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1. "Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu
From: Raveen S <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 1 May 2006 08:07:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: Raveen S <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: "Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu
"Discovery of a century" in Tamil Nadu
T.S. Subramanian
Stone axe with Indus Valley script found near
Mayiladuthurai
CHENNAI: A Neolithic stone celt with the Indus Valley
script has been discovered by a school teacher, V.
Shanmuganathan, in a village called Sembian-Kandiyur
near Mayiladuthurai in Nagapattinam district, Tamil
Nadu. The celt, a polished hand-held stone axe, has
four Indus Valley signs on it. The artefact with the
script can be as old as 1500 B.C., that is, 3,500
years old. The four signs were identified by
epigraphists of the Tamil Nadu Department of
Archaeology, according to its Special Commissioner, T.
S. Sridhar.
Iravatham Mahadevan, one of the world's foremost
experts on the Indus script, called the find "the
greatest archaeological discovery of a century in
Tamil Nadu." The discovery proved that the Indus
script had reached Tamil Nadu. He estimated the date
of the artefact with the script to be around 1500 B.C.
"I have cautiously and conservatively put it between
2000 B.C. and 1500 B.C.," Mr. Mahadevan said. It was
in the classical Indus script. He ruled out the
possibility of the celt coming from North India
because "the material of this stone is clearly of
peninsular origin."
Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, where hundreds of seals with
the Indus script were discovered, are in present-day
Pakistan. Neolithic means New Stone Age and it is
datable in India between 2000 B.C. and 1000 B.C.
According to Mr. Mahadevan, the first sign on the celt
depicted a skeletal body with ribs. The figure is
seated on his haunches, body bent and contracted, with
lower limbs folded and knees drawn up. The second sign
showed a jar. Hundreds of this pair have been found on
seals and sealings at Harappa. Mr Mahadevan read the
first sign as "muruku" and the second sign as "an." In
other words, it is "Murukan." The earliest references
in Old Tamil poetry portrayed him as a "wrathful
killer," indicating his prowess as a war god and
hunter. The third sign looked like a trident and the
fourth like a crescent with a loop in the middle.
Mr. Mahadevan commented that the latest discovery was
very strong evidence that the Neolithic people of
Tamil Nadu and the Indus Valley people "shared the
same language, which can only be Dravidian and not
Indo-Aryan." He added that before this discovery, the
southernmost occurrence of the Indus script was at
Daimabad, Maharashtra on the Pravara River in the
Godavari Valley.
The Hindu
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