Background and Basic Linguistics.

There is a correspondence between language and the world it describes, and the words themselves try to capture things and ideas. Words can point to objects, processes, or abstract ideas. This is why the concept behind the Word has been known as the "Logos", "Aql/Kalima," etc. Over time, corrupted minds failed to see the original meaning, adding more corruptions. If you do an archaeology on words, even nouns will show beautiful meanings. In those times, it was never just a noun or name as in modern nominalism. Originally, every noun represented an idea or story, composed of subjects, objects, adjectives, and verbs. The ancients did not treat a noun as meaningless nominal words as it is today. Today, we impose different meanings on the same words and blame the ancients for their meaningless "Babel." They thought they were just playing an innocent act of naming things according to their will and preference. Unwittingly, day by day, we add layers on words that create an extra burden against understanding the original meaning. Unless you are very careful, you will not see that almost all nouns, especially before modern language, were concepts from adjectives, adverbs, verbs, an event, or occurrence. Only a few can see the original, hidden meanings behind the mystery of Words. For example, the person whose name "Baal Shem" means the Master of Names. Knowing the real Name of anything [i.e., the concept behind the name] is the Mastery of that Name itself! In this setting, Name is actually “What is IT” or the real things can be perceived or recognized. And Allah taught Adam all Names. As in Qur'an 2:31: And He taught Adam the names - all of them. Then He showed them to the angels and said, 'Inform Me of the names of these, if you are truthful'". But the names can also be a trap if you are not extremely careful. If you accept nouns as meaningless names, then you will be lost in the labyrinth of language like the story of the tower of Babel. On the other hand, the same Name/Word can liberate you from ignorance.

In ancient times, language was utilized to represent ideas or physical objects, sometimes mirroring their attributes via sound mimicry. The examination of etymology operates in a manner similar to the archaeological exploration of words; when standard approaches are insufficient, the historical background of a word, including its genesis, cultural impacts, and chronological position, can guide us in understanding the meaning of the words. Nevertheless, the Quran presents an obstacle to this established etymological procedure due to the inclusion of isolated disjointed letters, such as 'Alif Lam Mim'. In order to find the original meaning, one has to dig deeper than the etymology of words, i.e., the meaning of original individual alphabets.

As ancient language and script in the Middle East co-emerge and influence each other, borrowing and adapting from each other, finding the original meaning of individual alphabets is difficult unless Allah’s willing to guide you to understand them. Based on known scholarly works and historical evidence, Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared slightly after the Sumerian script and were likely influenced by it. It is probable that the idea of writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia. Egyptian writing appeared suddenly, unlike Mesopotamia's long evolutionary history. Around 1800 BCE, a simplified script derived from hieroglyphs developed in Sinai, often considered the progenitor of Semitic alphabets, known as Proto-Sinaitic Script. This script began emphasizing phonetic over pictorial representation, laying the groundwork for later alphabets (Phoenician, Arabic, Aramaic, Greek). Later, the Phoenician alphabet streamlined symbols into purely phonetic representations, discarding ideograms and determinatives. Much of this innovation traces back to Egyptian principles of phoneme representation. Phonemes, the basic sound units of language, were integral to Egyptian writing, and Egyptians used about 24 symbols for individual phonemes, a precursor to phonetic alphabets. Understanding phonemes can give clues to the Phoenician or Arabic letter's original meaning. The word that you can easily understand is the name of Prophet Musa [mim, Sa, sꜣ] which means “Son drawn from Water”. Here, Meem: 𓈖, 𐤌, [m], ـمـ Water, Everchanging [often Chaotic] world below and Sa, sꜣ 'son' was represented by a 'pintail duck'. Letter Ra = Head 𓁶 Res 𐤓, R, Mouth, Authority (who Speaks and the rest Listens), Rex, King, Authority. Alif: 𓃾 𐤀 [ﺍ] A: Ox Head [Symbol of Force, Power, and Creativity]. Lam: 𓌅 𐤋 [ﻝ] L: A shepherd's crook staff is a long and sturdy stick with a hook at one end, often with the point flared outwards, used by a shepherd to manage and sometimes catch sheep. In addition, the crook may aid in defending against attack by predators.

Alif Lam Meem:

Alif Lam Meem (الم) are three Arabic letters that appear at the beginning of several chapters (Surahs) in the Quran. They are considered part of the Muqatta'at, a group of mysterious, disconnected letters that appear at the start of some Quranic chapters. 

The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) was asked about the meaning of 'Alif Lam Mim' and similar disjointed letters appearing in the Qur'an. In many reports, he remained silent. Narrated by Abu Sa'id al-Khudri: The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) said, “Whoever recites a single letter from the Book of Allah will have one reward, and each reward will be multiplied by ten. I do not say that 'Alif Lam Mim' is one letter, but 'Alif' is a letter, 'Lam' is a letter, and 'Mim' is a letter.” Source: Jami` at-Tirmidhi, Hadith No. 2910, Sunan al-Darimi.

According to another narration, "The Jews came to the Prophet and said: 'Do you not claim that you have been given all knowledge?' The Prophet recited to them 'Alif Lam Mim'. They said: 'Is it possible that this is the duration of your religion? Seventy-one years?' [Alif =1, Lam =30, Mim=40] The Prophet smiled, and then recited 'Alif Lam Mim Sad', 'Alif Lam Ra', 'Alif Lam Mim Ra”. They said you are confusing us. We do not know which one to go by. Source: Tafsir Ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Tabari, sometimes traced to Ibn Abbas.

However, there is no Hadith that clearly states that Prophet Muhammad was unaware of the meaning of 'Alif Lam Mim'. It's possible that most of his close companions also understood 'Alif Lam Mim''s meaning. If the majority didn't know, they would have asked the Prophet about it repeatedly, which would have produced numerous Hadith either clarifying or not clarifying 'Alif Lam Mim'. All this evidence, both direct and indirect, along with logical deduction, indicates that the Prophet and his close companions implicitly understood 'Alif Lam Mim''s meaning. However, after a few generations, people realized they didn't know the meaning of Alif Lam Mim, nor could they find any Hadith explaining it. Consequently, for nearly 1400 years of interpretation, scholars abandoned hope and generally agreed that only Allah knows the meaning of 'Alif Lam Mim'. Nevertheless, the Quran states that it is clear in its meaning for those who are guided to understand, while those who are not guided will be prevented from understanding. Qur'an 12:1: "These are the verses of the clear Book.", Qur'an 20:54 and 20:128 "Thus We explain the signs for a people who use reason." and Qur'an 3:7: "He it is who has sent down to you the Book; in it are verses that are precise—they are the foundation of the Book—and others unspecific as to interpretation. But those firm in knowledge say, 'We believe in it; all of it is from our Lord.' Yet none will grasp the message except those of understanding."

Based on All those discussions above and linguistic background, now let us ask Allah to guide us understand the meaning of Alif Lam Mim.

Alif: 𓃾 𐤀 [ﺍ] A, Primal Ox [Symbol of Force, Power, and Creativity], First Power, The Alpha, First Mover, Unmoved Mover, The Beginning, Ever Standing or Ever Existing, Allah.

Lam: 𓌅 𐤋 [ﻝ] L Shepherd's Crooked staff, Guidance, instruction. The intermediary—guiding intellect or Jibriel—that acts as a divine emanation and transmits it.

Meem: 𓈖, 𐤌, [m], ـمـ Water, Everchanging [often Chaotic] world below or Dunia or Mulk [kingdom/dominion]. Water is the first creation and God has created every living being from water and hence water covers both Mulk and Makhluq (ever-changing World, below The Arsh), and with the direct guidance of the Source, Prophet Muhammad offered the world to redeem itself, uniting the beginning and end.

Combining all of these, Alif Lam Mim means: 

Short: Allah's Guidance [via Jibriel)] to the World [Mulk and Makhluq].

Intermediate: Allah's Mercy (guidance via Jibriel) to the World via Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ).

Extended: The source Power, First and Unmoved Mover, the Ever-Existing Allah sent Guidance by Jibriel to the ever-changing material World below as a Mercy to Humanity exemplified by Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), to redeem the world, uniting the beginning and end.

I thank you Oh Allah who has guided me to understand the mystery of 'Alif Lam Mim', as promised in Qur'an 3:7: “He it is who has sent down to you the Book; in it are verses that are precise—they are the foundation of the Book—and others unspecific as to interpretation. But those firm in knowledge say, 'We believe in it; all of it is from our Lord.' Yet none will grasp the message except those of understanding."

Orality to literacy: Transition in Early Tamil Society

IRAVATHAM MAHADEVAN

From the forthcoming publication: Early Tamil Epigraphy : From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. by Iravatham Mahadevan (Harvard Oriental Series 62), simultaneously published in India by Cre-A:, Chennai, and in U.S.A. by Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

THE Brahmi script reached Upper South India (Andhra-Karnataka regions) and the Tamil country at about the same time during the 3rd century B.C. in the wake of the southern spread of Jainism and Buddhism. However, the results of introduction of writing in these two regions were markedly different. The most interesting aspects of Tamil literacy, when compared with the situation in contemporary Upper South India, are: (i) its much earlier commencement; (ii) use of the local language for all purposes from the beginning; and (iii) its popular democratic character.

Tamil-Brahmi rock inscription of King Atan Cel Irumporai at Pugalur. 2nd century A.D. It records the endowment of a cave shelter at the investiture of the King's grandson as heir-apparent.

