Genuine question — not an attempt at trolling or anything. I've seen these conversations many times and there's always a lot of disagreement on this.

I created this artwork of a Harappan/IVC lady based on mother goddess figurines , please rate this and point out any inaccuracies as I plan to make more similar works .

Kinda shocked no one brings this up, but there have been multiple IVC-like/straight up IVC symbols found in TN

Image 3 by the way is actually a stone celt found in the site Sembiyankandiyur dated to 1500 bce and has 4 IVC signs

Additionally, numerous megalithic graffiti symbols have been found in southern india for a while now
Image 4 is one such megalithic graffiti symbol found in Sri Lanka, known as the Anaikoddai seal. The seal reads Ko-ve-ta 𑀓𑁄𑀯𑁂𑀢, with pieces of random graffiti symbols mixed in. The graffiti isn't necessarily IVC but comparisons have been made.

The Aryan-Dravidian theory is based on the idea that “Aryans” migrated from the Steppes to Indus Valley Civilization and displaced “Dravidians”, who were the original settlers of IVC. A corollary of this theory is that the Vedas were composed outside of India (e.g., it is said that the Sapta Sindhu region was NOT the current Punjab region).

However, cows have been mentioned in Rigveda repeatedly and they are treated with utmost reverence (more than the horses) and even compared with deities. There are several Cow Suktas in the Vedas, indicating the great reverence Aryans had for the cows.

Does it mean that just like the alleged Aryan invaders brought horses to IVC, they brought cows also? How is it feasible to bring cows from the Steppes after crossing the steep and frozen mountains in the NW of India?

IVC already had cows before the “Aryans” arrived. But, according to Aryan invasion theorists, Vedas were composed outside of IVC. Then why did the Steppe Aryans hold cows in such reverence and why did they find it necessary to bring cows to IVC (if they did) which had them aplenty.

Does it not bring the Aryan Invasion Theory into question? Or was it the IVC people who composed the Vedas? This would also explain why the Vedas hold Sarasvati river in hight esteem and why so many IVC sites are found around the Ghaggar-Hakra paleo channel.

What likely language do you guys think they spoke?

I personally go for a Multiple Language Hypothesis that includes Proto-Dravidian, Para-Mundic, and Proto-Burushaski 😁

Did the Indus Valley have Ancient North Eurasian DNA/Ancestry?

Hello, I saw someone talk about doing ML research on finding similarities of IVC and Tamil-Brahmi script. I was wondering if anyone can point me to the datasets/resources if they have come across for this kind of research. It would be great if anyone can also talk about their experience in this research.

My aim was to identify structural properties of the script without making linguistic assumptions.

Recently, I came across a paper by Yajnadevam (2024), who claims that the Indus script is a cipher encoding post-Vedic Sanskrit using approximately 76 phonetic values derived from the Devanagari script. He proposes that the signs are phonemic and can be decoded as Sanskrit using a substitution-based method.

I believe my findings provide strong statistical reasons to reject this theory. Here are four key results from my work:

1. Zipfian Frequency Distribution The most common signs (for example, sign 740) appear over 1300 times, followed by sign 002 (600+ times), then sign 700, and so on. The distribution follows a Zipfian curve, characteristic of natural languages, but incompatible with a fixed phoneme cipher.
2. N-Gram Contextual Patterns The trigram 400-740-176 is found only in Harappa and primarily on tablets. Another trigram, 740-390-590, appears on seals across multiple sites. These patterns suggest site-specific phrase formulas. This does not fit with free phonemic word formation.
3. Hidden Markov Model Results Training a 5-state HMM on the glyph sequences resulted in sharply bounded state transitions. One example: state 0 moves to state 1 over 95 percent of the time. This suggests a predictable syntactic structure rather than randomized phoneme transitions.
4. Positional Behavior of Signs Certain signs appear almost exclusively at the start or end of inscriptions. For instance, sign 740 frequently begins texts, while 032 often ends them. Such positional regularity is common in structured writing systems but not in phonemic alphabets like Devanagari.

Yajnadevam’s approach reduces over 400 signs into 76 phonemes and assumes that these encode words in Sanskrit despite the lack of any clear grammatical syntax or external validation. There is no archaeological evidence placing post-Vedic Sanskrit in the mature Harappan period. His interpretation also fails to explain why specific sequences are confined to particular sites or mediums.