| Inscriptions | 1,916 verified, deduplicated |
|---|---|
| Unique signs | 584 |
| Sign occurrences | 11,110 tokens |
| Mean length | 4.6 signs |
| Sub-corpus | Mohenjo-daro, n = 179 texts |
| Sequence uniqueness | 98.31% (permutation test p < 0.001) |
| Conditional entropy | 3.23 bits |
| Sources | Fuls ICIT database (2020) · Mahadevan Concordance (1977) · Parpola Corpus (1994) · Kriger & Hunt Mohenjo-daro sub-corpus (2026) |
| Sanitisation | Anti-MNS protocol — database cleaned of ISC/IVC tag contamination before any count was taken |
A corpus in which 98.31% of sequences occur exactly once is not distributed like a language. It is distributed like a set of identifiers. Natural language reuses its sequences; primary keys do not, and neither does this.
The near-duplicate result is the one that closes the linguistic reading. If these were sentences, single-sign edits would fall anywhere. They fall in one place, every time, with a probability of coincidence under one in a hundred.
Stroke numerals concentrate in field four: 45.71% of all stroke numerals in the corpus appear there, making up 15.41% of total corpus volume, across 154 numeral tokens.
Within that field a single stroke-2 sign accounts for 66.91% of numeral entries — 103 of 154 tokens — tested against a uniform distribution at χ² = 198.3, p < 0.001.
That is the decisive anomaly. If these were item counts, Benford's Law predicts digit-1 dominance. The corpus does the opposite, and does it overwhelmingly. A number that clusters on one value across seven centuries is not counting goods; it is recording an institutionalised rate.
Sign 311/342 occurs 1,395 times — between 10% and 12% of total vocabulary volume — and converges on the terminal position. The audit reads it as a transaction-closing operator: applied to a clay sealing, it confers the status transaction verified and closed, duty paid.
Its absence is the finding that makes the reading testable. Without the terminal key the document is not a valid transport record but an unapproved draft — a draft/approved distinction encoded positionally rather than lexically. A second sign behaves as the functional analogue of the Minoan ki-ro and Sumerian lá-NI deficit operators, which are independently attested in their own corpora.
| Reference weight | 13.63 g, with binary fractions 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 |
|---|---|
| Verified fits | 3.41 g = 0.25 exactly · 6.8 g = 0.5 |
| Stroke arithmetic | Short shallow strokes encode a base-8 sub-system; long strokes enable multiples of 6 and 12 |
| Storage jar target | 9.47 L |
| Geometry | Cube of edge 21.156 cm = 12 Indus Angula at 1.763 cm |
| Observed deviation | 0.6% – 3.9%, attributed to thermal shrinkage in firing |
| Architectural lock | 3:4 ratio with the 28.2 cm Harappan brick (16 Angula) |
A container volume that resolves to a whole number of units of the same length standard used for construction is not a coincidence of pottery. The paper calls it a harmonic lock: logistics and architecture running on one metrology.
The pipeline is public. This is the part of the audit that a disagreeing reader can rerun rather than argue with.
Conditional entropy of 3.23 bits indicates strong sequential structure but is, on its own, compatible with both a constrained non-linguistic code and a natural language. It is reported as supporting evidence, not as proof.
The Minoan and Mesopotamian operator parallels are independently attested in their own corpora. The Harappan identifications remain the audit's hypotheses, rendered structurally plausible by the convergence rather than demonstrated by it.
The interpretation of pointed-base goblets as single-use volumetric gauges is not settled — they have also been read as disposable drinking or ritual cups — and is advanced as a hypothesis consistent with the metrological model, not as proof of it.
Diener, Ł. (2026). Excel in Clay II: The Meluhha Operating System — A Mathematical Reconstruction of the Indus Valley Non-Linguistic Cargo-Tag Database (version 1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20688721
Preprint, not peer reviewed by a journal. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Second of three audits applying the projection-before-meaning protocol to undeciphered Bronze Age administrative corpora.
Read on Zenodo Excel in Clay I Excel in Clay III All six audits