Administrative Writing Before Decipherment: The ORCA Threshold and ARCH Protocol Applied to Proto-Cuneiform, Proto-Elamite, Rongorongo, and the Indus Valley Script

Key Points

• This research aims to establish a methodology for identifying administrative writing in ancient scripts without deciphering them.
• Introduces ORCA threshold hypothesis and ARCH protocol for classification of records.
• Analyzes proto-cuneiform (6,691 tablets), rongorongo (146 tablet faces), and Indus Valley script (2,511 seals).
• Applies a six-step computational methodology to extract structural features from the texts.
• Five of six structural features are consistently found across proto-cuneiform, rongorongo, and Indus Valley script.
• The identified features span 3,700 years, suggesting a long-term pattern in administrative writing.

Abstract