There are 2 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: The Jaffna Seal
From: "af7802" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: Sanskritisation
From: "af7802" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 05:36:17 -0000
From: "af7802" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: The Jaffna Seal
In his book on Early Tamil Epigraphy, I. Mahadevan (citing Lal)
discounts the belief that the graffiti phonetically corresponds with
the Indus Valley script, given the immense differences in time and
geography. With only three letters, he is unsure whether the Brahmi
is even Tamil-Brahmi.
He shows less ambivalence concerning the potsherds shown to him by
Pusparatnam at the University of Jaffna. Given that these sherds
have the Dravidian letters zh and R, Mahadevan is convinced that
Tamil language had been in Jaffna since "time immemorial."
-AF
******************
Anaikkottai Seal by Dr. K. Indrapala, Department of History,
University of Jaffna in Early Settlements in Jaffna an Archeological
Survey (Appendix II), Ponnambalam Ragupathy Ph.D. thesis, University
of Jaffna, 1987 pp. 199-202
In the first two weeks of December 1980 an archaeological survey team
from the University of Jaffna in the northern most
part of Sri Lanka brought to light an important megalithic burial
complex at a place called Anaikkoddai, the first of its
kind to be discovered in the Jaffna district. Among the unearthed
articles in one of the burials, was a pre-Christian metal
seal with two lines of writing.
While the newly-discovered megalithic burial complex is in itself of
great significance to the archaeology of that district and has
already created much excitement there, the metal seal, the
significance of which is as yet unknown to many, appears to be an
extraordinary find with implications for the study of the so-called
non-Brahmi or graffiti marks found primarily on pottery in the
megalithic sites of South India and Sri
Lanka as well as in sites further north. It may even prove to be of
interest to the students of the intriguing Indus script.
The inscription on the seal is deeply indited and well preserved. The
second line of the inscription is clearly in Brahmi of
about the third or second century B.C. It consists of three letters
and an anusvara ("pu/li" = dot). The first line consists
of three characters or symbols, written in the same way as the
ideograms on an Indus seal. What is interesting is that these
are not unfamiliar characters, for they occur both among the numerous
graffiti marks on megalithic pottery as well as among the Indus
ideograms.
This is the first known instance of these symbols occurring on a seal
in the form of an epigraph alongside a Brahmi inscription and hence
the special significance of the seal. This poses a series of
interesting questions.
One is no doubt tempted to ask whether we ave at last stumbled upon a
bi-lingual inscription in the Indus and Brahmi scripts. But we must
leave this question aside for the moment. What is of immediate
relevance is the question whether this will provide a clue to the
proper understanding of the graffiti marks on the megalithic pottery
of South India and Sri Lanka.
The so-called graffiti marks have been found on a large number of
potsherds, both in the megalithic and premegalithic contexts in South
Asia. The earliest material comes from the Indus Valley sites
belonging to the Harappan culture and it continues in the post-
Harappan chalcolithic cultures in Pakistan, Gujarat, Rajasthan and
Maharashtra along the western side of the subcontinent. The later
material belonging to the megalithic phase comes from Karnataka,
Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka in the southern part of the South Asian
region.
For almost exactly a hundred years, scholars have shown interest in
these graffiti marks and attempts were made to collect them and
discover their significance. Perhaps the first attempt was made in
1881, and in recent years Mr.B.B.Lal, a former Director-General of
Archaeology in India, made a systematic survey of these materials,
which resulted in the publication of a 'preliminary note'
entitled : 'From the megalithic to the Harappa: Tracing Back the
Graffiti, on the Pottery' More graffiti marks have been discovered
since and some of them have been published.
Mr.B.B.Lal's investigation revealed that "Out of the total of 61
symbols noted so far, as many as 47 are common to the
megalithic pottery on the one hand and the Harappan and post-Harappan
chalcolithic on the other". In terms of statistics, his conclusion
was that 89 percent of the megalithic symbols go back to the
chalcolithic-Harappan times. And he concluded "But to stress the
point that the symbols do have a phonetic, syllabic or alphabetic
value would indeed be presumptuous in the present state of our
knowledge".
