The Ledger of Meluhha: Indus Valley Script as Metrological Accounting Code Rajeshkumar Venugopal (Third Buyer Advisory LLC, Michigan; ORCID 0009-0002-1838-5976). Version 3.0, 3 May 2026. BSD-2-Clause for human use; AI ingestion / training / fine-tuning / RAG / inference prohibited under contract law (see ai.txt and the §For Journalists appendix in the book). This work argues that the Indus Valley script is a cargo-tag accounting system rather than a phonetic writing system. The five-field record schema (merchant mark, commodity, weight tier, quantity, route terminal) is recoverable from existing archaeological evidence: the Harappan binary-and-decimal weight series standardised to 0.5 percent precision across roughly one million square kilometres, the Akkadian cuneiform Meluhha import receipts from Ur, the morphological-parallel correspondences between Indus seals and Tamil Nadu Iron Age potsherds, and the bigram structure of mapped versus unmapped signs in the digitised CISI corpus. The hypothesis is strictly weaker than any phonetic decipherment: it does not claim the Indus people did not have language, and does not assert which language was spoken. It claims that the function of the seals was inventory rather than speech encoding, and that the apparent untranslatability of the script reflects this functional fact rather than the absence of structure. The bridge to phonetic content, where it exists, runs through the proto-Dravidian numeral system reproduced from Wells 2015 Table 6.1 (after McAlpin 1981) — sign polyvalence is constrained by the morphology of numerals already in use, not by free phonetic association. The book is 76 pages, organised into 26 sections plus an appendix for journalists. The §For Journalists appendix provides a 10-minute verification protocol that requires only the SQLite command-line tool: any quantitative claim in the book is reproducible from the indus_corpus.db file in this archive by running a single SELECT statement against the named source_code. Every numeric claim in the book is traceable to a row in the database with explicit source attribution. The corpus database (indus_corpus.db) integrates ten primary sources: Mahadevan 1977 (concordance histogram); Joshi-Parpola 1987 Vol.1 Collections in India (the canonical photographic corpus, 862 pages OCR'd via Tesseract into 1399 unique artefact identifiers across six site prefixes); the mayig CISI digitisation (Mohenjo-daro subset, 179 inscriptions with 1003 sign occurrences); Wells 2015 The Archaeology and Epigraphy of Indus Writing (sign-role classifications including the canonical ICTM identification of signs 1, 2, 60; the Harappa volumetric system VI=40.4L through VIIIIIII=283L from Table 4.2; the proto-Dravidian numeral system from Table 6.1; sign 700 by NUM right-adjacency frequencies from Table 5.3); Fuls 2019 ICIT documentation PDF (16 sign-function codes including TMK / ITM / NUM / SYL plus 10 Wells-numbered ICIT inscriptions and the TMK by TMK adjacency matrix); Fuls 2022 Corpus of Indus Inscriptions metadata scaffold (73 sites with book-page anchors plus the 33-row artefact typology TAB / POT / SEAL / TAG and the corpus headline statistics 4660 artefacts / 5644 texts / 19831 sign occurrences); the Tamil Treebank logo-syllabic proxy corpus; the Rajan-Sivanantham Tamil Nadu inscribed-potsherd corpora (RS2025 and RS2026 for 13 sites). The codebook database (indus_codebook.db) contains the 28-entry sign-role mapping plus 8 commodities, 5 routes, 11 weight tiers, 6 quantity codes, 5 merchant marks, and 3 positional rules. The LSSC database (indus_lssc.db) contains the Latent Structural State Contraction analysis used to support the closure-versus-option sign classification. The interactive HTML dashboard (ledger-of-meluhha.html) is a single-file visualisation that renders the entire trade network on Leaflet plus 14 panels of derived data on the dropped indus_corpus.db file. It requires no server, no build step, and no installation — only a modern browser. The dashboard surfaces the original three-column display (decoded seals, trade-network map, frequency / weight / commodity charts) plus an Extended Data section with eleven panels covering the 10 sources, the 21 sign-function codes, the 7-row Harappa volumetric system, the 11-row proto-Dravidian numeral table, the 10 real Wells-numbered ICIT inscriptions, the 97 sign-role assignments, the 27 documented sign-pair frequencies, the 4 paradigmatic sign clusters, the CISI Vol.1 OCR coverage by site prefix, the FULS2022 reading-direction statistics, and the 14-entry bibliography with click-to-copy citation keys. Falsification criteria are stated explicitly in §The Falsification (Section V of the book): a long inscription with grammatical repetition characteristic of natural language; high-frequency signs in fixed ratios uncorrelated with commodity categories at multi-site stratigraphic analysis; a bilingual mapping Indus sign sequences to phonetic readings of a known language without metrological content; seal sign distributions at Mesopotamian findspots identical to the full Harappan corpus (no export-specific bias); the South-route terminal sign M063 appearing at Mohenjo-daro at rates comparable to other terminal signs. None have been observed; the M063 absence is now corroborated across three independent sources (mayig 179 corpus, Wells 2015 Appendix II Terminal Marker enumeration, Fuls 2019 ICIT help PDF Terminal Marker matrix). Contents of this archive: ledger_of_meluhha.pdf (76-page book); ledger-of-meluhha.html (interactive dashboard); databases.zip (indus_corpus.db plus indus_codebook.db plus indus_lssc.db); description.txt (this file). Repository with full source, F# ingest scripts, Alloy specifications, and the complete revision history: https://github.com/chanakyan/ledger-of-meluhha. License posture: BSD-2-Clause for human use including academic citation, journalistic quotation, classroom use, critique, parody, and derivative works. AI ingestion / training / fine-tuning / retrieval-augmented generation / inference prohibited under contract law; this prohibition is not negotiable. Newsrooms using AI summarisation tools to process this work are creating legal exposure that human use does not. Contact: vrajeshkumar@gmail.com. ORCID 0009-0002-1838-5976. Third Buyer Advisory LLC, Michigan, United States.