The Indus civilization, also known as the Mature Harappan civilization (2500–1900BCE), was geographically spread over an extremely large area covering approximately a million square kilometers in present-day Pakistan and northwestern India. It was marked by urbanization centered around large planned cities, as seen from the ruins of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Craft specialization and long-distance trade with Mesopotamia and Central Asia have been well-documented. Its existence was unknown until archaeological excavations in the early 20th century revealed the ruins of the large urban centers which characterized the civilization. Continued work on these and other sites that have been discovered later have given us fascinating glimpses into various aspects of this Civilization but there is much that is still unknown.
Among the artifacts uncovered in excavations are a variety of objects - seals, miniature tablets, pottery, bronze implements - that are inscribed with sequences of signs. Given the technical sophistication of the civilization and the level of social complexity it implies, with the concomitant requirements of coordination and communication, these inscriptions have been interpreted as corresponding to writing. However, despite periodic claims about their decipherment, there has as yet been no generally accepted interpretation of the Indus inscriptions.
The object of this two-day meeting is to have focused interactions on recent developments in applying statistical, numerical simulation and graph theoretic approaches to analyzing the Indus inscriptions and other aspects of the archaeological data obtained from excavation of Indus Valley sites. The meeting also plans to consider the broader aspects of the civilizations, such as the trading network that connected it to contemporary Bronze-Age civilizations in Mesopotamia, Persian Gulf and elsewhere. It is the third in a series of meetings, the first being held at Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai in 2010 and the second in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada in 2014.
Organizer: Sitabhra Sinha
The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai