joyboseroy/indus_decipher

Indus Script Corpora (indus_website and CISI)

Dataset Description

Two independently sourced Indus Valley script corpora, packaged together as four configs of one dataset since they share a schema and are routinely used side by side for comparison. Both are derived, cleaned CSVs built for computational analysis, not new digitization efforts. All credit for the underlying transcription work belongs to the two source repositories named below; this card documents what was changed, checked, and fixed in producing these versions, so downstream users don't have to reverse-engineer that from code.

This dataset does not decipher or interpret the Indus script. It is raw structural data (which signs appear, in what order, at which site) for anyone doing their own statistical or computational analysis.

The four configs

Config	Corpus	N (usable)	Signs	Unit
indus_website	2,543 inscriptions, 52 sites	2,543	592	inscription
cisi_primary	179 Mohenjo-daro unicorn seals (104 non-damaged)	179	182 (142 non-damaged)	inscription
cisi_hierarchical	same 179 seals, allographs split at 3+ attestations	179	234 (185 non-damaged)	inscription
cisi_allograph	same 179 seals, every allograph a distinct sign	179	337 (230 non-damaged)	inscription

Load a specific config with, e.g.:

load_dataset("<repo>", "cisi_hierarchical")

Do not directly compare raw statistics (entropy, vocabulary size, uniqueness) between indus_website and any cisi_* config without adjusting for scale. Their vocabularies differ by roughly 3 to 4 times (142 to 337 signs vs. 592), and such statistics are strongly vocabulary-size-dependent. The three cisi_* configs are directly comparable to each other (same 179 underlying inscriptions), and are specifically designed to be compared to each other; see "Why three CISI granularities" below.

Companion resources

Built as part of joyboseroy/indus_decipher, a falsification-oriented statistical toolkit for the Indus script. That repository's CORPUS_REGISTRY.md and CLAIM_EVIDENCE_MATRIX.md document, in much more depth than this card, every real corpus this project uses (including a fifth corpus, the actual M77/IDF-80 corpus, not distributed here due to its more involved access terms), the specific bugs found and fixed while working with each one, and exactly what has and has not been established using them.

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

indus_website:

inscription_id,sign_sequence,site,object_type,line_count,damaged,reading_direction,motif,mean_uncertainty,cisi_number
S2531,G140 G8 G342,Mohenjo-daro,seal,1,False,R-L,Bull1:W,0.0,M-1734

cisi_primary / cisi_hierarchical / cisi_allograph (same schema, sign IDs differ in granularity):

inscription_id,sign_sequence,site,object_type,line_count,damaged,reading_direction,motif,mean_uncertainty
M-1A,P121 P202 P385 P073 P108,Mohenjo-daro,seal,1,False,L-R,unicorn_I,0.0

Data Fields

All four configs share one schema:

Field	Type	Description
inscription_id	string	Real ID from the config's own source (database key for indus_website; real CISI ID, e.g. "M-1A", for the three cisi_* configs)
sign_sequence	string	Space-separated sign IDs, left-to-right as stored (see reading_direction)
site	string	Excavation site. 52 distinct sites in indus_website; always "Mohenjo-daro" in the cisi_* configs
object_type	string	Seal, tablet, etc. where recorded; "unknown" otherwise
line_count	int	Number of physical lines on the object
damaged	bool	indus_website: a per-inscription flag from the source. cisi_*: true if ANY grapheme in the inscription has a nonzero damage code
reading_direction	string	"R-L" means use sign_sequence as stored; "L-R" means reverse it before use. A loader-convention flag, not a claim about the script's actual reading direction. indus_website has a genuine mix of both values (per-inscription, source-provided); all cisi_* rows are "L-R"
motif	string	indus_website: iconographic field-symbol code (e.g. "Bull1:W"), "unknown" for 921 of 2,543 rows. cisi_*: always a unicorn variant (e.g. "unicorn_I")
mean_uncertainty	float	indus_website: always 0.0 (no per-grapheme uncertainty field in that source). cisi_*: mean, across an inscription's graphemes, of the original annotator's 0-100 subjective uncertainty score, distinct from damaged
cisi_number	string	indus_website only. Real Mahadevan/CISI catalog number (e.g. "M-1734", "H-322") for 2,375 of 2,543 rows (93%); "unknown" otherwise. Not applicable to the cisi_* configs, whose inscription_id already is the real CISI number

Data Splits

No splits in any config.

