By : Satyaki Paul
Recently, a paper was published by BahataAnsumali Mukhopadhyay in Nature magazine which seeks to conclude a vital part of this recurrent puzzle of Indology i.e., what was the language spoken by the people of Indus Valley Civilization (IVC).The paper by B.A. Mukhopadhyay was titled as “Ancestral Dravidian Languages in Indus Civilization: Ultraconserved Dravidian Tooth-word Reveals Deep Linguistic Ancestry and Supports Genetics” (2021).https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3676702
In current context, there is a complete absence of any deciphered written documents of Indus Valley Civilisation, so there are no direct ways of identifying Harappan languages. Thus, the only possible starting point is to find certain proto-words whose likely origin in Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) gets confirmed through historical and linguistic evidence, while archaeological evidence indicates that the objects signified by those proto-words were prevalently produced and used in the Indian Valley Civilization (IVC).
In this context, Ms. Bahata had started analysing numerous archaeological, linguistic, archaeogenetic and historical evidences which is related to such proto-words. In her article sheobserves that the words used for the term elephant (like, ‘pīri’, ‘pīru’) in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, the elephant-word used in the Hurrian part of an Amarna letter of ca. 1400 B.C., and the ivory-word (‘pîruš’) recorded in certain sixth century B.C. Old Persian documents, were all in the beginningrented from ‘pīlu’, a Proto-Dravidian elephant-word, which was predominantly used in the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), and was etymologically related to the Proto Dravidian tooth-word ‘*pal’ and its other forms ( ‘*pel’/‘*pīl’/‘*piḷ’/). Thus, by broadlystudying Dravidian grammar and phonology, Ms. Bahata, a Bengaluru-based software technologist, contended that the elephant words ‘pīlu’, ‘palla’, ‘pallava’, ‘piḷḷuvam’, etc., which are proven in various Dravidian dictionaries, are related to the Proto-Dravidian tooth-word “pal”.The research paper points out that elephant-ivory was one of the luxury goods sought-after in the Near East, and archaeological, and zoological evidence confirms that Indus Valley was the onlytrader of ancient Near East’s ivory in the middle-3rdto early-2ndmillennium B.C. So, it can be concluded that some of this Indus ivory came straight from Meluha (Sumerian name of IVC) to Mesopotamia, while some of it wastraded in there through Indus Valley’s flourishing trade with Persian Gulf, and even through Bactria. Therefore, along with the ivory trade, the Indus word for ivory also got disseminated to the Near East and continuedto be fossilised in different ancient documents which were penned down in Akkadian, Elamite, Hurrian, and Old Persian languages.
Furthermore, Ms. Bahata provides another fascinating evidence vis-à-vis the etymological link of the ‘pīlu’ word to the meaning of tooth. In this context, she opines that some trees of Salvadoraceae family, which are famous as ‘toothbrush tree’ in the western-world, and as ‘miswak’ tree (‘miswak’ connoting ‘tooth-cleaning-stick’) in the Arabic-speaking countries, are called by ‘pīlu’ and its phonological derivatives across the Indus valley areas. The branches and roots of this tree have been used since ancient times as a natural toothbrush. In traditional medicine systems such as Indian Ayurveda and Perso-Arabic TibbYūnānī this tree is called as ‘pīlu’ and ‘pilun’ correspondingly. In the view of such facts, Ms. Bahata contends that, as the terms are in consonance to each other, so its Indic name was also related to the meaning of tooth. Nonetheless, this fact can be further reinforced through Archaeobotany. The archaeobotanists who are involved in similar studiesobserves that Indus people used this tree’s wood often as tooth-cleaning-stick, and it is a crucialrepresentative flora of current Pakistan’s tropical dry thorn forest.
In the end of the research paper, Ms. Bahata adds that her study “cautiously refrains” from either verifying or invalidating the incidence of any other language-group in this “likely multilingual civilization” i.e., IVC. Ms. Bahata opines that the ancient world was “usually more multilinguistic” and the ancient IVC too “debatably hosted more languages than these days”.Ms. Bahatarecommends that since ‘pīlu’ had a Proto-Dravidian origin, her study adds trustworthiness to the empirical genetic research that the Brahui people, the only Dravidian-speaking population of present Pakistan, “were a pre-existing population of Indus valley” and did not migrate there around 1000 CE.The study also remarks on the conceivable migration of Proto-Dravidian reciters from the Indus Valley to South India, saying the “linguistic and archaeological evidence” presented in it supports this “intriguing possibility”.