Early literacy in Tamil society

The earliest Tamil inscriptions in the Tamil-Brahmi script may be dated from about the end of 3rd century or early 2nd century B.C. on palaeographic grounds and stratigraphic evidence of inscribed pottery. The earliest inscriptions in Kannada and Telugu occur more than half a millennium later. The earliest Kannada inscription at Halmidi (Hassan district, Karnataka), is assigned to the middle of the 5th century A.D. The earliest Telugu inscription of the Renati Colas at Kalamalla in Cuddapah district of Andhra Pradesh belongs to the end of 6th century A.D.

The earliest extant Tamil literature, the Cankam works, are dated, even according to conservative estimates, from around the commencement of the Christian era. The earliest extant literary works in Kannada and Telugu were composed almost a millennium later. The earliest known literary work in Kannada is the Kavirajamarga, written early in the 9th century A.D. and the earliest known literary work in Telugu is the famous Mahabharata of Nannaya, composed in the middle of the 11th century A.D. It is also probable thatKavijanasraya, a work in Telugu on prosody, composed by Malliya Rechana, is about a century earlier. There were earlier literary works in Kannada and Telugu, as known from references in earlier inscriptions and later literature. But none of them are extant.

The earliest inscriptions in the Tamil country written in the Tamil-Brahmi script are almost exclusively in the Tamil language. The Tamil-Brahmi cave inscriptions are all in Tamil though with some Prakrit loanwords. There are no Prakrit stone inscriptions in the Tamil country. Coin-legends of the early period are also in Tamil (with the solitary exception of a Pantiya copper coin carrying bilingual legends both in Tamil and Prakrit).

Seal-texts are also in Tamil (with the exception of a seal impression on clay in Prakrit found at Arikamedu and a few gold rings with Prakrit legends from Karur). Inscribed pottery found at various ancient Tamil sites is mostly in Tamil, with a few exceptions in Prakrit confined to cities or ports like Kanchipuram and Arikamedu. In contrast, during the same period, all early inscriptions from Upper South India on stone, copper plates, coins, seals and pottery are exclusively in Prakrit and not in Kannada or Telugu, which were the spoken languages of this region.

Popular versus elitist literacy

Another noteworthy feature of early Tamil literacy was its popular or democratic character, based as it was on the language of the people. Literacy seems to have been widespread in all the regions of the Tamil country, both in urban and rural areas, and encompassing within its reach all strata of the Tamil society. The primary evidence for this situation comes from inscribed pottery, relatively more numerous in Tamil Nadu than elsewhere in the country. As mentioned earlier, excavations or explorations of several ancient Tamil sites have yielded hundreds of inscribed sherds, almost all in Tamil, written in the Tamil-Brahmi script. The inscribed sherds are found not only in urban and commercial centres like Karur, Kodumanal, Madurai and Uraiyur and ports like Alagankulam, Arikamedu and Korkai, but also in obscure hamlets like Alagarai and Poluvampatti, attesting to widespread literacy. The pottery inscriptions are secular in character and the names occurring in them indicate that common people from all strata of Tamil society made these scratchings or scribblings on pottery owned by them. On the other hand, inscribed pottery excavated from Upper South Indian sites are all in Prakrit and mostly associated with religious centres like Amaravati and Salihundam.

Literacy is not merely the acquisition of reading and writing skills. To be meaningful and creative, literacy has to be based on one's mother tongue. In this sense, the early Tamil society had achieved true literacy with a popular base rooted in the native language. On the other hand, Upper South India had in this period only elitist literacy based on Prakrit and not the native languages of the region.

What are the reasons for such contrasting developments between the two adjoining regions of South India? It cannot be that Prakrit was the spoken language of Upper South India at any time. If proof were needed to show that Kannada and Telugu were the spoken languages of the region during the early period, one needs only to study the large number of Kannada and Telugu personal names and place names in the early Prakrit inscriptions on stone and copper in Upper South India. The Gatha Saptasati, a Prakrit anthology composed by Hala of the Satavahana dynasty in about the 1st century A.D., is said to contain about 30 Telugu words. Nor can it be said that Kannada and Telugu had not developed into separate languages during the Early Historical Period. Dravidian linguistic studies have established that Kannada and Telugu (belonging to different branches of Dravidian) had emerged as distinct languages long before the period we are dealing with. Telugu and Kannada were spoken by relatively large and well-settled populations, living in well-organised states ruled by able dynasties like the Satavahanas, with a high degree of civilisation as attested by Prakrit inscriptions and literature of the period, and great architectural monuments like those at Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda. There is, therefore, no reason to believe that these languages had less rich or less expressive oral traditions than Tamil had towards the end of its pre-literate period.

Literacy and political independence

The main reason for the contrasting developments in the growth of literacy as between the two regions appears to be the political independence of the Tamil country and its absence in Upper South India during the relevant period. Upper South India was incorporated in the Nanda-Maurya domain even before the beginning of the literate period. Asoka specifically lists Andhra among the territories included within his domains in his thirteenth rock edict. The region was, therefore, administered through the medium of Prakrit, which was the language of the rulers and also became the language of the local ruling elite, of learning and instruction, and of public discourse, as clearly shown by the presence of Asoka's Prakrit edicts in the region. This situation persisted even when the Mauryas were succeeded by local rulers, the Satavahanas, and later by their successors like the Ikshvakus, Kadambas, Salankayanas, Vishnukundins and Pallavas. It would have been in the interest of the ruling elite to protect their privileges by perpetuating the hegemony of Prakrit in order to exclude the common people from sharing power. Persian in the Mughal Empire and English in British India (and even after Independence) offer instructive parallels to this situation.

The situation in the Tamil country during the early period was entirely different. The Tamil country was never a part of the Nanda-Maurya empires. The Tamil states, Cera, Cola and Pantiya, and even their feudatories like the (Satiyaputra) Atiyamans maintained their political independence as acknowledged by Asoka himself in his second rock edict in which he refers to them as his `borderers'. As a direct result of political independence, Tamil remained the language of administration, of learning and instruction, and of public discourse throughout the Tamil country. When writing became known to the Tamils, the Brahmi script was adapted and modified to suit the Tamil phonetic system. That is, while the Brahmi script was borrowed, the Prakrit language was not allowed to be imposed along with it from outside. When the Jaina and Buddhist monks entered the Tamil country, they found it expedient to learn Tamil in order to carry on their missionary activities effectively. An apt parallel is the case of the European Christian missionaries in India during the colonial period, who mastered the local languages to preach the gospel to the masses.

Facilitating factors for spread of literacy in early Tamil society

Apart from political independence and the use of the mother tongue, there were also several other factors facilitating the spread of literacy in early Tamil society. Of the factors which will be briefly discussed here, the first three were inherent features of early Tamil society and the next three were new elements from outside which influenced the spread of early literacy in the Tamil country.

Pottery inscription in Tamil-Brahmi giving the name Catan. 1st century A.D. Found at Quseir-al-Qadim on the Red Sea coast of Egypt.

(i) The presence of a strong bardic tradition: Bards were so much respected in early Tamil society that they could move from court to court across the political barriers even when the princes were at war. The oral bardic tradition, which must have been rich and expressive even in the pre-literate era, flowered into the written poetry of the Cankam Age with the availability of writing under the active patronage of the Tamil princes, chieftains and nobles.

(ii) The absence of a priestly hierarchy: There was no priestly hierarchy in early Tamil society with vested interest in maintaining the oral tradition or discouraging writing after its advent. (It was the presence of such a priestly hierarchy in early Brahmanical Hinduism in North India that prevented Sanskrit from being recorded in inscriptions for about four centuries after the introduction of the Brahmi script. Prakrit inscriptions are available from the time of Asoka in the middle of the 3rd century B.C. The earliest Sanskrit inscription of consequence is the rock inscription of Rudradaman dated in the middle of the 2nd century A.D.) Learning does not seem to have been the prerogative of any particular class like the scribes or priests. This is clearly shown by the wide diversity in the social status of the nearly five hundred poets of the Cankam Age, among whom were princes, monks, merchants, bards, artisans and common people. Quite a few of them were women. We have earlier noticed the evidence of the inscribed sherds for widespread literacy in the rural areas and among the common people.

(iii) A strong tradition of local autonomy: Reference to self-governing village councils like ampalam, potiyil and manram in Cankam literature and to merchant guilds (nigama) in the Tamil-Brahmi records show that there was a long tradition of strong local self-government in the Tamil society. In such an environment, literacy would have received special impetus as it would serve to strengthen local self-government institutions and merchant guilds.

(iv) The spread of Jainism and Buddhism: As mentioned earlier, knowledge of writing was brought to the Tamil country, as to the rest of South India, in the wake of the spread of Jainism and Buddhism to these regions. As protestant movements against Vedic Brahmanical Hinduism, these faiths kept away from Sanskrit in the initial phase and conducted their missionary activities in North India in the local Prakrit dialects. The monks followed the same tradition in the Tamil country, learning the local language and, in the process, adapting the Brahmi script to its needs. They had no vested interest in maintaining the oral traditions nor any bias against writing down their scriptures in the local language. As a result of this attitude, the Jaina scholars (and to a lesser extent, the Buddhist scholars) made rich contribution to the development of Tamil literature during the Cankam Age and for centuries thereafter. A similar development did not take place in Upper South India in the early period presumably because Prakrit was already the language of administration and public discourse in the region. The monks who were familiar with Prakrit had perhaps no opportunity or incentive to change over to the local languages in this region.

