An Indus Seal from Mohenjo-daro
Computation science, information theory, and machine learning have now come to the vindication of Indus Valley scholars—providing a new type of “quantitative evidence for the existence of linguistic structure in the Indus script, complementing other arguments that have been made explicitly or implicitly in favour of the linguistic hypothesis.” This quantitative evidence comes from the results of a statistical study published online recently in the journal Science. Drawing from multiple disciplines, using rigorous equations, and through scientific number crunching, a team of scientists have demonstrated that the Indus script encodes a language and is not a mere “chain of symbols,” as an article published in 2004 claimed.

…   more »