Linguists at the National Institute of Epigraphy have announced a significant breakthrough in deciphering a regional variant of the 'Shell Script' (Sankha Lipi) found on stone tablets in Haryana. The inscriptions, dating to the late Kushan period, appear to record administrative village laws and land boundary disputes in a highly stylized, ornamental format.
This decipherment provides a new window into the governance of post-Harappan settlements. The researchers utilized machine learning to identify recurring geometric patterns, revealing that the script was a specialized, high-prestige code used by the Sanatan guilds to protect legal and commercial information from foreign invaders.