(v) Foreign trade: The Tamil country, with its long coastlines, carried on extensive trade during the Cankam Age with Rome and the Mediterranean countries in the west and with Sri Lanka and Southeast Asian countries in the east. Trade with Rome brought in not only wealth (as attested by numerous Roman coin-hoards in the Tamil country) but also early contacts with other literate societies using alphabetic scripts. Recent excavations of Roman settlements on the Red Sea coast of Egypt have brought to light a few inscribed sherds with Tamil names written in the Tamil-Brahmi script of about the 1st century A.D. An ancient papyrus document written in Greek and datable in the 2nd century A.D. in a museum at Vienna has been identified as a contract for shipment of merchandise from Muciri to Alexandria. While the document itself is not in Tamil, one can infer from it the milieu of advanced literacy in Tamil society whose merchants could enter into such trading contracts.

A democratic, quasi-alphabetic script

The Tamil-Brahmi script is a quasi-alphabetic script with just 26 characters (8 vowels and 18 consonants). The enormous importance of such a simple, easy-to-learn script in the spread and democratisation of literacy can hardly be overestimated. Palm leaf as a writing surface was also a happy choice, as in the semi-arid Tamil countryside it is abundant, perennial and virtually free. Palm leaf and the iron stylus radically altered the ductus of the script from the angular Brahmi to the round Vatteluttu in the course of a few centuries.

The consequences of literacy in early Tamil society

There is little doubt that literacy transformed the early Tamil society in several ways yet to be fully evaluated. A preliminary listing of changes can be as follows.

(i) Transformation of tribal chieftaincies into states with more centralised administration; levy of taxes and tributes properly accounted for; and external relations based on written communications like treaties and trade contracts.

(ii) Urbanisation of royal capitals, port towns and commercial centres.

(iii) Temple administration based on written records, including inscriptions.

(iv) Increased foreign trade as evidenced by the occurrence of Tamil inscriptions in the Tamil-Brahmi script in Roman settlements in Egypt to the west and Thailand to the east.

(v) Democratisation of society and strengthening of local rule, which came about with widespread literacy based on a simple quasi-alphabetic script and with the mother tongue as the language of administration, learning and public discourse.

(vi) An early efflorescence of Tamil language and literature leading to the truly great epoch of the `Cankam Age' almost a thousand years before any other regional language in South India reached that level of development.

The author The author Iravatham Mahadevan (b. 1930) is a specialist in Indian epigraphy, especially in the fields of Indus and Brahmi scripts. He was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship in 1970 for his research on the Indus script and the National Fellowship of the Indian Council of Historical Research in 1992 for his work on the Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions. His book, The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables (1977) is recognised internationally as a major source book for research in the Indus script. He has also publishedCorpus of the Tamil-Brahmi Inscriptions (1966), besides numerous papers on several aspects of the Indus and Tamil-Brahmi scripts. He has served as the Coordinator, International Association of Tamil Research, for 10 years (1980-90). He was elected the President of the Annual Congress of the Epigraphical Society of India in 1998 and the General President of the Indian History Congress for its session in 2001. He served the Indian Administrative Service and retired voluntarily to devote himself to full-time academic pursuits. He lives in Chennai.

The book The book Early Tamil Epigraphy is the first definitive edition of the earliest Tamil inscriptions in the Tamil-Brahmi and Early Vatteluttu scripts, dating from ca. second century B.C. to sixth century A.D. The book is based on the author's extensive fieldwork carried out in two spells between 1962-66 and 1991-1996. The study deals comprehensively with the epigraphy, language and contents of the inscriptions. The texts are given in transliteration with translation and an extensive word by word commentary. The inscriptions are illustrated with tracings made directly from the stone, estampages and direct photographs. Palaeography of Tamil-Brahmi and Early Vatteluttu scripts is described in detail with the help of letter charts. The special orthographic and grammatical features of the earliest Tamil inscriptions are described in this work for the first time. A glossary of inscriptional words and several classified word lists have been added to aid further research. The introductory chapters deal with the discovery and decipherment of the inscriptions, relating their language and contents to early Tamil literature and society. The recently discovered Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions on pottery and objects like coins, seals, rings, etc., have also been utilised to present a more complete picture of early Tamil epigraphy.

R. CHAMPAKALAKSHMI

Early Tamil Epigraphy. From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. by Iravatham Mahadevan; Crea-A:, Chennai (email: crea@vsnl.com), and the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, 2003; pages 719 + xxxix; Rs.1,500.

BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT 

Iravatham Mahadevan copying a Brahmi inscription at Tiruvadavur.

IT is rarely that one comes across a study that marks, in the usual manner of description, "a milestone" in the history of a discipline like epigraphy. In the last century, the 1960s saw a new awakening in the field of south Indian epigraphy and palaeography - owing to the efforts of one man, Iravatham Mahadevan, an administrator-turned scholar. He created history by reviving interest in the earliest surviving and "enigmatic" cave inscriptions of Tamil Nadu in the Brahmi script, which had defied all earlier attempts at successful decipherment and reading. His first publication, Corpus of Tamil-Brahmi Inscriptions (1966/68), triggered a series of institutional and individual explorations. The Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology, the Department of the Chief Epigraphist, Government of India, and individual scholars vied with one another to make new discoveries of cave and rock inscriptions in Brahmi.

More than the romance of discovery, these explorations proved to the scholarly world how rigorous the discipline of epigraphy had become and how important an interdisciplinary method was for such studies to be meaningful. That epigraphy could no longer be treated as an appendage to archaeological studies, but was a major discipline in itself was firmly established. South India's rich epigraphic sources form nearly 70 per cent of the total number of inscriptions in India, and the "Tamil-Brahmi" inscriptions represent their beginnings in Tamil Nadu in a language (Tamil) other than Prakrit.

The recently published book on Early Tamil Epigraphy (From the earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D.), the result of more than forty years of dedication and penance, is truly Mahadevan's magnum opus. His earlier study of the Indus script is no less significant. It is the most scientific and sober analysis of an undeciphered script in a language that remains unknown. Further, the Indus script has been the focus of an unresolved controversy, to which not only genuine scholarly interest but also politically motivated hijacking has contributed. However, it is Tamil-Brahmi that has been Mahadevan's lifelong, magnificent obsession.

Coin with the Brahmi legend "Kuttuvan Kotai", a Chera king. 3rd century A.D.

The names of two pioneers of epigraphic studies are indelibly imprinted in our minds: James Princep (1850s), who deciphered the Asokan and post-Asokan Brahmi used for the Prakrit language, and A.C. Burnell (1874), who attempted the earliest work on South Indian palaeography. The contributions of Indian epigraphists like D.C. Sircar, H. Krishna Sastri, T. N. Subrahmanian and K.G. Krishnan have made epigraphy the most important among the sources relevant for the study of the pre-modern periods of Indian history. The deciphering of the Grantha, Vatteluttu, Nagari and Tamil scripts of the south Indian inscriptions dating from the 7th century A.D. and their evolutionary stages, based on their resemblance to the modern forms of the scripts, seemed relatively easier and more successful than that of the early Brahmi inscriptions.

The early Brahmi inscriptions posed a greater challenge on account of their archaic characters and orthographic conventions, which were different from the original Brahmi used for Prakrit. The challenge seemed insuperable even to the most competent among the pioneering epigraphists. The major breakthrough in the decipherment of the cave inscriptions of Tamil Nadu came with K.V. Subrahmanya Aiyer (1924). He was the first to recognise that these are inscribed in Brahmi, but with certain peculiarities and new forms of letters, due to its adaptation for the Tamil language which has sounds (phonetic values) not known to the Prakrit (Indo-Aryan) language and northern Brahmi script. Yet, this lead was not seriously followed and was soon forgotten. Even Subrahmanya Aiyer did not pursue his line of enquiry to its logical conclusion.

Other scholars like V. Venkayya and H. Krishna Sastri were constrained by the assumption that all Brahmi inscriptions were invariably in Prakrit or Pali, as Brahmi was used predominantly for Prakrit in all other regions of India from the Mauryan (Asokan) period. Their readings failed to convey any meaning. By reviving Subrahmanya Aiyer's early decipherment and reading and at the same time more systematically studying these inscriptions in all their aspects, including palaeography, orthography and grammar, and seeking corroboration from the early Sangam classics and the Tolkappiyam, the basic work on Tamil grammar, Mahadevan has virtually re-deciphered these inscriptions and shown them to be inscribed in Tamil. Hence the name "Tamil-Brahmi," one variety of the Brahmi script.

Square seal (silver) from Karur, with symbols like the Srivatsa and legend "Kuravan". Ist century B.C.

The Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions are mostly short, donative inscriptions. They are found in inaccessible rock-caverns with stone beds for ascetics, mainly of the Jaina faith and occasionally Buddhist. The inscriptions number 89 in all, so far discovered and read, apart from the 21 Early Vatteluttu inscriptions studied by Mahadevan in order to show the transformation of the Tamil-Brahmi into the Vatteluttu and also the inscriptional usage of Prakrit and Sanskrit words and the emergence of the Tamil script. The distribution of these inscriptions reveals a clear pattern: they occur on trade routes connecting the west (Kerala) coast with the east (Tamil) coast and the upper parts of south India with Tamil Nadu. The distribution also coincides with the distribution of coin finds (indigenous punch-marked and dynastic and foreign, that is, Roman) and pottery with Brahmi inscriptions in urban/craft centres, while potsherds with inscriptions occur even in rural areas.

Mahadevan persuasively relates the significance of this pattern (Maps I, I-A and II) with the intensive trade activities of the period (the 2nd century B.C. to the 3rd century A.D.). He points out, for the first time, that the relatively large number of potsherds with Brahmi inscriptions even in rural areas, signet rings, seals and other objects inscribed with Brahmi characters, indicate a transition from orality to literacy in this part of the country, where Tamil was both the spoken and "official" language. Prakrit was never given the hegemonic status that it had attained in all other parts of India, where Prakrit/Pali was the language of the elite and administration.

