Tamil Brahmi inscriptions and other archaeological finds
From the Hindu:
http://www.hindu.com/2005/04/03/stor...0301931400.htm
CHENNAI, APRIL 2. In an important discovery, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Chennai Circle, has located the habitational site of the Iron Age people who were buried in big urns at Adichanallur, 24 km from Tirunelveli town in Tamil Nadu. Although several urn burial sites such as at Amirthamangalam and Perumbair, both near Chengalpattu, have been discovered in the State, this is the first time the place where these people lived has been found.
The site discovered now is on the north and north-western slopes of the urn-burial mound at Adichanallur. It is a few hundred metres away from the burial fields.
T. Satyamurthy, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Chennai Circle, said, "We have succeeded in locating the habitational site at Adichanallur. We are excavating in a place where we are getting the materials of a town where people actually lived."
Two things are confirmed, he said. First, the settlement was inside a fortified town. "The fortification wall has been traced. There is a regular alignment wall." Second, the potters' quarters have been found inside the fortification wall. Discovery of three potter's kilns with ash, charcoal and broken pots showed wet pots/urns were baked with fire. Artefacts, including an iron knife, carnelian beads, terracotta beads, couex beads, bone implements and potsherds with graffiti have also come to light.
According to Mr. Satyamurthy, the urn-burial site could be dated "to about 1,000 B.C," that is 3,000 years ago. "Contemporary to that, we have got the habitational site."
How ancient Tamil history could be?
Re: New find at Adichanallur
Quote:
Originally Posted by aravindhan
From the Hindu:
CHENNAI, APRIL 2. In an important discovery, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Chennai Circle, has located the habitational site of the Iron Age people who were buried in big urns at Adichanallur, 24 km from Tirunelveli town in Tamil Nadu. Although several urn burial sites such as at Amirthamangalam and Perumbair, both near Chengalpattu, have been discovered in the State, this is the first time the place where these people lived has been found.
Actually, the burial process and urns is not a new discovery. It is only its location at Adichanallur as a possible ancient inhabitation site which is. If you go to Deccan College in Pune, you will see a lot of these urns from all over South India which seemed to be one way to dispose the dead; other than burning them.
Rgds, Aravind Sitaraman
Early writing discovered in Theni
According to the Hindu, three early Tamil Brahmi "hero stone" inscriptions have recently been discovered in Theni district. It appears that the two newer inscriptions are from the 3rd century BC, with the third being older.
http://www.hindu.com/2006/04/05/stor...0518340600.htm
As you probably know, the "standard" modern account of the origin of Brahmi is that the script was invented under Ashoka as an adaption of the imperial Aramaic script, expressly for the purpose of engraving Ashoka's edicts. There are a number of problems with this theory, and the discovery of such early examples of the script outside Ashoka's empire casts even more doubt on it, and strongly suggests that Brahmi which Ashoka adapted for Prakrit was already in use in India.
Perhaps it's time to revisit Nacchinakkiniyar's theory that the script was entirely derived from geometric patterns? :wink:
Re: Early writing discovered in Theni
Wow Aravindhan. Thanks for the link. :clap:
Quote:
Originally Posted by aravindhan
Perhaps it's time to revisit Nacchinakkiniyar's theory that the script was entirely derived from geometric patterns? :wink:
If it is not too much to ask, could you throw more light on this?
New find: Indus script in Tamil Nadu!
http://www.thehindu.com/2006/05/01/s...0101992000.htm
http://www.thehindu.com/2006/05/01/s...0112670100.htm
P.S.: If there is a relevant thread already dedicated to such stuff, would the moderators please move it there? Thanks
Re: Indus Saraswathi Valley
Quote:
Originally Posted by devapriya
It is an excellant link given, but Irawatham Mahadevan has made clear that reading of Those Pictograms from Right to Left as a Forgery and Sanskrit Traddtion is the Cotinuity of Indus Civilisation.
I reproduce the actual views of Iravadham Mahadevan as given in "The Hindu":
Quote:
Mr. Mahadevan commented that the latest discovery was very strong evidence that the Neolithic people of Tamil Nadu and the Indus Valley people "shared the same language, which can only be Dravidian and not Indo-Aryan."
But that said, one of my friends is of the view that the number of signs is too small to arrive at any conclusion. Can anyone throw more light on this? Or perhaps, should we wait for more evidence to surface..?
Re: Indus Saraswathi Valley
Quote:
Originally Posted by kannannn
Quote:
Originally Posted by devapriya
It is an excellant link given, but Irawatham Mahadevan has made clear that reading of Those Pictograms from Right to Left as a Forgery and Sanskrit Traddtion is the Cotinuity of Indus Civilisation.
