NOTE: In addition to this microseminar, there will also be a public lecture on the Indus civilization and its writing April 21, 7pm, Kane 225.

HUM 597A · 1 credit

Deciphering the 4500-year-old Indus Script:
Past Efforts and Recent Approaches

Instructor: Rajesh Rao (Computer Science & Engineering)
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In conjunction with their week-long visit to the University of Washington, researchers from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (Mumbai, India) and Institute of Mathematical Sciences (Chennai, India) will conduct a micro-seminar for graduate students on the Indus civilization (c. 2550-1900 BC) and its as-yet undeciphered script. Work for the course will be limited to readings and discussion.

The course will provide an introduction to the Indus civilization, focusing particularly on the nature of the script and recent statistical analysis of the structure of the script. The four planned lectures will cover: Indus culture and background, art and artifacts of the civilization, Indus writing and its style, and statistical investigations of the structure of Indus writing.

Mayank N. Vahia is an Associate Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. Besides being a noted scholar in astrophysics and astronomy, his recent research has focused on archaeo-astronomy as a means of studying the intellectual growth of cultures in India and beyond. The search for astronomical references in Indian archaeological finds and ancient Indian literature has led him to research on the Indus civilization and the Indus script. He is leading a team of researchers in India who are working towards a scientific analysis of the Indus script. Some of their research has been reported in the press.

Nisha Yadav is a Research Scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Her research examines the structure and nature of the Indus Script using statistical techniques and explores connections to other aspects of Indus Culture. Her published work on the Indus Script is available at www.harappa.com.

Ronojoy Adhikari is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India. His research interests are in applying techniques from statistical mechanics and statistical physics to problems in the natural and social sciences. He has published articles in prestigious journals such as Science and Physical Review. He has recently become interested in applying statistical techniques to the Indus script problem and has been collaborating with Prof. Vahia's group at the Tata Institute.

Hrishikesh Joglekar is a graduate from IIT Kharagpur and works as a Senior Application Developer in Oracle Corporation. His main interests are in Algorithms and Machine Learning. He has worked on the various problems in Bioinformatics. He is also interested in astronomy, archaeo-astronomy and the Indus script. Hrishikesh has been one of the core contributors of the TIFR project 'Archaeo Astronomy in Indian Context'. He is working on developing computational and visualization tools to study the grammatical patterns in the Indus script.