This certainly is a significant finding as the Tamil literary works (the Sangam classics) represent the earliest and only large corpus known in a Dravidian language, a language that was spoken in the Tamil region, which then included the territory that is now Kerala. What is of even greater importance is the fact that the Brahmi script was brought to the Tamil region by the Jainas and Buddhists in the post-Asokan period. It may be added that the Jainas and Buddhists also fostered the Tamil language and authored some of the most remarkable literary works, above all the two epics - Silappatikaram and Manimekalai. Even Tolkappiyam and many of the 18 didactic works, including the Tirukkural, are often assigned to Jaina authorship.

Early Tamil Epigraphy, which is organised in three parts and thematic sections (chapters) with charts and tables, inter-linked by cross references, is highly readable, delightfully so, because it addresses the lay and specialist reader with equal ease. For it takes up serious issues such as palaeography (the evolution of script), orthography (the system of spelling), grammar and linguistic analysis of the inscriptions (in Part Two) with the competence of a specialist in each field, without deviating from the simplicity of expression that only a master of the subject can adopt.

In Part One, the author takes us on a fascinating journey through the hazardous fieldwork of pioneers, the copying, deciphering and reading of inscriptions. The inscriptions are found in inaccessible hills (rocky outcrops) and out-of-the-way sites, to which the author made two major field trips, equally difficult, but immensely interesting and rewarding. Every inscription was rechecked, re-deciphered and read both with the help of estampages supplied by the Government Departments of Epigraphy and fresh copying and fresh photographs, following a new method of tracing each letter on the rough and often undressed rock surface. In the process of making his fieldwork productive, Mahadevan collected around it a number of younger and enthusiastic epigraphists, who are now actively engaged in pursuing research in this field. The author generously acknowledges their contribution in his book.

Parts Two and Three, the key sections of the book, make this work unique - for the following reasons.

First, Early Tamil Epigraphy is the most comprehensive source for the study of the Tamil-Brahmi and Early Vatteluttu inscriptions, including inscriptions on pottery, seals, rings and other objects. Second, the occurrence of the largest number of inscriptions on pottery in the Tamil region not only in well-known urban sites but also in rural areas indicates that Tamil society was in the process of transition from orality to literacy. Third, this is the first work to take up the study of the orthography in addition to the palaeography of the inscriptions. This has made it possible to recognise that these inscriptions are inscribed in the Tamil language (Old Tamil). These are the earliest known lithic records in Dravidian, as rare lexical items and grammatical morphemes not found even in the earliest layer of Old Tamil occur in these records. On the other hand, no Brahmi inscriptions in Telugu or Kannada have been found so far, since Prakrit is the language of the early "Southern-Brahmi" inscriptions in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

Fourth, present day Kerala with its Tamil-Brahmi and Early Vatteluttu records was part of a larger Dravidian-speaking south in the early historical period. It became a separate region and culture zone from the early medieval period (A.D. 600-1300). This fact is corroborated by the Sangam classics as well as by later Malayalam literature and inscriptions. Fifth, the Tamil language with its alphabet of 26 main letters attained fixity by the 6th century A.D. and resisted any new characters for the non-Tamil words introduced into the language. The origin of the Vatteluttu (cursive script of the 5th-6th centuries A.D.) can now be traced to the Tamil-Brahmi. Sixth, although the Southern-Brahmi and the Tamil-Brahmi are derived from the Asokan Brahmi, they evolved independently of each other, despite the close cultural and commercial contacts between upper and lower south India in the early period. There is a significant influence of Jain Ardhamagadhi - and not of Asokan Prakrit - in the language of Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions. Seventh, there is clear evidence of mutual influence between the Tamil-Brahmi and the Simhala-Brahmi, although the latter is used for Simhala-Prakrit, a Middle-Indo-Aryan language, and the former for Tamil, a Dravidian language. Simhala-Brahmi and Tamil-Brahmi show certain orthographic similarities and peculiarities. It is interesting that recent Sri Lankan archaeological and epigraphical studies have also recognised this interaction and influence. Simhala-Brahmi, we are told, is "unique among the Prakrit based variants of Brahmi, for a substratum of Tamil influence seems to have been present and due to the processes of assimilation and epenthesis, which were more thorough going in this language than in Indian Prakrits, the two scripts, one for a Middle-Indo-Aryan (Simhala-Brahmi) and the other for a Dravidian language (Tamil-Brahmi), were able to avoid ligatures, a prominent feature in all other regional scripts."

Ring (silver) from Karur with legend "Velli Campan".

Eighth, Brahmi cannot be derived from the graffiti (symbols), as the latter occurs in the inscriptions side by side with the Brahmi characters in rock inscriptions and pottery (from Kodumanal). Also important is Mahadevan's observation that the resemblance of the cave symbols with the Indus script may show that they are likely to share similar significance, but not necessarily the same phonetic value. Ninth, of great importance is the recognition that the Tolkappiyam, admittedly the earliest work on Tamil grammar, cannot be dated earlier than the 2nd century A.D., as its rules regarding the phonetic needs of Tamil and the signs (medial vowel notations etc.) used for specific sounds not known to the Indo-Aryan appear in the later stages that is, in Late-Tamil-Brahmi. Tenth, the revised chronology presented by the author provides a century-wise dating of the inscriptions and broadly classifies them into two: Early-Brahmi - 2nd century B.C. to 1st century A.D., and Late-`Brahmi - 2nd century A.D. to 4th century A.D., followed by the Early Vatteluttu - 5th to 6th centuries A.D. Eleventh and most important, Early Tamil Epigraphy disproves the claim by Tamil enthusiasts that there existed an earlier independent script for Tamil, which was forgotten, and that Brahmi came into use later.

To show how the author has arrived at these conclusions, one has necessarily to dwell upon the technical aspects of the study in some detail. The Brahmi script was adapted and modified to suit the Tamil phonetic system. Palaeographic changes were made to suit the Tamil language, with the omission of letters for sounds not present in the Tamil language and by additions to represent sounds in Tamil that are not available in Brahmi. All but four of the 26 letters are derived from Brahmi and have the same phonemic values. Even these four - i.e., l,l, r, n - are adapted from the letters with the nearest phonetic values in (Asokan-) Brahmi, i.e., d, l, r, n. Letters were also modified with a special diacritic mark, viz., the pulli (dot). These are reflected in the development of the Tamil-Brahmi in three stages (TB I, II and III): Stage I when the inherent a (short-medial vowel) was absent in the consonants and the strokes (vowel notations) were used for both the short and long medial a, and hence the need for the reading of consonants with reference to context and position; Stage II when the stroke for medial a marked only the long a; and Stage III when the use of diacritics like the pulli was introduced for basic consonants and for avoiding ligatures for consonant clusters (as in Simhala-Brahmi). The pulli was used also for distinguishing the short e and o from the long vowels, for the shortened - i and -u(kurriyalikaram and kurriyalukaram) and for the unique sound in Tamil called aytam, all of which are unknown to the Indo-Aryan ( Prakrit and Sanskrit).

It is the recognition of the absence of the inherent vowel a (short) in the early phases, e.g. ma, ka, na with strokes or medial vowel notations, which are actually to be read as ma, ka, n (the inverted J symbol for the nominal suffix `an' characteristic of Tamil), and the addition of the pulli as a diacritic, that provided the key to the whole re-decipherment. Herein lies the basic contribution of Mahadevan to the study of the script and alphabet. That these findings are corroborated by the phonetic rules of the Tolkappiyam is significant.

Carefully drawn up charts and a graphemic inventory of the Tamil-Brahmi script illustrate these palaeographic and orthographic changes from the Early Tamil-Brahmi to the Late Tamil-Brahmi and the evolution of the script and its transformation into the cursive Vatteluttu. The Tamil script is basically syllabic and examples of this are provided from Tamil-Brahmi such as segmentation in consonant followed by vowel, vowel followed by vowel, and so on. Complex issues such as the linguistic, grammatic and phonetic differences and the way they were resolved in early Tamil epigraphy are handled with expertise acquired in various disciplines such as linguistics, grammar and lexicography of both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian families of languages.

Potsherd with Brahmi letters from Quseir al-Qadim on the Red Sea coast. Reads "Catan".

WHILE Mahadevan's major finding is that the language of the inscriptions is Old Tamil, his analysis brings out other significant features such as the nature and number of Indo-Aryan loan words - mainly Prakrit loan words - derived from standard epigraphic Prakrit. They are all nouns - names, religious and cultural terms. Some are derived from Jain Ardhamagadhi and interestingly also from Simhala-Prakrit. Sanskrit loan words appear only in the Vatteluttu inscriptions, and increase in the early medieval inscriptions, that is, from the 7th century A.D. Hence the absence of voicing of consonants in Tamil acquires a special significance in the light of the author's discussion of the way in which Prakrit loan words were written with voiceless consonants in Tamil-Brahmi, and later the method by which the problem of the voicing of consonants was solved when the Grantha script was evolved and adopted for the voicing of consonants, aspirates, sibilants and other phonetic needs of Sanskrit in the increasing Sanskrit loan words in the early medieval (A.D. 600-1300) inscriptions of the Pallava, Pandya and Chola periods.

