As Gujarat is poised to host the 10th edition of Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit from Wednesday, the studythrows light on the region’s thriving business culture for over 5,000 years.
As Gujarat is poised to host the 10th edition of Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit from Wednesday, the study – along with several others in the past – throws light on the region’s thriving business culture for over 5,000 years.
This year’s theme for the big-ticket event ‘Gateway to the Future’ resonates with the millennia of overseas trade and the deep impact of business on the region from language to customs, said experts.
The study, ‘Semantic scope of Indus inscriptions comprising taxation, trade and craft licensing, commodity control and access control: archaeological and script-internal evidence’ by researcher Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay was published in Nature journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications recently.
‘This study argues that such tablets were possibly trade/ craft/ commodity-specific licenses issued to tax-collectors, traders and artisans. These reverse-side tablet inscriptions possibly encoded certain standardized licence fees for certain fixed license slabs, whereas their obverse side inscriptions specified the commercial activities licensed to the tablet-bearers,’ mentioned the paper. The study added that these seals/ tablets were possibly issued by certain guilds of merchants/ artisans, and/ or region-based rulers or governing bodies, who collaborated in the integration phase of IVC, to standardize certain taxation rules and trade/ craft regulations across settlements. Mukhopadhyay claimed that the iconography such as very famous unicorn could be emblems of guilds, rulers, or governing bodies.
Earlier, several experts on IVC have established how Lothal and Dholavira were important trading ports with links to ancient Mesopotamia, Sumer and Elam (modern-day Iran).
Prof P Ajithprasad, former professor of archaeology at the MS University of Baroda and currently a visiting faculty at IIT Gandhinagar (IIT-Gn), had earlier told TOI that three factors had made the region a thriving business centre – find of semi-precious stones in Kutch and Khambhat regions and abundant shells from the coast, find of quartz rock from Kutch region and coastline that helped move the goods at a faster pace.