TAMIL OR SANSKRIT It is difficult to pinpoint the age of the evolution of the language because of its rich vocabulary. ‘Tholkappiyam’, which is 2,000 years old, is the first literary work in Tamil. According to Tamil language expert M Srinivasa Iyengar, Tholkappiyam dates to before 350BC. The other Sangam Tamil literature is estimated to be around 5th century BC and recent archaeological evidence has proved this.
Researchers of the subject have differing estimates for the age of Tamil. While recent excavations at Keezhadi throw light on the ancient civilization of Tamils, earthen burial urns (Mudhu Makkal Thazhi) have been found in Adichanallur and Kodumudi that go back 2,000 to 2,500 years. ----------------------------------------------------- [image: Inscription in Modi script unearthed in Perumagalur temple near Thanjavur] A stone inscription in Modi script (used to write Marathi language), that was unearthed in Thanjavur reveals that the age of Tamil language could date back to more than 10,000 years. Such archaeological evidence provides ample proof to establish the antiquity of Tamil as an ancient language. Discoveries also point out that the first ‘Tamil Sangam’ existed in 8th century BC. Ancient Tamil words are still in use. The Modi alphabet was invented during the 17th century to write the Marathi language of Maharashtra. It is a variant of the Devanāgarī <https://www.omniglot.com/writing/devanagari.htm> alphabet. The Modi alphabet was used until 1950 when it was replaced by the Devanāgarī alphabet. However, there is a movement to revive the use of the Modi script. Inscription in Modi script unearthed in Perumagalur temple near Thanjavur Advertisement The stone inscription in Modi script unearthed near Peravurani in Thanjavur district An inscription in Modi script belonging to the Maratha ruler of Thanjavur Prathaba Simhan period was found at Sri Somanathar Temple at Perumagalur village near Peravurani by a team of epigraphists recently, said archaeologist Mani Maran of Saraswathi Mahal Library on Saturday. Tiruchirapalli Based on information from the public that a stone inscription was found while undertaking renovation works at Sri Somanathar Temple, situated in Perumagalur about 15 km away from Peravurani in the Peravurani-Aththani-Kattumavadi Road, a team led by Mani Maran and a group of epigraphists, including Jambulingam, Thillai Govindarajan and Ramamurthi went to the village and studied the stone inscriptions. The inscription recorded the donations made by Prathaba Simhan (A.D. 1753) to the temple in Modi script. Further, it had the stampings usually found on palm leaf or copper plate inscriptions. The experts pointed out that they had found idols of Natarajar and Vinayagar and more than 10 copper plates while digging for laying the pipelines HOW THE ABOVE EXCAVATION CAN PROVE TAMIL IS 10000 YEARS OLD? -------------------------------------------------------- After elaborate research on western languages, late professor and author Devaneya Pavanar has established that Tamil is the mother of all languages. As a conclusion of his research in Greek, Latin and English, he says words from Tamil have gone on to influence Latin and English languages. Words such as ‘coin’, ‘coffee’ and ‘navy’ are a few examples that have their roots in Tamil language. Devaneya pavanar felt that way as an ardent Tamil lover and there was no basis. ------------------------------------------------- Linguistic experts have often highlighted that the first couplet in Thirukkural has Sanskrit words. But ‘Bhagwan’, the word they are referring to in Thirukkural, is not the ‘Bhagwan’ that is mentioned in Sanskrit. Thiruvalluvar, has in fact, never used Sanskrit words in Thirukkural. The word ‘Bhagawan’ that appears in the first couplet of Tirukural is actually a Tamil word ‘Pagalavan’, which means sun. As far as the usage of Sanskrit words in ancient Tamil scriptures is concerned, it is minimal. Again this is also an interpretation self-evaluated. In short, Tolkappiyam is the origin as Rig vedam is said to be an origin for Sanskrit. The Tolkappiyam age is close to AD. So Tamil can never be older than the samskritam. -------------------------------------- New Research Shows Sanskrit Evolved BEFORE The Indus Valley Civilization VENU GOPAL NARAYANAN Jul 30, 2023, A new study on the origin of Indo-European languages, released by Science magazine this month, integrates linguistic and genetic research to infer that early forms of Greek and Sanskrit began to evolve as independent language branches from before 7000 years ago. That is two to three millennia earlier than the conventional date of 5000 years ascribed by most historical research of the past century. The study also suggests that the common origin point of the Indo-European languages may have to be shifted from its hitherto-accepted standard location in the steppes of Southern Russia, to somewhere in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East – an arc stretching from Israel through Syria to Iran. These findings contradict some established historical notions which have rarely made sense to Indian scholars, as well as generally accepted views on Eurasia’s prehistory. Their