Artist's Emphatic Views on Tottams

Abstract

The magnificent Desert of Cholistan is full of cheerful colors, enthusiastic cultures and gorgeous customs with glorious history and fabulous architecture. Identifying tribes using the art of tottam, seals, Indus Script, and ideographs on camels and cows is one of its alluring features, which should be explored. Where there are thousands of animals, it would have been quite difficult for someone to recognize their animal in the past as well. Every tribe created a distinctive and impressive tottam, icon, sign, symbol, mark, tattoo, or other stamp that is marked on the muscle of the hind leg or on the face of the camels/cows in order to solve this challenging problem. This stamp is constructed of iron bars that are first burned before being imprinted on an animal's skin. These imprints remain on the skin of the animal forever and serve as a key point of identification. This suggests that traders may have used them to label shipments of textiles and other goods. However, the majority of these tottams or shapes have nothing to do with local alphabets and instead resemble the ancient writing styles of the Indus Valley, Buddhist, Hindu, and Aryan Civilizations, as well as the old available script of prehistoric Multan and Jaleeplpur civilizations. It is possible that they derived these tottams, symbols, and tattoo marks from their alphabetic letters.