I reproduce the actual views of Iravadham Mahadevan as given in "The Hindu":
Quote:
Mr. Mahadevan commented that the latest discovery was very strong evidence that the Neolithic people of Tamil Nadu and the Indus Valley people "shared the same language, which can only be Dravidian and not Indo-Aryan."
But that said, one of my friends is of the view that the number of signs is too small to arrive at any conclusion. Can anyone throw more light on this? Or perhaps, should we wait for more evidence to surface..?
Though I dont agree with Mahadevan completely on this, it makes some sense to think of Indus script to be tamil or some archaeic form of tamil. If we analyze the morphology of both tamil and sanskrit, we can find that both these languages have followed some unique pattern in word formation - tamil adding letters to right of root word and sanskrit left of root word. Of course we find some words that have the roots in middle. These could have been borrowed or could have been the result of combining two words.
If we see the growth of these languages, complex words have been added later in an uniform manner. So I assume that the primitive form should have consisted only monosyllabic roots. I notice that these monosyllabic roots, may be by coincidence, are actually sounds related to their meanings - like the sounds made by animals or by nature.
Primitive humans should have named things he saw by the sounds related to them. Then as their need for words grew, they could have started forming complex words. The first words should have been nouns and the others should have formed much later.
Tamil is noted for having multiple words meaning the same. So a primitive word could have had a lot of meanings and the language should have been spoken with the help of nouns - like "stone food" could have actually meant "kill the food (animal) with a stone tool" or something like that. The words for stone and food could have been like - kal, un. Since the vocabulary in this state is minimal, we dont need to invent any syllables or alphabets and can be represented by X - kal, Y - un. This could have actually been the root of all languages - later developing into different languages based on the people's practices and need - some could have continued monosyllabic words like chinese(analytic), some could have evolved agglutative like tamil and sanskrit, some could have developed into fusional languages like most languages.
About the word order, it could have been in both ways, though I guess right to left to be more probable. Most people are right handed. Right handed people normally hold the chisel with their left hand and hammer with right. So, it is a lot easier for a right handed person to chisel from right to left than from left to right. This also suggests that the earliest writing could have been from right to left till formation of some complex words. Then, at some point of time, some people could have started reading these from left to right and started creating new words based on these, leading to a new language. This new language could have been prakrit, which could have been quite messy since some words would have not been meaningful. So they could have cleaned their new language, creating sanskrit.
So, it is possible that the indus script is a script indeed and could be morphemes, comprising only of nouns.
Indus Saraswathi Civilisation.
Friends,
We are all trapped by falsehoods spread by Some False movements in the name of Thani Tamil and Dravidian movements.
I quote Verbatim from the Interview of Iravatham Mahadevan given in the past downloaded from www.harappah.com
//14. The Indus and Dravidian Cultural Relationship
Q: How do you conceive of the relationship between the Indus culture that existed five thousand years ago and contemporary Dravidian culture here in South India? Prof. Dani, for example, says that doesn't believe that the Indus language was Dravidian because there is just not enough cultural continuity between what is today in South India and what was then in the Indus Valley.
A: I think any direct relationship between the Indus Valley and the deep Dravidian south is unlikely because of the vast gap in space and time. Something like 2,000 years and 2,000 miles. But linguistically, if the Indus script is deciphered, we may hopefully find that the proto-Dravidian roots of the Harappan language and South Indian Dravidian languages are similar. This is a hypothesis.
If you ask what similarity is likely to emerge, the first and most important similarity is linguistic. Culturally, there is a problem. The modern speakers of Dravidian languages are the result of millennia long intermixture of races. There are no Aryans in India, nor are there any Dravidians. Those who talk about Dravidians in the political sense, I do not agree with them at all. There are no Dravidian people or Aryan people - just like both Pakistanis and Indians are racially very similar. We are both the product of a very long period of intermarriage, there have been migrations. You cannot now racially segregate any element of the Indian population. Thus there is no sense in saying that the people in Tamil Nadu are the inheritors of the Indus Valley culture. You could very well say that people living in Harappa or Mohenjo-daro today are even more likely to be the inheritors of that civilization.
In fact, I plow a somewhat lonely furrow in this. I often say that if the key to the Indus script linguistically is Dravidian, then culturally the key to the Indus script is Vedic. What I mean is that the cultural traits of the Indus Valley civilization are likely to have been absorbed by the successor Indo-Aryan civilization in Punjab and Sindh, and that the civilization in the far south would have changed out of recognition. In any case, the present South Indian civilization is already the product of both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian cultures, and the language itself is completely mixed up with both elements//
Tamil does not mean Indus Scripts and None of the Dechiphering, let it be Parbola or Iravatham Mahadevan has not solved the complete Corpus and all attempts have failed and they both accept it.
Devapriya