implications are both numerous and fascinating. Historical scholarship of the colonial era generated three patent absurdities which, for various reasons, still command rigid adherence in most academic circles in one form or another: One, the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC, or the Sindhu-Saraswati culture as it is more commonly termed today), which emerged, flourished, and declined between 5000 to 3500 years ago, was socio-culturally distinct from our Indic Sanskrit-based culture. Two, the IVC was comprehensively supplanted by an invasion of Sanskrit speakers (called Aryans, or those who spoke ‘the noble tongue’) from somewhere in the steppes of southern Russia around 3500 years ago. Three, the sacred texts of these steppe-Aryan invaders, the Vedas, were composed and compiled at the fag-end of their long journey to the subcontinent around 3500 years ago. *This date of 1500 BCE was arbitrarily set in stone by Max Muller, a German Indologist.* None of these ‘theories’ have any factual basis or historical evidence. However, in the process, these colonial historians discovered strong similarities between Sanskrit and Ancient Greek first, and then with the younger Old Latin. That meant all three tongues had evolved from a common ancestral language. One example of a term cognate (meaning, sharing a common origin) to Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, is: the deity Jupiter in Latin is equal to Zeus Pater in Greek, and Dyaus Pitr in Sanskrit. They also unearthed deep linguistic ties between Sanskrit and Avestan (an extinct form of Old Persian in which the Zoroastrian sacred text, the Zend Avesta, is written). For example, Soma of the Vedas is Haoma in the Avesta; and Ahura is cognate with Asura. In the absence of any epigraphical evidence older than 3000 years for any of these languages, scholars clubbed their antecedents into a hypothetical root language which they called ‘Proto-Indo European’ (PIE). That solved a lot of problems and warded off uncomfortable questions. Now, Sanskrit-speaking Aryans could migrate from the steppes of Russia, invade the subcontinent, destroy the culture of the Indus valley (which conveniently spoke no Sanskrit since the Indus script remains undeciphered), establish their own high culture, compose marvels like the Upanishads – all well after 1500 BCE, and introduce the horse to India. It also ‘solved’ the Mitanni contradiction: engraved tablets dating to about 1400 BCE, and discovered near the Syrian-Turkish border, which record invocations to Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and the Nasatyas, by a king named Tushratta (Tvesharatha – one with a charging chariot; or Dasharatha). By the PIE hypothesis, there was now no need to somehow try and link Tushratta with India, since his forebears were but one of many groups which migrated out of the Russian steppes, just like others who left for India or Iran. Unfortunately, the three absurdities, coupled with the PIE, condense Indian prehistory into an unacceptably-brief timespan. By it, Videgha Madhava of the Shatapatha Brahmana moves east to clear the dense forests of the eastern Gangetic plains and establishes the kingdom of Videha (Mithila) only around 1000 BCE. This is followed at a frenetic pace by the mushrooming of countless pastoral communities, organized farming, trade, trade routes, administrative machineries, the rise and fall of dynasties in multiple kingdoms, and the evolution of great cities like Kashi or Vaishali with long histories of their own. And all of this is supposed to have happened in not just a few short centuries, and so comprehensively across such a vast region, but some centuries before the era of Bimbisara, the Buddha, and Mahavira, because, lest we forget, historical records exist in that region from around 600 BCE onwards. But scholars struggled to question such contradictions because they had no evidence to disprove this appealing PIE hypothesis based solely on linguistics. That is where the findings of the new study come in. Caveat emptor: while the study has numerous limitations, makes many assumptions, and lacks definitive boundary controls, it is a rigorous probabilistic assessment which is a step forward from the selective speculations which have bedevilled this field for a century. First, the study posits that Sanskrit and Greek diverged into separate branches 8000 years ago. This is at the tail of the first global agricultural revolution, when organized farming and the domestication of animals led to the growth of permanent settlements. It means that some sort of Sanskrit, plus its derivatives, was being spoken in villages, and, was the lingua franca for a large region, over *4000 years before Max Muller’s arbitrarily-fixed date of the Vedas’ composition* *.