Hence the conclusion that the Tamil alphabet and script attained fixity by the 6th century A.D., resisting the introduction of new letters for non-Tamil sounds, and that the classical age of Tamil began under the Cholas. The graphic presentation with charts and tables on the script and language, their evolution and relative position, influence and interaction among the varieties of Brahmi, such as the Northern-Brahmi, Southern-Brahmi, the Bhattiprolu script, Simhala-Brahmi and Tamil-Brahmi, as also the later Vatteluttu and Grantha, make these sections easy to follow and interesting even to the lay reader. The relative position of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam is also graphically presented in Table 5.5. The Bhattiprolu script, "an isolated epigraphic curio," is legitimately characterised as the Rosetta Stone in the decipherment of Tamil-Brahmi.

All this is of considerable value for the historian. The author consciously draws from and follows closely the historical contexts as well as continuity and change in the subcontinent and Sri Lanka from the Mauryan period to early medieval times, the 6th century A.D. marking the point at which the Tamil letters attained fixity.

The grammar of the inscriptions forms an important section covering all aspects such as the phonemic inventory, dependent sounds (Carpeluttu), vowels, consonants and their distribution, consonant vowels (Uyirmei eluttu) and so on. Sections on morphophonemics, morphology and syntax deal respectively (a) with the process of joining morphemes in a word or words in a sentence, (b) with the forms of words, the syllabic structure of stems, parts of speech, and so on, and (c) the various ways in which the inscriptions make up the sentences with or without verbs as found in the inscriptions.

Mahadevan offers a complete reading and interpretation of all the known inscriptions in Early and Late-Tamil-Brahmi and Early Vatteluttu with illustrations in the form of tracings, estampages and some computer-enhanced prints of direct photographs, carefully listed with fine reproductions, thus preserving these early inscriptions for posterity. There is an exhaustive commentary on the inscriptions, with citations from early Tamil literature and lexicographic works (Nighantus), which aims at situating the Early Tamil inscriptions in the mainstream of Indian epigraphy and which will undoubtedly be a major guide to the study of the Tamil-Brahmi and Vatteluttu. An inscriptional glossary, index to names of places and persons, etymology, grammatical morphemes and so on, together with a useful bibliography make the book a tour de force in scholarship.

By way of historical background to his study, Mahadevan provides a survey of the polity, society and religion in Part One. It may be conceded that since Early Tamil Epigraphy is a work on epigraphy, processes of social, economic, political and religious changes are not major concerns for the author. Yet his overview is too cursory and somewhat inadequate, as it is based mainly on the Tamil-Brahmi and Vatteluttu inscriptions. There is little doubt that the Sangam Chera-Pandya rulers appear for the first time in Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions and that the identity of the Satiyaputas of the Asokan edicts is now established beyond doubt as the Atiyamans of Tagadur (Jambai inscription). Nonetheless, the author's understanding of the nature of the major Tamil polities (Chera-Chola-Pandya) as well-organised kingdoms with a centralised administration, government functionaries like the atikan (adhikari - official) and kanaka (accountant) and territorial units like the natu and ur points to his conventional approach.

Rock-cavern inscription in Jambai. Mentions "Satiyaputo Atiyaman", a Sangam chief, who got this "palli" (cave monastery) made.

There is no attempt to look at the new perspective on early societies that suggests that state institutions were less evolved and administration hardly centralised. The natu was a generic term for any settled region, for example, Chola-natu or Pandya - natu, and a peasant micro-region. It became a revenue unit only later, during the period of the Pallavas and Cholas. Similarly a certain all-pervasive political control is implied in the references to the Kalabhras as the invading and subversive force in Tamil society after the 3rd century A.D., for which it is hard to find epigraphic and archaeological evidence. The so-called Kalabhra interregnum (a dark period in conventional history) in fact marked a period of great flux with no clear political configurations. The derivation of the term Kaviti from the Prakrit Gahapati and its interpretation as a title conferred on merchants and officials, as also the interpretation of Kon as a title conferred on Kaviti, need closer scrutiny. Despite the fact that the author has carefully refrained from any discussion on social structure and relations, the inference that the suffix Ilanko refers to a Vaisya is strange and needs to be substantiated, for even in the inscriptions the term Ilanko refers to a prince.

The predominant references to Jaina ascetics in these inscriptions and the close interactions between Karnataka and Tamil Jainas are duly emphasised. While most of these caverns with stone beds in the interior sites were executed for the Jainas by rulers, merchants and craftsmen, the significant presence of Buddhism in the coastal sites cannot be ignored. The Andhra and Tamil coasts were linked through trade and traders of the Buddhist persuasion and also with Sri Lanka, which had close contact with Amaravati and its art traditions.

The decline of the Jainas (and Buddhists) is rightly attributed to a religious conflict and to the revival of the Brahmanical religions, Saivism and Vaisnavism, revitalised by the Bhakti movement. The theory of "revivalism" however, poses serious problems in the understanding of the religious changes, especially the emergence of organised and institutionalised forces in Brahmanical/Puranic religion and the decline of the "heterodox" Sramanic faiths of Buddhism and Jainism. In the course of the conflict, the Jainas were persecuted, which Mahadevan believes was "uncharacteristic of [the] Indian polity."

Yet there is impressive evidence of patronage, persecution and marginalisation occurring in periods of major socio-religious and economic change. These processes have to be situated in the larger context of the decline of trade and the beginnings of a land-grant system in early medieval India, with predominant agrarian institutions like the Brahmadeya and the temple emerging and Puranic religion providing the major world-view and ideology of the ruling families. Thus the temple appears as an institution in its incipient form even in the Pulankuricci Vatteluttu inscription (circa A.D. 500), although it assumes a multi-faceted institutional role only in the early medieval period, that is, the 7th to the 13th centuries A.D.

Approaches to history may differ. Interpretation and analysis of historical processes may vary and justifiably so. However, the discipline of history will greatly be in debt to Mahadevan for his first authentic study of Tamil-Brahmi. Early Tamil Epigraphy will prove to be a major source of enduring value not only for Tamil-Brahmi and Early Vatteluttu inscriptions, but also for Indian epigraphy as a whole.

Dr R. Champakalakshmi is former Professor of History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; she has specialised in socio-economic history and religion and society in South India.

4. The Indus Script and Brahmi

Q: What do you think the relationship is between the Indus script and the Brahmi script, since you know both of them? 

A: Several scholars have said that there is a relationship between the two, that the Indus script survived and slowly became linear and ultimately lead to the Brahmi script. I do not at all believe in this theory. The Indus script was in existence not later than at the most about 1500 B.C. The earliest undisputed examples of the Brahmi script are only from the days of Ashoka, around 300 B.C. One might take the origin of the Brahmi script still farther, to the beginnings of the Indo-Gangetic, Iron Age civilization, in the middle of the first millennia B.C., since Ashoka does not claim to have invented the Brahmi script, it is not unlikely that the Brahmi script was known before his times, and perhaps used by the merchants commercially as the Allchins have suggested in their recent book. The absence of such inscriptions by Chandragupta, the illustrious grandfather of Ashoka could be explained by saying that stone inscriptions were not in the Indian tradition and they came to us along with the Persian tradition. This is not unlikely, but even so there is at least a gap of 1,000 years before the introduction of the Brahmi script and the complete collapse of the Indus script. 

There is a parallel in the history of writing elsewhere in the history of the world. Mycenian Linear B script was written in syllabic script in about the 14th or 15th century B.C. and that has nothing to do with the later script of the Greeks, which was taken over from the Phoenicians. There again was a gap of one thousand years. Personally, I believe that the Indus script was too closely tied up with the Indus language, whatever it was, and when that language ceased to be spoken and became dead, the incoming Aryans could not use that script. Now that again has a parallel in the Egyptian script which was too closely tied up in the Egyptian language and could not survive it. The cuneiform scripts were much more adaptable to a wide variety of languages. So perhaps the logographic Indus script had a one-to-one relation with the words of the Indus language and could not be used in another language. What has survived of the Indus script may be symbols of various kinds, totem signs, royal signs and insignia on punch marked coins and flags and traditions in our mythology of gods, attributes, weapons and so on but not as a writing system. 

Another reason to say that the Brahmi script is not related to the Indus script is that the connection between Brahmi and some form of Semitic script is too strong. Buehler pointed out the relation between Alif and A, B and Bay, Gameen and Ga, and so on. At least I can see about 10 of the 22 Semitic characters very closely resemble Brahmi both in form and sound. Statistically, such a resemblance is impossible except when there is genetic relationship. I do not say that Brahmi script itself came from the Semitic script, but some elements of the Semitic were taken over, others were locally added, improvements were made, the order of the sounds were changed, the diacritical marks were locally invented, the aspirates were invented, the additional vowels were joined, so that Brahmi is a much developed and transformed script. But the idea of the Brahmi script comes from the alphabetic, Semitic script and I believe in Buehler's theory. For these two reasons I do not agree with the scholars, most of them Indian, who believe that the Brahmi script is a remote descendant of the Indus script.

5. One or Many Languages ?

Q: Do you believe that the Indus script represented a single language or could it have represented a multiple number of languages? 

A: This is a very interesting question. I will give you the parallel of the Chinese language. The Chinese have only one script but they have many mutually unintelligible dialects. Such a situation might have existed in the far flung areas of Harappa, but I believe basically that the Harappan script was intelligible to all the people of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. If there were differences, it would have been more diacritical than linguistic. 

The very strong reason for this was the one found out by Hunter long ago. Hunter pointed out that the frequency and combination of signs at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro are the same, showing that the language used there must have been the same - subject to what I said earlier that there might have been diacritical differences. If you take English and French, both are written in a form of the Roman script but the frequency and combination of characters in the two languages is different. Therefore, all over the greater Indus Valley the language was the same and it was the same throughout the civilization. There is one major exception to this and that is very interesting, again pointed out by Hunter, and recently restated by Parpola and his colleagues with more evidence. 

