An important new paper by one of the foremost figures in Indus script research, Iravatham Mahadevan, who takes a popular four sign sequence and offers an interpretation. As he writes in the Introduction: "This is the first announcement of a new identification of a frequent phrase in the Indus texts, interpreted as ‘Merchant of the City’. The interpretation is supported by firmly inter-locked evidence at three levels, namely, Corpus of Indus Texts and later survivals from the earliest Dravidian (Old Tamil) and Indo-Aryan (Vedic) sources. I shall present the evidence from each level in a separate Section, and proceed to draw some important conclusions from the results which validate the title of the paper. The results are numbered serially to facilitate discussion."

First published by the Indus Research Center at the Roja Muthiah Research Institute in Chennai, November 2014. More papers by Iravatham Mahadevan are available from the Institute at the link below.