NEW DELHI: One of the most famous legends surrounding the building of the Taj Mahal, near Delhi in northern India, is that Mughal emperor Shah Jehan, determined that no other ruler should ever copy his glorious masterpiece, cut off the hands of some of the master craftsmen. Well, the fingers may have been chopped off but the fingerprints have survived.

Some of the 20,000 labourers who toiled to build the Taj Mahal 350 years ago in the small dusty town of Agra must have had an inkling of its later fame as the greatest monument to love ever built because archaeologists have discovered their names, furtively etched in the sandstone slabs of a boundary wall.

A team of experts from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), for the first time, recently stumbled upon the names of more than 671 masons and labourers while carrying out their routine documentation of the mausoleum.

While most of the names are in Arabic and Persian, some are in the Devanagri (Hindi) script. The team also found symbols such as the swastika, flowers, fish, and geometrical patterns on the wall that faces the muddy Yamuna river.

"My hunch is that the symbols were etched by masons who were illiterate and used the symbols as a mark of their identity," said superintending archaeologist D. Dayalan. "Of the names, some were repeated in several places, indicating that they were senior, perhaps calligraphers or designers."

The etched names had been meticulously divided into sections - dome-makers, calligraphers, and inlay artists. Now the ASI team is examining other sections of the boundary wall in case there are more names.

"Some of the senior men who worked on the Taj are known, such as the calligrapher Amanat Khan Shirazi and the head of the dome- making team, Ismail Khan Afridi from Turkey.

But what we're interested in are the unknown masons who have never been recognised for their work, the foot soldiers who did back- breaking work round-the-clock," said Mr Dayalan.

Shah Jehan wanted to build a monument to his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth after bearing him 14 children. His chief architect is generally acknowledged to be Ustad Isa Afandi from Iran.

The construction of the Taj Mahal began in 1631 and it took 20,000 workers, many brought in from Iran and Central Asia, 17 years to complete the masterpiece. A whole town, named Mumtazabad after the empress, was built to accommodate the army of workers.

Material was brought in from all over India and neighbouring countries - marble from the quarries of Makrana in the Indian desert state of Rajasthan, turquoise from Tibet, jade from China, lapis lazuli and sapphires from Sri Lanka - and carried to the site by a fleet of 1,000 elephants.

Soon after its completion, Shah Jehan was dethroned by his son and imprisoned a few kilometres away in the royal palace, the Red Fort, where he would gaze at the Taj using a small mirror positioned on a balcony.

The ASI has yet to confirm if the 'signatures' were those of the workforce or the names of colleagues who died in the course of the construction. "It is possible that some fellow workers etched these symbols in memory of their colleagues and wrote their names," said an archaeologist involved in the study.

The ASI team are now trying to compile a complete list and decipher the symbols: "We've always known the names of the core creative team on the Taj but it's fantastic to find the names of ordinary, faceless men who, in their own small way, wanted to leave their mark on posterity by etching their names in," said Dayalan.

The local authorities in Agra say they will honour the workers whose names have been discovered by making a plaque in their memory, listing their names. The latest discovery will add to the marble mausoleum's mystique ahead of a grand celebration in September to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the mausoleum. The celebrations will last six months.

Music concerts inside the huge complex are planned, a spectacular illumination of the Taj and special packages for tourists. "This is going to be a historic celebration.

We are expecting a large number of tourists but we also have to ensure that there is no damage done to the monument," said tourism minister Naresh Agarwal. The residents of Agra are hoping it will get a facelift too in the midst of all the anniversary euphoria. -Dawn/The Observer News Service.