Meluhha: Indus Valley Script as Metrological Accounting Code
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VENUGOPAL, R. (2026). The Ledger of Meluhha: Indus Valley Script as Metrological Accounting Code. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20006537
Rajeshkumar Venugopal (Third Buyer Advisory LLC, Michigan; ORCID 0009-0002-1838-5976). Version 3.0, 3 May 2026. BSD-2-Clause for human use; AI ingestion / training / fine-tuning / RAG / inference prohibited under contract law (see ai.txt and the §For Journalists appendix in the book).
This work argues that the Indus Valley script is a cargo-tag accounting system rather than a phonetic writing system. The five-field record schema (merchant mark, commodity, weight tier, quantity, route terminal) is recoverable from existing archaeological evidence: the Harappan binary-and-decimal weight series standardised to 0.5 percent precision across roughly one million square kilometres, the Akkadian cuneiform Meluhha import receipts from Ur, the morphological-parallel correspondences between Indus seals and Tamil Nadu Iron Age potsherds, and the bigram structure of mapped versus unmapped signs in the digitised CISI corpus. The hypothesis is strictly weaker than any phonetic decipherment: it does not claim the Indus people did not have language, and does not assert which language was spoken. It claims that the function of the seals was inventory rather than speech encoding, and that the apparent untranslatability of the script reflects this functional fact rather than the absence of structure. The bridge to phonetic content, where it exists, runs through the proto-Dravidian numeral system reproduced from Wells 2015 Table 6.1 (after McAlpin 1981) — sign polyvalence is constrained by the morphology of numerals already in use, not by free phonetic association.
The book is 76 pages, organised into 26 sections plus an appendix for journalists. The §For Journalists appendix provides a 10-minute verification protocol that requires only the SQLite command-line tool: any quantitative claim in the book is reproducible from the indus_corpus.db file in this archive by running a single SELECT statement against the named source_code. Every numeric claim in the book is traceable to a row in the database with explicit source attribution.