Abstract: The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) left no deciphered text, creating a "silence" at the heart of South Asian proto-history. This paper argues that the surviving Vedic corpus—specifically the Rigveda’s heroic-political register and the Atharvaveda’s practical-magical-domestic register—contains a systematic, archaeologically corroborated description of the IVC urban core. Introducing Dual-Register Reverse Archaeology, the author utilizes accent-stripped substring matching and register stratification to recover eight structural dimensions of the IVC ethnographic signal. Key findings include: The Paṇi Reframe: A typological identification of the Paṇi as a cross-cultural intermediary broker class (analogous to Sogdian or Hanseatic patterns) rather than a mere "enemy" category. The Diagnostic Null: A methodological proof utilizing the absolute absence of brick (iṣṭakā), seals, and script across both registers to confirm the "outside-looking-in" position of the composer-community. Maritime Synchronization: Evidence of a sophisticated maritime register (śatāritra) and coastal toponyms (Sindhu-dvīpa) that align with the Mature Harappan maritime reach. Phenotype Null: A corpus-statistical falsification of the 19th-century "racial invasion" model, confirming the conflict was institutional and cultural rather than phenotypic. By treating the Rigveda and Atharvaveda as contemporaneous witnesses, this paper provides a high-definition "Vedic Mirror" of the silent Harappan world, recovering institutional and economic data "hidden in plain sight." Keywords: Indus Valley Civilization, Rigveda, Atharvaveda, Reverse Archaeology, Paṇi, Bronze Age Economics, Historical Linguistics, Harappa, Maritime Proto-history. Notes: This is Paper 4 in the series. It depends on the dating and stratigraphy established in Paper 1 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19687675), Paper 2 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19687820), and Paper 5 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19717063).
Tarak Parikh (2026) studied this question.