In some of the Indus Valley seals found in the Middle East, particularly the round seals which must have been locally manufactured, the order of the signs and their combination are totally dissimilar to what we find in Harappa and Mohenjo-daro., This may have been an attempt to use the Harappan script by the natives of the Indus Valley who went over to the Middle East for trade purposes, to adapt the Indus script to a local Middle Eastern language. But for this exception, within the Indus Valley itself, in all its areas and throughout the time, the language was the same as proved by the frequency of the Indus signs.

6. Tissue of Indus Civilization ?

Q: To have the same language over such a wide area and time, what does this imply about the political or social organization of the culture? 

A: To me one conclusion is irresistible. It is not a migrant civilization, it is not that a handful of settlers came and settled on the sea coast. This is a large, native, indigenous civilization. It is surprising that people hardly realize the extent of the Harappan civilization. It was more than a million square kilometers in area, much larger than modern Pakistan, much larger than all the other ancient civilizations, excepting China of course, put together. The Sumerian, the Akkadian, the Egyptian, Hittite and so on. Over such a large and fairly populous area, judging from the number of villages and cities. Several estimates of the population of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro have been made and they seem to have been very large cities by ancient standards. This only goes to confirm our supposition that you must look for a local language as a candidate for the Harappan script. 

One might ask, could not those people have totally vanished? 

It has happened in history before, the Sumerians became totally extinct. But for the accident of their script having been taken over by the Akkadians, the world might never know of the existence of Sumerians. But here again, the scale and the magnitude of the Harappan civilization speaks against its total extinction. As all scholars who have studied the problem agree, the incoming Aryans were relatively a very small minority and they were able to dominate only culturally and ultimately, in the assimilated Indo-Aryan or north Indian people, the indigenous racial element must have slowly surfaced. That is why we have no such thing as early Aryan pottery, because the pottery continued to be made by the local people. As someone has said jokingly, archaeology knows of no Aryans, only linguistics knows of Aryans. This is true. The answer to this is that the incoming Aryans were small in number. In this respect there was no cultural discontinuity. The real discontinuity was in language, principally, and in religion and ritual in the earliest levels, but in later levels, modern Hinduism as we know it is a composite of both pre-Aryan, native, animistic and tribal religions and the incoming Aryan religion. Perhaps when the Indus script is deciphered, I would not be surprised to find that the greater part of modern Hinduism has a Harappan lineage. 

Q: You have such an extensive civilization that does not seem to been very militaristic, it does not seem to have had supreme authoritarian rulers, the fortifications seem to have been as much against floods or from cultural accretions as for defensive purposes. What would have been the tissue that held together such a large group of people for so a long period of time? 

A: It is not quite true that they were not militaristic at all, except in the sense that they didn't seem to have been aggressive. But they had defense fortifications, they had weapons, spears, swords and the large terra-cotta stone slingballs which they stored on their fortifications. But it appears that this very large civilization was peaceful and for a long time did not fear any enemies from outside. What held them together could have been a dominant priestly elite, binding the people together with the help of religion, religious practices as has happened in later Hinduism where millions of Hindus follow the dictates of religion not by force but by persuasion. This could have been so. Here again, I am treading on fairly dangerous ground, for there are scholars who say that there is no proof that the Indus Valley was ruled by priests. This is true only in a very narrow sense, in the sense that the script has not been deciphered. But if you look at the seals, you can clearly see priestly rituals, naked priests offering worship to naked, horned gods. At least one sealing shows a woman being beheaded by a sickle, it could be an example of human sacrifice. You have examples of worship of the peepal tree. 

Scholars have said there is no evidence for kings. Well, we have no large graves, we have no kings buried with their queens and their chariots in position, we have no large collection of crowns and jewels. This may be a reflection of the types of rulers they had. 

The native tradition of India was largely one of janapadas, before the Mauryan Empire, before even the 6th century B.C. Before that time, north India was divided into a large number of republics, janapadas; both Mahavira and Buddha belonged to republican clans. It is quite possible that the Harappan states were earlier examples of janapadas. I know I am speculating, but one has to explain the absence of royal graves and royal paraphernalia. It could be they had elders, they had ganas, they had republican, a crude republican form of government, they had priestly oligarchies and the chief went by rotation. All these things are not impossible, and for the keys to these one must look at the surviving institutions. The republican janapada tradition could be an important element in judging the absence of royal paraphernalia in the Harappan polity. 

Q: There is no royal paraphernalia in those traditions? 

A: None at all. There are no great palaces, no royal graves, no evidence of a large standing army. In this respect the Harappan civilization was very unique. Now these are problems crying for answer and unfortunately the Indus script remains unread. 

But one thing is clear. Even if the script is read, it is not likely to throw much greater light on what we already know archaeologically. The linguistic question would be solved, and that is very important. But in the absence of chronicles, legends, epics, connected accounts of the type you have the Akkadian, Sumerian and other Near Eastern civilizations, we have no accounting tablets, we have no long connected works. We know that Sumerians had advanced mathematics, they could calculate eclipses and they had epics like that of Gilgamesh. These are all not available in the Indus Valley. To that extent perhaps, this civilization is distinctly mute. 

7. Writing on What ?

Q: Don't you think they may have written on other objects, like palm leaves or cloth? 

A: This has been suggested by Parpola and others, that they probably wrote on cloth or on leaves like birch leaves. I do not know about the palm leaves, palm trees were there of course, but if they had written on palm leaves and they had used a bronze stylus, these must have survived. Nor was there any writing on clay except seal impressions. But perhaps on large barks or on prepared cloth these could have written and this would have perished in the humid and warm climate of the Indus Valley. 

Q: But is it likely? For a civilization that lasted so long, they would have seen that these writings on cloth or something like that perished, probably rather quickly. Wouldn't they then have tried to write more important things on stone or clay? 

A: The same thing has happened later. Why did not the great and victorious Emperor Chandrgupta who stopped the Greek armies from invading India - why did he not like King Darius record his conquests in stone? The answer seems to be one of culture, it was not in the Indian tradition to make inscriptions on stone and the earliest such inscriptions are those of Ashoka. They clearly show Persian influence. This could be one answer.

The other thing was that in the river valley civilization, in modern Sindh proper, there is not much stone, it is available only in the highlands. In Harappa and Mohenjo-daro brick was the dominant material for building, so stone inscriptions would not have been a natural choice. But they could have used clay inscriptions of course, and they knew that clay was being used in the contemporary Akkadian civilization and they did not do that. They could have used metal for example, since they did write on metal and we have a large number of copper tablets from Mohenjo-daro. Well, this is all some of the might-have-beens of our history. Even the recent Dholavira [Gujarat, India] find - I was disappointed that the very large, nearly 10 feet wide, wooden board contained really nothing but a magnified version of a seal. In fact, I have identified all the 10 characters in that famous board as occurring on seals already in the same sequences. So even the opportunity of a large writing surface was missed. How I wish it contained a very long narrative of the conquest of that city by a warrior! 

8. The Fish Sign

A: Lets come to the specific signs. What do you believe may be some of the best interpretations offered of certain signs? 

A: Like all Dravidian scholars, I too began with Father Heras. Father Heras was a Spanish Jesuit priest who worked in India and was a celebrated Professor of History in Bombay. It was his brilliant idea that the fish sign in the Indus script represented the word for fish in all the Dravidian languages, which is "meen," and he pointed out that the word "min" also represented a star or planet in all the Dravidian languages. He said that perhaps the Harappans used the fish sign to represent a star or a planet. This is really the starting point for decipherment for all the Dravidian scholars who followed him, the Russians, the Finnish and myself. Only Fairservis broke away from the tradition, but his identification of the fish sign as a loop or a knot in rope is very unconvincing. I have seen far too many seals and sealings with realistic, life-like fish symbols, there is no doubt at all that the sign represents the fish. 

But another and more valid objection is, why wouldn't they pictorialize the star as a star? Draw five or six lines and add an asterisk mark - that's how the Sumerians, the Akkadians and the Chinese represented a star. The theory behind pictorial writing is that you use pictures to represent the sound of objects that are difficult to draw. In an example given by Parpola himself, "can" in the noun form is a container, in the verb, I "can" do it - that cannot be written as a picture. But in the case of a star it is much easier and it occupies much less space to draw the picture of a star than a fish. Parpola has given a reply to this, not perhaps wholly convincing, but I still think that the fish-meen-star homophony is a good one, although I readily admit that it has not been proved. That could only come if the word "meen" was written elsewhere syllabically or if you have a bilingual. 

For example we have proved the direction of the Indus script. It is no longer open to debate. Those who read the Indus script from the left, their work is condemned to failure right at the beginning. The fish hypothesis is not that conclusively proved, but it still is a very attractive one. 

There are some corroborative details. The numbers three, six and seven before the fish correspond to the well known asterisms, three-fish in the warrior constellation, six-fish for Pleades, seven-fish the Great Bear and so on, but then when you come to the diacritical marks over the fish symbol which Parpola reads as the names of several planets, it is much more open to question. Diacritical marks are very tiny little tick marks and they are not inherently pictorial so any hypothesis about them is only arbitrary. 

9. The Terminal Sign

As regards the other signs, the position is even weaker. There is the famous terminal sign, the most frequent sign, which occupies ten to twelve percent of all Harappan writing. This sign, popularly called the jar sign, is as popular as the letter "e" is in the English language. 

Q: What are your thoughts about the terminal sign of the Indus script? 

