Friends,

Will welcome constructive comments on the following thoughts
about the inscribed stone celt tool found at Sembiyan-Kandiyur
near Mayiladuthurai in The Hindu of May 1st
( http://www.hindu.com/2006/05/01/stories/2006050112670100.htm
and
http://www.hindu.com/2006/05/01/stories/2006050101992000.htm ).

First, in view of the importance of the find, its genuineness
and context need to be carefully ascertained. This should
include: (1) a detailed microscopic examination of the
inscription in consultation with expert mineralogists, to find
out whether it is contemporary with the polishing of the celt,
or was made later (if so, approximately how much later); (2) a
limited excavation of the site where the celt was found, so as
to establish an archaeological context and, hopefully,
chronology. It should be borne in mind that in the South,
Neolithic artefacts have frequently been found in later
Megalithic sites, or even sometimes as surface finds; therefore,
without a clear archaeological context, while the axe is
undoubtedly a Neolithic artefact, we cannot assert that the
inscription dates back to the Neolithic -- it could equally have
been made centuries later. The dates attributed to the
inscription by Mr. I. Mahadevan (between 2000 and 1500 B.C.) are
not impossible but are premature at this stage. Only a thorough
investigation can give an answer.

My second point is that a clear, high-resolution photograph or
sketch of the characters should be circulated among
archaeologists and epigraphists to reach a consensus on whether
the likeness to Indus signs is close or not. We are familiar
with many Indus-like signs on Megalithic pottery, which in the
end do not prove anything. While Mr. Mahadevan's expertise on
the Indus script is well recognized, there is surely nothing
wrong in consulting other experts.

Now let us assume that we do have a celt with four Indus signs.
That will indeed be a first in the South, and yet finding a few
Indus signs here cannot, by any stretch of imagination, show
that Indusians or Harappans had a Dravidian language. There are
several non-sequiturs in this flawed reasoning.

The first is that Mr. Mahadevan's decipherment of the Indus
script has not been accepted by any expert in the field, to my
knowledge. The general public may not know that we have at least
five different "Dravidian" decipherments of the Indus script,
those of Father Heras, Walter Fairservis, Asko Parpola, a
Russian team of experts led by Y. V. Knorozov and I. Mahadevan,
and not one of them agrees with the other or has been widely
accepted. Therefore the reading of the word "Murugan" is, at
best, purely hypothetical.

Yet, let us, for the sake of argument, accept that the
inscription is in a Dravidian language, whether it reads
"Murugan" or anything else. What would that show? The answer is,
strictly nothing. Archaeologists have long suspected limited or
punctual trade exchanges between the Harappan civilization and
the South (perhaps for semiprecious stones); when the Harappans
established outposts as far as Bahrain or North Afghanistan, we
cannot rule out their occasional contacts with communities in
the South, which could have learned the script from them. In
that case, those communities would of course use it to write
*their own language*. We know that Brahmi was used in the South
to write Tamil, but does it prove that Ashoka's edicts written
in Brahmi script were in Tamil language? There is very clearly a
complete confusion here between language and script -- the two
are totally distinct.

To take another simile, seals with the Harappan script have been
found at Bahrain and Oman; it does not mean that the ancestors
of the people of the Gulf (the Dilmun civilization, for
instance) are to be credited with the Indus Valley civilization.

Language apart, I wish to stress that the implication made in
the articles (and relayed a few days later by a prominent
politician of Tamil Nadu) to the effect that the Harappan
civilization is "Dravidian" is wholly baseless and has long been
rejected. Some of the reasons for this include: (1) the absence
in the archaeological record of any clear southward migratory
pattern, especially through the Deccan; (2) the phenotypical
continuity between the Harappan physical types and today's types
in the same region, which precludes any massive southward
migration; (3) recent genetic studies pointing to the indigenous
origin of Dravidians in the South; (4) the absence of any
Dravidian names in the toponymy and hydronymy in India's
North-West; (5) the growing consensus among linguists that
Brahui (a Dravidian dialect in Baluchistan) is an import of the
historical period into the region, not an ancient relic; (6)
finally the fact that the Harappans could not have migrated to
the South and reverted from an advance Bronze Age culture to a
Neolithic or Megalithic one, forgotten all about their typical
crafts and techniques, pottery designs, urbanism.

In conclusion, I am afraid that Mr. Mahadevan's conclusions are
hasty as well as methodolically faulty.

Michel