“Beyond ‘Sikai Korran’: Socotra Cave Inscriptions Show Wide Indian Merchant Presence”, The Cammune, February 25, 2026
“Ingo Strauch, who presented a paper on the discovery of Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions, written respectively in Tamil-Brahmi and Kharoshthi scripts, in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, has also published extensively on a series of comparable inscriptions found on the island of Socotra in the Republic of Yemen, specifically in a cave context.
Socotra functioned as a crucial intermediate maritime station linking Bharat with the western world within the ancient transoceanic trade network. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1st century CE) explicitly refers to the island as an important trading centre in the Indian Ocean commercial circuit.
More than one hundred inscriptions have been discovered on Socotra. Of these, a significant portion are in Sanskrit, while the remaining inscriptions belong to South Arabian and Aramaic linguistic traditions. The Sanskrit inscriptions are written in the Brahmi script and are dated broadly to the 2nd-4th centuries CE……”
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