Illustrated Indus Script Concordance

Book excerpt: The Indus civilization was one of the earliest civilizations of the ancient world. At its peak, it was more than ten times larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined and three times their population. Yet it remains a riddle of prehistory. Its script is the last great script to remain undeciphered. This illustrated concordance attempts to make the corpus of Indus inscriptions organized and searchable in a digital format. It covers 3,649 objects with 5,037 inscriptions from across 40 Indus sites. At more than 10,000 pages, it aims to be a comprehensive reference for the domain. The drawings carved into the seals encode key identity and context information and represent iconic and culturally significant symbols. This illustrated concordance not only represents the full gamut of visual information available but also seamlessly integrates it into the overall search experience. It allows the reader to efficiently search and navigate the corpus by location and object types, by animals and other illustrations, by facing and writing directions. It is the only resource that indexes the collection by letters, words, and patronymics. In order to help the first-time reader, the Introduction provides a background of the Indus civilization and its script. It presents a unique analysis of the typography of the Indus seals and compares it to modern fonts. It systematically analyzes the script down into constituent forms and links to resources for Unicode encoding and an open-source font for the script. The book itself serves as a test case for those resources. This concordance is based on a complete decipherment of the Indus script that I will publish separately. It leverages that to identify characters and words and present a consistent and complete coverage of the inscriptions.