A: It is one of the most important signs. The problem is there is a dispute about what the object itself is a picture of. Hunter said it was a vessel, with long lips or handles. B.B. Lal, the famous Indian archaeologist has a very good paper on it, where he proves that some of the variants of this sign very closely resemble jar forms found at Kalibangan. My personal view is that particularly the representation of this sign freely drawn on pottery and copper tablets leaves little room for doubt that it is a container. 

Parpola now thinks that it represents the front view of a bull or a cow with curved horns or a face. There is some parallel, it is not a very far-fetched idea, but the symbolism of the jar is much nearer. I am influenced by the fact that in the Indian tradition the ruling classes, the princes and the priests, always claim to have come from a jar. The jar-born elite is a very famous old Indian symbolism starting all the way from the RgVeda, where Agastiya and Vasishta are supposed to have been born out of jars. The major rishis were jar-born. So I have tried on an ideographic, symbolic level to connect the two, but I have sufficiently emphasized in my writing that this is not decipherment. When the script died, the most important user of that symbol retained it in his mythology. Who was he? Invariably a priest or a ruler. Therefore through the pathway of Indian mythology I arrive at the conclusion that the jar sign represented the ruling elite of the Indus Valley civilization. 

But within the Indus script itself it might have performed the function of a grammatical suffix. It could have been a nominal suffix, used only by the elite. Very early in my work I had tried to find the phonetic value of that sign, but for many years now I have given up working on phonetic signs because there is insufficient evidence to arrive at the phonetic value of any sign so far. I occasionally still try to do so, however.

Q: Parpola's argument that it is a representation of a cow has some appeal to me on the level of looking at cows straight on. It also seems to me that there must be some deep connection between the cow and Indus culture. Even in Harappa today cattle thieving, cattle chasing remain popular. It is changing to the buffalo, but in those days it was cattle and they must have been represented somehow. 

A: Well, you have plenty of that in the animal symbolism of the seals. You have the so-called unicorn which may be a side view of an animal with two horns, one behind the other. You have the magnificent bull with the hump, or a short-horned bull always in an aggressive mood. There is no doubt that the Indus Valley people thought along these lines and could have worshipped animals, or the animals could very well have been their totem signs, one group having the unicorn, most probably the ruling group, another the elephant, another the rhinoceros and so on.

Whether the jar sign is a front view of a cow I have my reservations, but I may be influenced by my own connecting this with the mythological tradition, so I cannot claim to be a disinterested witness. Nevertheless, looking at the pictorial parallels provided by Parpola himself in his book I am not convinced - in which case at least occasionally some seal or another should show a greater fidelity to a bull or a cow's face. The two parallel lines on top of the jar are parallel, they are not horizontal or slanted. If they are slanted they are slanted downwards, they do not look like horns at all to me. 

Similarly many years earlier the Russians said it represented the front view of the hull of a ship. Well, they have not been pursuing this. Those who are not dealing with the decipherment of the Indus script like B.B. Lal all say it looks like a jar. It could be an agricultural [storage] jar, or a ritualistic jar as I believe. It does not appear to be the same as the perforated jar, but I think that it is some kind of a jar which is related to the ruling elite. But in the Indus Valley itself it would have primarily a phonetic value. 

There is also a famous sealing where you find this particular jar with a lid on it shown. About half a dozen examples are available of this jar sign which I think Parpola has overlooked. But the argument is still unsettled. Here again I do not think how the question will be settled without a bilingual or a syllabic version of the Indus script being spelt out and a jar being replaced by two symbols which could be read. But that is still in the future.

10. The Arrow Sign

Similarly the twin sign of this jar sign is what is called the arrow sign, or the lance sign. It is a twin functional in the sense that both these signs occur at the end, almost always after other signs which may represent names, so therefore it is another type of grammatical suffix. But one view is, like the one presently held by Parpola, that one is genitive and one is dative. I think this is unlikely because in which case you must occasionally have this symbol following the same names. But the use of the jar sign and the arrow sign are generally mutually exclusive; where the one occurs, the other never does, showing they are integrally connected, semantically related to the names which precede those symbols, which would rule out an explanation like a case ending. However, the position is that this is all still in the realm of speculation. No one has any hard evidence. I have suggested that the jar sign represented the elite who later developed the myth of the jar-born sages and jar-born rulers. I am not suggesting that the myth existed, even in the Indus civilization, but it developed into a myth later. 

Let me give you a pictorial example. Let us assume that English is a pictorial language and all English gentlemen who called themselves "Squire" wrote a square sign after their names. Then, centuries later, the myth would develop about English gentlemen and their connection with squares, that their houses were squares, or their temples were square. In the long development of the Indian civilization, the jar sign acquired a myth, so when I deal with it I am looking not at the jar sign as it was understood in the Indus Valley but as it was understood centuries later. The survival would be among the same groups. In other words, if the Vedic rishis claimed special affinity to the jar then the Harappan priests had something to do with the jar, broadly speaking. It is not a linguistic argument, it is a cultural argument. Similarly the arrow sign may have to do with warriors, and a sign with shwoing a plain simple man may be a servant. 

11. Signs and Castes

Q: What about the signs where you have some very convincing thoughts, the trader and so forth. The logical basis that traders would have to be represented in some way on seals which were meant for trade makes sense. [See "Dictionary" for Mahadevan's speculations]

A: It is a moot question whether the Harappans had castes like we have in later India. But they certainly must have had occupational groups, priests, scribes, traders, warriors, why not? Perhaps they were not very rigid divisions. In any case, even if these terminal ideograms represent different groups, we must remember that the ideograms themselves are combined - for example the symbol of a bearer is combined with that of a jar, and that is followed by a harrow sometimes. So they could not have referred to exclusive caste groups like we understand the term. The possibility is that originally these were all mere phonetic symbols, but later the groups whose names used these symbols most, they only had surviving symbols with the loss of the language, so the symbols became mythical symbols or representations of their own cult objects. It is a jungle really, very difficult to trace out the environment in India which is not only multi-cultural, multi-racial and multi-linguistic. 

The Dravidians and the Indo-Aryans interacted with each other and we have the Indo-Aryan languages with Dravidian features and we have Dravidian languages with Indo-Aryan features. Hinduism has both Aryan and Dravidian elements, not to speak of modern Hinduism also being influenced by Islam and its own native offshoots like Buddhism and Jainism. There are no clear cut parallels. 

What is more, the same symbol in the Indus valley could have taken multiple forms later. The jar sign is one example. Kunda is both jar and the fire pit. In later India, there are communities which claim to have arisen from the jar, and other from the fire pit. Now both have the same word and both could be two very different responses to the same common tradition.

12. Parpola's Work

Q: What are your thoughts on Parpola's work, its importance and where you disagree with him. 

A: Parpola's work is without doubt the most valuable contribution to date in the field of the Indus script. As I have mentioned in my latest paper, his work transcends linguistic boundaries. His contribution in publishing the first concordance, the first computer studies, the UNESCO volumes of seals are very great. One of his biggest achievements now is a standardized sign list which is so comprehensive that it replaces all other sign lists, including the one prepared by me more than twenty years ago. He has also meticulously recorded every little variant of every sign, running into thousands of variants. He has in his book, while it deals with the Dravidian hypothesis, also given a formal analysis of the Indus script, its functional character, frequency distribution analysis, syntactical analysis, how an Indus sentence could be broken up into slots and so on. Therefore, while I still consider that Parpola's latest decipherment to be not wholly successful, therein might lie the seeds of future decipherments. There are many, many things he says which make sound sense, like his emphasis on contacts with the Near East, his proof as to why a Dravidian language is involved. He has marshaled all the arguments in favor of a Dravidian hypothesis which I find convincing. I would say he has laid the groundwork for a successful decipherment which may happen any day now or maybe later. The world of scholarship recognizes that Parpola's is the most serious work done to date on the Indus script.

Q: One of your charges against him is that he emphasizes too much the religious nature of these various signs. First I thought that was a good point. But Mark Kenoyer makes the point that in Islam, in Christianity, Hinduism, and so on, names and religion are closely intertwined. Most names have a religious origin. Doesn't that make your charge against Parpola somewhat weaker? 

A: It is not a charge but an observation. I agree that the Harappan names could be religious and in that sense the contents of the seals could be religious, as were the Near Eastern seals. But religion is not the only thing. For example, when Parpola says the fish sign is not only a phonetic symbol, it is not only a representation of a star or a planet, but that it is a god in itself - he calls the fish sign a god and it has values far transcending its phonetic values - well, that seems to me to be overstating the case. Further, when you look at the sum total of his decipherments, it's all gods - you have Murugan, you have planets, you have stars. Okay, the Harappans had gods and they could very well be these. I also believe that the fish-star parallel may have something to it. But then where are the Harappan people in his decipherment? Where is the scribe? Where is the ordinary petty government official, the tax collectors, the warriors, the sailors? Take Near Eastern seals: X, son of y, gave this. Where is son, daughter, wife, husband, father? Where are those little cementing particles of language without which you cannot write? I deal with Indian inscriptions. Even the briefest of the Brahmi inscriptions, both in Prakit and Tamil, cannot do without a modicum of grammar. They cannot just be a string of nouns. You will have to have "and," conjunctions, "of," genetive case, "to," dative case. You have to have verbal participles. A language which consists of nothing but a string of names and the names all being gods to me seems very unlikely.

We know that the Harappan civilization was a very advanced urban civilization and it must have employed a large army of bureaucrats because it has such standardized weights, bricks, standardized versions of everything. So there must have been efficient administration of everything, tax collection and civic and sanitary affairs. Almost everyone has a seal - the seals have a boss at the back and it has a hole to be worn around the neck. So the holder must have mentioned not only his name, but also his calling, his profession. Unless we have a word for priest, king, noble, tax collector, scribe, unless we have a little more of what I call ordinary, day-to-day life of the people it looks to me like the decipherment is slanted. It may be true, but wholly one-sided. 