Dataset Creation

Source Data

indus_website: MySQL dump (population-script.sql) from yajnadevam/indus-website. Scale matches the "ICIT/Yajnadevam digitization" cited in independent literature on Indus sign-system statistics.

cisi_*: JSON files from mayig/indus-valley-script-corpus (MIT licensed), an in-progress, transparently documented hand-transcription of Parpola's CISI corpus, credited to Parpola, Wells, and Fuls's sign lists.

Corrections made during conversion

• Reading direction (indus_website). The original conversion had sign order backwards. Caught by a diagnostic checking for a published fingerprint (final sign position should show lower entropy than initial position); confirmed correct after reversal.
• CISI/Mahadevan numbers (indus_website). The source SQL has a CISI column that an earlier version of the conversion script never extracted. Fixed: 93% of rows now carry this real crosswalk number, spot-checked against physical seal photographs for consistent sign counts.
• Reading direction (cisi_*). Same kind of fix, independently confirmed for this separate source.

Why three CISI granularities

The cisi_hierarchical config exists to distinguish two competing explanations for a result found using cisi_allograph: does allograph choice genuinely matter, or is naive full fragmentation just too sparse on 104 inscriptions to trust? cisi_hierarchical's 3-occurrence threshold was built specifically to test this. It did not resolve to "it's just sparsity," which is why all three configs are provided rather than one being treated as the "real" version.

Considerations for Using the Data

• The three cisi_* configs give different answers to the same structural question, and that is a documented finding, not an inconsistency to average away. Using a basic language-vs-non-language statistical classifier (see companion repo), cisi_primary classifies this corpus one way; cisi_hierarchical and cisi_allograph both classify it the other way, and this is not simply because the latter two are too sparse (cisi_hierarchical was built to be conservative and still agrees with the fully fragmented version). Tracing why found that the single most common sign at primary granularity is actually several independently well-attested, visually distinct forms bundled under one ID. Report all three when it matters, don't pick the one that supports your preferred conclusion.
• cisi_* is small (104 non-damaged inscriptions) and entirely one motif at one site. Statistics requiring higher-order sequential structure did not produce a reliable signal on it in the companion repository's own testing, most likely due to sample size. It is also not a representative cross-section of the Indus corpus as a whole.
• motif and cisi_number are both partial in indus_website. Treat "unknown" as missing data, not a meaningful third category.
• This dataset alone cannot support a claim that the Indus script is or is not a language, an administrative code, or any other specific kind of system. See the companion repository's synthetic-continuum and external-language-calibration experiments for why that inference is harder than it looks.
• indus_website's source repository maintainer is also associated with an independently disputed decipherment claim for an unrelated script. The raw glyph sequences and site metadata here are ordinary transcription data, checked directly (reading-direction fingerprint, CISI-number cross-reference) rather than taken on trust; no sign-to-meaning mapping from that other work is used anywhere here.

Additional Information

Licensing

indus_website: source repository license terms apply to the underlying transcription data; this derived CSV is provided under MIT for the conversion and structuring work. cisi_*: source repository is MIT licensed; this derived CSV is provided under the same terms.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the relevant original source:

indus_website config: yajnadevam/indus-website (GitHub), underlying ICIT/Yajnadevam digitization
cisi_* configs: mayig/indus-valley-script-corpus (GitHub), digitization of Parpola's CISI corpus

and, if relevant, the companion analysis toolkit:

joyboseroy/indus_decipher (GitHub)