HYDERABAD: In a significant discovery, a historian, Dr Dyavanapalli Satyanarayana, has uncovered a continuous human settlement from the Neolithic and Megalithic periods up until the 18th century AD at the BNR Hills in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad.
Satyanarayana, who is the curator of the Nehru Centenary Tribal Museum at Masab Tank, explored a rock shelter known as ‘Tabelu Gundu’ (tortoise rock) on January 26 and found rock art on a boulder that bore a striking resemblance to the characters of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
The ochre-coloured rock paintings, arranged in a straight line measuring approximately two metres, were similar to those found in caves at Manyamkonda near Mahbubnagar and the Wargal Saraswathi temple near Gajwel, he concluded. Satyanarayana compared these rock paintings to those discovered in the Tungabhadra valley and the Vikram Dhol inscriptions in Odisha’s Sambalpur district, which scholars like Pandyan and KP Jayaswal had deciphered as pre-Ashokan scripts.
Similarities with Indus Valley Civilisation
The letters in the paintings, such as ‘D’ and ‘E’ in an inverted position, ‘U,’ a triangle and the ‘delta’ symbol, were comparable to the Indus Valley sites deciphered by archaeologists and scholars like Iravatham Mahadevan, SR Rao and Asko Parpola, Satyanarayana said, adding that he also found cupules (cup marks) in the rock shelter, which were created during the Neolithic era as a result of early humans making stone tools.
Furthermore, he discovered a rock bruising (carving) resembling an ‘upward-facing trident penetrating a circle’, which he believed to be characteristic of the Megalithic Age from around 3,000 years ago. He suggested that this carving might have represented the prevalent ‘fertility cult’ of that time.
In addition to the ancient findings, Dr Satyanarayana found a Telugu inscription from the 18th century on the southwest corner of the boulder. The inscription, which reads “ja glam ti vem kka ta shaa va”, references an obeisance to Lord Jaglanti/Borlanti Venkata. “It assumes significance because, during the 18th Century, Banjara Hills and this entire hilly area was inhabited by Lambadas who worship Lord Venkateshwara and it supports the local legend that their spiritual guru, Sant Sevalal Maharaj, had visited this area,” Satyanaraya told TNIE.
He urged the State government to protect the rock shelter and employ carbon-14 dating methods to determine the age of the paintings. It is worth mentioning that on the same rock shelter, Dr E Sivanagireddy and S Haragopal recently discovered two stone axes.