Cotton, Sesame, and Copper: Five Thousand Years of Silence Broken — Decoding the Harappan Script as a Bronze Age Trade Certification System

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We present Compositional Position Theory (CPT), a comprehensive framework for partial decipherment of the Harappan script based on the systematic positional distribution of signs across the inscription corpus. CPT proposes that Harappan texts encode Proto-Dravidian trade vocabulary through a three-position grammar: an authority HEADER sign at text-beginning, commodity or guild signs in MEDIAL position, and a certification TERMINAL sign at text-end. We identify 15 signs with high-confidence Proto-Dravidian etymologies covering approximately 52% of corpus sign occurrences by frequency. We present 18 complete inscription readings across five Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) sites and four Mesopotamian cities, document 15 grammar variants, and perform the first vector-geometric analysis of the Dholavira Signboard, reading the world's oldest known civic inscription as 'the seasonal tribute citadel' at 72% confidence. We screen CPT commodity words against folk and regional languages of the IVC geographic zone — Gujarati, Kutchi, Marathi, Rajasthani, Sindhi, Konkani, and Haryanvi — finding that pre-Aryan substrate forms for cotton, ivory, seasonal measure, and fortified enclosure survive identically across the IVC heartland, constituting a fifth independent validation tier. CPT positional assignments are independently corroborated by the Interactive Corpus of Indus Texts (ICIT), which classifies five signs identically through entirely different methods. This revised version (v1.1) features standardised Times New Roman formatting, normalised margins and table widths, consistent paragraph spacing, and section headings updated to standard academic style throughout.

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