Taksha Indic Sarasvati-Sindhu Civilization (TISSC) Center: Traditions, Research & Studies

The Taksha Indic Sarasvati-Sindhu Civilization (TISSC) Center has the principle objective of studying the Sarasvati-Sindhu Civilization’s traditions and interacting areas of trade with the Levant and the Ancient Far East, to better understand how Ancient India became the largest nation on the globe, contributing to over 33% of global GDP (ca. 1 CE pace Angus Maddison).

Research activities of the TISSC are planned to be multi-disciplinary, particularly in the context of the Tin-Bronze Revolution from ca. 5th m. BCE, which moved civilizations from the neolithic to the chalcolithic eras, creating industrial-scale activities all over Asia, stretching from Hanoi (Vietnam) to Haifa (Israel). Study will examine an Ancient Maritime Tin Route that predated the Silk Road by two millennia, linking Ancient Far East and Ancient Near East, as evidenced by C. E. Alexandrie‘s recent discoveries of seafaring cargo boats of 19th Century BCE at Ayn Soukhna (the Red Sea, North of Suez Canal) sewn with coconut fiber, possibly from the west coast of Ancient India (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpZPvpRMr4&t=5s.). Also enhancing the wealth of Ancient India during this era was the discovery of cotton and silk fibers for creating clothing, apart from agricultural activities involving organized farming of rice, wheat, and cereal cultivation. Enormous bodies of scriptures and texts from Veda tradition document the life activities of people from ca. 7th m. BCE.

The challenge is to relate these scriptures and texts to over 9000 inscriptions and Indus Script Cipher deployed on sculptural or art forms and ongoing archaeo-metallurgical researches or archaeo-linguistic studies or ādhyātma enquiries. The corpora of Epigraphia Indus Script present a cipher (encryption system) — an advance over Egyptian hieroglyphs– layering rebus renderings of ‘meaning’ or ‘semantics’ in Meluhha Bhāratīya sprachbund, ‘speech union’.

Using the framework of Machine Learning/AI initiatives such as a driverless automobiles or a drones instructed to deliver an ‘envelope’ to a specific location, the semantic layering of Indus Script Cipher — not merely on inscriptions, but also on sculptural metaphors such as ayo kammaṭa dvāra ‘doorway of alloy metal mint’ of Sanchi/Mathura Jaina Stupa toraṇa — is expected to provide avenues for further advances in Machine Learning and AI with the objectives of:

Division Leaders

TISSC Chair

S. Kalyanaraman, PhD, D Litt
Sarasvati Research Centre

TISSC Council of Advisors (CoA)