The paper by Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay seeks to resolve a vital a part of this perennial puzzle of South Asian prehistory.
A current publication has offered essential proof that Ancestral Dravidian languages were possibly spoken by a major inhabitants in the Indus Valley civilisation.
The paper titled “Ancestral Dravidian Languages in Indus Civilization: Ultraconserved Dravidian Tooth-word Reveals Deep Linguistic Ancestry and Supports Genetics”, by Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay was printed earlier this month in a Nature Group of journal – Humanities and Social Sciences Communications quantity 8, Article quantity: 193 (2021).
This study seeks to resolve a vital a part of this perennial puzzle of South Asian prehistory, by way of establishing the sure existence of ancestral Dravidian language(s) in the Indus Valley civilisation. In the absence of any deciphered written paperwork of Indus Valley civilisation, there are not any direct methods of figuring out Harappan languages. Thus, the one possible start line is to search out sure proto-words whose probably origin in Indus Valley civilisation will get confirmed by way of historic and linguistic proof, whereas archaeological proof signifies that the objects signified by these proto-words were prevalently produced and used in the Indian Valley civilisation.
Elephant-word
Analysing quite a few archaeological, linguistic, archaeogenetic and historic evidences the study finds some such proto-words. It claims that the phrases used for elephant (like, ‘pīri’, ‘pīru’) in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, the elephant-word used in the Hurrian a part of an Amarna letter of ca. 1400 BC, and the ivory-word (‘pîruš’) recorded in sure sixth century BC Old Persian paperwork, were all initially borrowed from ‘pīlu’, a Proto-Dravidian elephant-word, which was prevalent in the Indus Valley civilisation, and was etymologically associated to the Proto Dravidian tooth-word ‘*pal’ and its alternate kinds ( ‘*pel’/‘*pīl’/‘*piḷ’/).
Extensively analysing Dravidian grammar and phonology, Ms. Bahata, a Bengaluru-based software program technologist, argues that the elephant phrases ‘pīlu’, ‘palla’, ‘pallava’, ‘piḷḷuvam’, and so forth., that are attested in numerous Dravidian dictionaries, are associated to the Proto-Dravidian tooth-word “pal”.
The paper factors out that elephant-ivory was one of many luxurious items coveted in the Near East, and archaeological, and zoological proof confirms that Indus Valley was the only real provider of historic Near East’s ivory in the middle-third to early-second millennium BC. Some of this Indus ivory got here straight from Meluhha to Mesopotamia, whereas a few of it bought imported there by way of Indus Valley’s thriving commerce with Persian Gulf, and even by way of Bactria. Thus, together with the ivory commerce, the Indus phrase for ivory additionally bought exported to the Near East and remained fossilised in completely different historic paperwork written in Akkadian, Elamite, Hurrian, and Old Persian languages.
Ms. Bahata supplies one other intriguing proof relating to the etymological hyperlink of the ‘pīlu’ phrase to the which means of tooth. She reveals that some bushes of Salvadoraceae household, that are well-known as ‘toothbrush tree’ in the western-world, and as ‘miswak’ tree (‘miswak’ which means ‘toothcleaning-stick’) in the Arabic-speaking international locations, are known as by ‘pīlu’ and its phonological derivatives throughout the Indus valley areas. The branches and roots of this tree have been used since antiquity as a pure toothbrush. In conventional drugs programs equivalent to Indian Ayurveda and Perso-Arabic Tibb Yūnānī this tree known as as ‘pīlu’ and ‘pilun’ respectively. Ms. Bahata claims that, identical to its English and Arabic names, its Indic title was additionally associated to the which means of tooth. Archaeobotany reveals that Indus individuals used this tree’s wooden often, and it’s a key attribute flora of Pakistan’s tropical dry thorn forest.
Important disclaimer
The researcher, nevertheless, places an essential disclaimer, saying that it could be very fallacious to imagine that solely a single language or language-group was spoken throughout the one-million sq. kilometre space of Indus Valley civilisation.
“Even today, people across the greater Indus Valley speak several tongues including Indo-Aryan, Dardic, Iranian, along with the isolated Dravidian language Brahui and the language isolate Burushaski. During the Indus Valley civilisation era, this region could have been even more multilingual, with some languages that are now extinct. But we can at least be sure that ancestral Dravidian was one of the most popular tongues spoken by our ancestors,” she added.
Two years in the past, on July 9, 2019, the researcher had printed a paper titled ‘Interrogating Indus inscription to unravel their mechanism of meaning conveyance’ suggesting that majority of Indus valley inscriptions were written logographically or semasiographically (by utilizing word-signs or meaning-units) and never phonograms (speech sounds models).
