The project to develop a corpus of inscriptions for the Upper Indus Valley commenced with a pilot of inscriptions sourced from rocks from Shatial on the Karakorum Highway in the Upper Kohistan district in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. More than a 1000 across 224 rocks have been catalogued including Kharoṣṭhī, Brāhmī and Sogdian inscriptions composed across the third to seventh centuries. In addition, approximately 700 petroglyphs have been catalogued. The development of a sophisticated corpus of inscriptions is a component of a wider program of 3D imaging of the rocks. The project stakeholders are Wilfrid Laurier University and Lahore University of Management Sciences.
Research Proposition
The research proposition was the development of digital editions each of the inscriptions and flexible publishing of script/language-based collections (Kharoṣṭḥī, Brāhmī and Sogdian) and, given the heterogenous nature of the inscribed rocks, rock-based collections that aggregate inscriptions of different scripts in merged corpora.
Research Results
The research outputs of the project have been phased, with the initial deliverable being the development of edition substrates of individual inscriptions and, as glossary strata were developed for each inscription, both homogenous (script/language based) and heterogenous (rock based) aggregates have been merged.