Writing about ten years later, Prof.T.V.Mahalingam, in his report on
the Tirukkampuliyur excavations, doubted that these graffiti had any
association with script and concluded that "we may not
be far wrong if we take the graffiti marks to
represent such totemic symbols by the people of the ancient past".
Among those who investigated the meaning of these graffiti, it was
Mr.G.Yazdani who more than 64 years ago, thought that these
constituted a script and that these symbols were characters used to
express ideas. Although later researchers tended to dismiss his view
Mr.Yazdanils seems to be the most acceptable theory.
The Anaikkoddai seal seems to confirm Mr.Yazdani's view. So far
scholars appear to have been misled by the notion that these symbols
occur only on pottery. But their occurrence in a line on a seal, like
letters in any short inscription and similar to those on the Indus
Valley seals, together with another line in Brahmi - very much like
the bi-lingual legends on a coin, indicates that these symbols were
in fact used as characters in a script not only on pottery but also
on other materials. That the symbols on the megalithic pottery stood
for words or names is also confirmed by the occurrence of names in
Brahmi scripts on potsherds of a slightly later period excavated in
Arikamedu and elsewhere in Tamil Nadu as well as in Kantarodai,
Anuradhapura and other sites in Sri Lanka. After the spread of
Brahmi, naturally this phonetic script displaced the earlier symbols.
If as we are inclined to believe, the so-called graffiti marks on the
megalithic pottery are ideograms or characters with
meaning, they have to be evidently treated as survival of the Indus
writing system. For, as we have seen, the vast majority of these
graffiti could be traced back to the Indus ideograms and this is not
a mere coincidence. Spatially as well as chronologically a
relationship could be established between the two sets of characters.
Spatially they extend from the Indus Valley right down the western
part of India to the south and beyond to Sri Lanka. Chronologically
they begin in the Third Millennium B.C. in the Harappan chalcolithic
culture, continue into the post-Harappan phase, then into the
megalithic phase and overlap into the period of the Brahmi script.
The Anaikkoddai seal belongs to this final phase, after which the
easy phonetic Brahmi script supplanted the more difficult character
writing.
On this premise, the first line of the Anaikkoddai seal inscription
consists of Indus-derived characters and each of them must have a
value. Being a legend on a seal, they no doubt stand for a name. And
the Brahmi writing in the second line obviously stands for the same
name, as the case of the Greek and Brahmi legends on some of the
coins of the Indo-Greek rulers, Pantaleon and Agathocles. So, for the
first time we have a chance of deciphering one complete legend in the
characters of this Indus-derived script with the aid of a Brahmi
transliteration.
The inscription in Brahmi consists of three letters and an anusvara.
They are crowded within a small space and the first letter, though at
first sight it seems to present some difficulty in reading, shows on
closer examinations all the features of the vowel-consonant 'Ko'. The
middle stroke of this letter is not horizontal but diagonal and the
arm of the right (as it appears in negative on the seal) is not very
prominent. The second letter is clearly 've' and the third letter is
a clear 'ta'. There is a dot or anusvara above the letter 'ta'. Two
readings seem to be possible, depending on the point at which we
read the anusvara. If we read it before 'ta' the inscription would
read as 'Koventa', but if we read the anusvara after 'ta', the
reading 'Kovetan', is possible. Either way, the word would be
Dravidian and both readings would have the same meaning.
'Koventa' consists of two words 'Ko' and "venta". Ko in Tamil and
Malayalam means 'King' and is related to words in other lesser known
Dravidian languages, such as 'Koc' in Parji and 'Kosu' in
Gadba. "Venta" is no doubt a variant of or related to the Tamil and
Malayalam 'ventan', 'Ventu', also meaning 'king'. It is also related
to the Parji word 'vedid', meaning 'good'. "Koventa" would then
appear to be a tautological compound and it is interesting to note
here that such a compound. 'Koventan' as well as its variant
form 'Koventu' does actually occur in the earliest literature of the
Tamils.