Q: Couldn't all those names of these specific functions also have a religious side to them? All these people, workers, scribes, tax collectors couldn't they have had a religious side to their function? 

A: Of course, we have such parallels in the city states of the Near East, where the king was also the god, the palace was also the temple and everybody had both a religious and secular identity. Nevertheless, if you look at the message of the writing in the Near East it is not all religious. I am not talking of the longer texts, even the seal texts, have things like so-and-so belonging to such and such city. For example, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were very large cities. They must have had names. The people from there possibly used their city names. The secular, mundane day-to-day-life of the Indus valley is not sufficiently represented. In fact, those who have excavated those cities are struck by the absence of outward religious symbols. No temple has been excavated, no large deities have been excavated. I would be the last person to deny that Harappans had a religion and that it was very important and reflected in their seals, but that it would be the only message - that, I think, is unlikely. 

Q: Lets talk about the bangles decipherment by Parpola. 

A: Parpola has pointed out that the bangles are inscribed, and among the signs the sign of the interlocking circle or ovals are very common and they occur with greater frequency on these bangles. So I am fairly convinced that perhaps the interlocking circles do pictorially represent a pair of bangles. It is very likely. Now very large quantities of stoneware bangles have been discovered from Mohenjo-daro by [Michael Jansen's] German team. But when you try to give a phonetic value for it, it becomes very difficult. Parpola has chosen a word which means twisted wire bangle, or twisted wire amulet or a twisted wire earring or nose ring, where the operative word is twisting, the root there is murugu, which means in old Dravidian "to twist." But the stoneware, the polished vitrified stoneware bangles have no twists on them, so that is very unlikely. There are other words for bangles but he doesn't choose them because they are not homophonous with the word for Murukan that he is looking for. I personally believe that if the Indus Valley people were Dravidians, one of their gods was called Murukan - it is very likely, but he is hiding in still some other sign.

13. The Unicorn

Q: What do you think about the unicorn? 

A: We still do not know exactly what animal it is. There is no animal with a single horn like it of course. It still is very likely that it is only a pictorial representation of an animal with two horns, where the other horn is behind the one horn we see from one side. The animal looks more like an antelope than like a bull, this has been commented on. The first problem is in identifying the animal, about which there are several theories. 

Secondly, since it is invariably present with this ritualistic device which I have identified as a filtering device, it shows that the unicorn also had a religious connotation in the Indus Valley, like the Golden Calf of the Near East. Whether it was itself worshipped is a matter of doubt. It could be associated with God, or some fertility cult. Note that it is always the bull, not the cow. In this sense the Hindu veneration of the cow seems to be different from the Harappan veneration of the bull. I have never seen a cow being represented on any of the seals, except when it is a bull mating a cow, but never a cow by itself. Therefore it could be some kind of a fertility sign, or a sign of one of their Gods. 

Or, most likely, it could be the totem sign of one of the largest or most powerful ruling elites of the Harappan polity. With very few exceptions the filter device which you find before the unicorn is not placed before other animals. There are some exceptions, but they are rare. For the moment, the unicorn seems to be a very tantalizing symbol about which anything firm is yet to be found out. 

Q: Kenoyer and others don't believe that it represents a two-horned animal because the craft level was high enough that they could easily have shown two horns if they wanted to. What about the thought that it was some sort of composite symbol, an integrative clan symbol? 

A: Yes, I think S.R. Rao has also said it is a composite of a camel, a horse, and so on, although the camel and horse are never found in the Indus Valley. You cannot have a composite without the constituent animals being found there. But it could very well be a representation of what was already a mythological animal in the Indus polity, there being no real representation. We have other such animals, three-headed and two-headed animals. These were only mythological animals and the unicorn could very well have been one of them. 

Q: If it was a symbol of the ruling class, why did it vanish so entirely from later Indian mythology? 

A: It is difficult to say. One theory could be that it was closely associated with the rulership of Harappa and became the first casualty; when the ruling elite was destroyed the myth of unicorn went along with it. This is one possibility. The other is, taking the soma parallel further, who is most associated with soma in the RgVeda? Indra. What is most associated with the filter symbol in the unicorn seal, the unicorn. Could the unicorn be the prototype of Indra? One clue is the most common simile describing the soma drink in the RgVeda is the bull. It is very difficult to understand why a drink would remind you of a bull. A drink is a liquid, a bull is a very strong animal. Could this again be a reflection of the bull-filter device combination on the Indus seals? 

Another possibility is that Indra himself displaced Varuna. The original soma drinker was Varuna, Indra is a late-comer or Varuna was a pre-Aryan god. Could the Indrasoma combination of the RgVeda be a combination of proto-Varuna, proto-soma combination in the Indus Valley. These are speculations. 

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 alone retains most of the earlier Dravidian linguistic structure. Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada have become Indo-Aryanized much more, and culturally, the Hindu religion is a complete combination of all these elements. Therefore while it is legitimate to look for survivals, those survivals are as likely to be found in the RgVeda as in Purananuru, a Tamil work, as likely to be found in Punjab and Sindh as in India and Sri Lanka. So we have to separate our approach of a linguistic connection where it is permissible to construct proto-languages and try to decipher a language, but if you are looking at the survival of cultural and social traits of Harappan civilization they are likely to be all over the subcontinent, overlaid with centuries of transformation in culture and of language. Some of the myths may survive but may become unrecognizable. It is not a very easy or straightforward relationship that you can trace, it is a tangle. 

Q: What about the man and bull festival we were discussing . . . 

A: One of the cultural traits in the Indus Valley is that they had the bull fight. Some famous sealing show a man running towards a bull, catching hold of its horns, doing a somersault over the back of the bull, and landing at the other end. Even today in the Dravidian south bull fighting and bull chasing are very common sports. Yesterday, Tamil Nadu had this year's bull festivals where young men in the villages chase bulls and get hurt in the process. This is an assertion of their manhood and they can claim the hands of the fair maiden only after they are able to get hold of the horns of the bull and prove their heroism. This is very likely to be one of the traits which connect the Dravidian south with the Indus Valley. But such traditions are also known, for example, in Spain and in Portugal and the Iberian peninsula. There may well be a pre-historic connection between these very similar cults. 

15. Tamil Paleography

Q: The last thing I'd like to ask you is about your work in early Tamil paleography, and how this is connected if at all to the Indus script work. 

A: The two are very different fields. The Indus script is a logographic script, which means that each sign stands for a whole word or a whole syllable. The Tamil script, which is an offshoot of the Brahmi script, is a quasi-alphabetical script, where each symbol stands for a vowel or a consonant or a consonant combined with vowels. The principles of studying these two languages is completely different. Plus the Indus script is undeciphered. In the case of the early Tamil script we have the example of Brahmi, which is almost identical except for change in some syllables. 

Nevertheless, it happens that there was some diffculty in understanding the cave inscriptions in Tamil Nadu written in the Tamil variant of the Brahmi script and I took up that challenge and I have been working on that for more than three decades and I am now completing my book on that. 

Q: What had you added to that field? 

A: Since the cave inscriptions represent the earliest known stratum of a Dravidian language, their phonology and their grammar are most important. I have constructed an inscriptional grammar and compared that with the oldest known grammar in Tamil and oldest Tamil literature, the Sangam poetry. The oldest stratum of Tamil language known from literature is not very different from the cave inscriptions, showing that they were not very far removed in time. At the same time, the cave inscriptions represent the very beginning of literacy, so the main contribution coming out of this is in firming up our ideas of how Tamil was at the very beginning of its literate period. Of course we have a number of other spin-off benefits. These caves were all created for Jaina monks, so we come to know about the early history of Jainism in the Tamil country. Plus the caves were donated by traders, so we know about a lot of trading, in gold, pearls, sugar cane, gems, salt and so on. We find the Kings, the Pandiyas or the Cheras who are mentioned in the oldest Sangam literature appearing in these inscriptions, giving for the first time historical veracity to what was so long known only from fables or ballads. 

Paleographically, we now know how the Tamil script originated. There were many theories, but now we know it came from the Brahmi script and slowly became rounded because in the south, people wrote on palm leaves with an iron stylus and the letters got rounded. Each stage of this transformation can now be documented. The inscriptions I am studying cover from the time of Asoka, roughly the 3rd century B.C. to about the 5th century A.D. Thereafter from the 6th or 7th century A.D. we have hundreds of stone temples in Tamil Nadu with thousands of inscriptions, so there is no mystery afterwards. 

Much of what I have said now I have already published, but now I will bring out a definitive book. In fact, it is this work I am now engaged in and the Indus script, for me, is somewhat on the back burner. 

16. The Future

Q: When you do get back to the Indus script, what are you hoping to do? 

A: I have some unpublished, rather unfinished papers. One of the things I want to get back to is whether I can fix the phonetic values of some signs. I have some leads, particularly concerning the phonetic values of the terminal signs, which are very important. If at least a few phonetic values could be established, they will have a cascading effect. Many of the symbols could yield their results. But this is still a dream.

I also still want to work on the filter theory, whether by combining Dravidian theory, Indo-Aryan or by looking at the finds in the Indus Valley itself.

But I have no illusions that I will decipher the Indus script, nor do I have any regret. I think the ultimate decipherment of any language is built on the unsuccessful attempts of so many earlier scholars, so I am content to remain one of them. I am very hopeful that further discoveries by teams like Kenoyer's and others, and the active work of Parpola and his team will all bear fruit, hopefully in my lifetime.