As a scholar of the Indus script since the 1990s, I take issue with many of the statements in Andrew Robinson's summary (Nature 526, 499–501; 2015 and Nature 532, 308; 2016) of his book The Indus: Lost Civilizations (Reaktion, 2015).

In my view, there are climatic, geological and inter-regional motivations for the end of urbanization in the Indus. I dispute that there is evidence for Hinduism's roots in the Indus Valley. And my inference from photos of the many axes, spearheads and arrowheads in site reports is that the Indus people had military weapons.

I consider standard usage of the term pictograph in archaeology to be a symbol, with no linguistic counterpart, representing a real or mythical object. A sign or character representing a word or phrase, such as those used in shorthand and some writing systems, is a logogram. My reading of the decipherments of Mayan and Linear B does not chime with Robinson's précis. Finally, I dislike the way he elides code-breaking and decipherment.

A point-by-point discussion of these and other issues can be found in my books (Epigraphic Approaches To Indus Writing; Oxbow, 2011; The Archaeology and Epigraphy of Indus Writing; Archaeopress, 2015), which demonstrate the potential of digital techniques to move this field forward.

The Indus peoples, like all other archaeological cultures, had the same range of foibles and brilliance we all share. We owe it to them to make our representations of their writing and culture as precise as possible.