In the reading 'Kovetan', 'Ko' is of course 'King' and 'Vetan' would
also mean 'King'. "Ventan" (which could also be read as "Vettan", as
the double consonants do not sometimes occur in the early Tamil-
Brahmi inscriptions) is a variant of "Ventan" and its root could
clearly be seen in such ancient Tamil "vetalikar" (vetu (or veta) +
alikar - king's clowns or dancers). "Vetan" has to be split as vetu
(or veta) + "an" the 'an' being the masculine singular ending. If as
is obvious the name on the seal is Old Tamil or Proto-Malayalam then
the second reading namely "Koventan~" is preferable to the first
which has no masculine singular ending. But the first reading is
possible if the name is in some other Dravidian language,including
Proto-Tamil While "Koventa" could be meaningfully split into only two
parts ('Ko' and 'venta'), "Kovetan" could be split into three parts
going by some of the forms of the masculine nouns in the early Tamil-
Brahmi inscriptions of Tamil Nadu. The three parts
are "Ko", "veta", "an", comparable to "asiriyku -an", "Pana-an"
and "Katala-an-" in the Mankulam Inscription No.1. This accords well
with the occurrence of three characters in the first line on the seal
as the equivalent of the name in Brahmi. We are therefore, inclined
to adopt the reading "Kovetan".
--- In varalaaRu@yahoogroups.com, Raveen Satkurunathan wrote:
> The Jaffna Seal:
>
> 4.8 Mathivanan claims to have discovered some clinching evidence
> validating his decipherment. The most important among them is the
> metal
> seal from Jaffna described by him as the 'Rosetta Stone' for his
> decipherment. An archaeological team led by K.Indrapala of the
> University
> of Jaffna excavated a megalithic burial complex at Anaikoddai in
> Jaffna
> District, SriLanka. In one of the burials, a metal seal was found
> assigned by the excavators to ca.3rd century B.C. There are two
> lines of
> writing on the seal; the upper line depicts three megalithic
symbols
> (one
> of them repeated twice) resembling the signs of the Indus script;
the
> lower line has three characters in the Brahmi script read as ko ve
ta.
> Indrapala (1981) has raised the question whether this could be a
> bilingual
> inscription in the Indus and Brahmi scripts. Scholars have debated
the
> question, but the results are inconclusive.
>
>
> http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/ejvs0801/ejvs0801.txt
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 05:17:46 -0000
From: "af7802" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Sanskritisation
What is the history of Batticaloa? Why is their language closer to
Indian dialect than Jaffna? Why don't they follow Agamas in temple
worship. Why is casteism weaker?
Are all these things just part of "high" culture, not involving the
masses?
--- In varalaaRu@yahoogroups.com, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Sanskritisation is a model that doesn't need a sizeable number of
> Brahmins per say to take place. Jaffna was a kingdom with its
> associated trappings of state power, rituals and rules. All were
> modeled on what is at that time considered to be proper governance
> which included what we today ins anthropological terms call as
> Sanskritisation
>
> Batticaloa was never fully integrated into this socio –political
view
> point because most of the area was semi independent and came under
> the purview of the Kandyan kingdom.
>
> Sanskritisation is associated with so called high culture similar
to
> the westernization that is going on amongst the elites in South
Asia
> today. Speaking in English and sending children over to Convent
> schools and discssing about Kafta in cafe over a Columbian coffee
> whereing T- shirts and jeans is not generally an option for a
person
> from a village.
>
> It is that simple why Jaffna and other Tamil hinterlands differed
in
> their so called "high" culture but at the mass level the people
> outlook on life was not that different in Jaffna, Batticalao or
> Mannar.
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