* Second, the study shows that the Sanskrit and Avestan-Persian languages branched over 5500 years ago, and went on to develop as separate family trees with almost no subsequent interaction. This is significant. Bearing in mind the close lexical similarities between Sanskrit and Avestan, the even closer grammatical resemblances, and restricted linguistic exchanges thereafter, this finding pushes the composition dates of both the Vedas and the Zend Avesta back by at least two millennia. Third, the study clearly shows that Sanskrit had an influence on the development of Greek, almost continuously, till around 2000 years ago (zoom into chart to track lines leading from the Sanskrit language tree to the Greek one). This not only predates the hypothetical PIE language, postulated to have evolved about 5000 years ago, but essentially negates it as well. Fourth, a branching date between Sanskrit and Greek of 8000 years ago predates the supposed movement of Aryans from the Russian steppes via Iran to India by at least 4000 years, and effectively negates that hypothesis. This is reiterated by a branching date of 5500 years ago, between Sanskrit and Avestan, which too, predates the Aryan invasion hypothesis by two millennia. In simple English: it is not possible for a people to have brought a proto language to a region when branches of that proto language had already separated, and begun to evolve independently in that very region, much earlier. It would be less absurd to say that Tamilians introduced the rasgulla to Bengal in the 1960s! In addition, and rather significantly, the study’s integration of genetics and linguistics concludes that the hypothesis of a Russian homeland for the Aryans is untenable. The authors, instead, place the origins of PIE speakers ‘somewhere’ in the Middle East. Fifth, the study dates the origins of Pali as a separate language branch to almost 4000 years ago. The implications are staggering. If true, this means that Pali, the language of Magadha, and the language in which the first Buddhist canons were recorded, was alive and in use, in India, during the Indus valley period. Sixth, equally significantly, the study shows that Vedic Sanskrit (and the authors have used that term with purpose) predates the rise of the Indus Valley civilization, which means that the Vedas were composed well before the Great Bath of Mohenjo Daro was built. This also means that the *Vedas predate the Bronze Age.* There is more in the study, but just these six observations are enough to show that the old, entrenched colonial hypotheses were no more than rank speculations completely off the mark. Instead, this study reinforces historical research which shows that the Indus Valley civilization was a very Indic one. Of course, true believers will hold on to their pet Aryan invasion theory by invoking the ‘horse problem’ {Wendy doniger concept} – the archaeological fact that the horse was introduced into the Indian subcontinent only around 3500-4000 years ago. There is no problem. There was brisk trade between the Indus Valley and the Middle East from as far back as 4500 years ago, both overland and maritime. And just as a Dubai-return would bring a VCR home from the Middle East in the 1980s, someone first brought a horse back many millennia ago. There is no need to wear oneself out with convoluted thinking*. The point is simple: the Aryans didn’t bring the horse to India – they brought it back home.* And the Mitanni inscriptions? If Singapore could have a president named Devan Nair, and Suriname a president named Chandrikapersad "Chan" Santokhi, then the Mittani would very well have had a king named Tushratta. Thus, in conclusion, it is an interesting study which debunks hoary colonial myths. It may be taken as a scientific step in agreeing that the homeland of the Aryans is closer to home than earlier speculated, and, that the Vedas are a lot, lot older than we think. Perhaps, in time, through more similar, rigorous studies, an Aryan Invasion Theory, which was quietly rebranded as an Aryan Migration Theory (just like global warming was rebranded as climate change), may be supplanted by an Aryan Exodus Theory from the subcontinent. Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fact 1 – Sanskrit is 6000 years old or older (excerpt from the upcoming book “Our Mother Tongue: 108 Facts about Sanskrit”) Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in his book “The Orion, or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas”, has shown, based on internal evidence (using astronomical references) of the Vedas, that the R̥g Veda and some of the portions of the Yajur Vedic Samhitas are at least 6000 years old. The language of the Vedas, called Sanskrit, is highly refined and sophisticated. (In fact, Saṃskr̥tam ‘Sanskrit’, means ‘well-made, refined’.) So, Sanskrit must have been evolving as a language for quite some time before that. ………………………….. The R̥g Veda and later compositions (together called the Vedas) of the ancient ancestors of the Indians have come down to us as pitch (tone) accented chants without any mistakes creeping in over the 6000 years of their life. It is clearly the oldest unbroken oral tradition in existence in the world. In fact, UNESCO (on Nov. 7, 2003) has recognized the tradition of Vedic chanting as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The technique our ancestors used to ensure this high level of fidelity while transmitting them orally from generation to generation, over the centuries, is to devise many different, special, methods of rendering each line and each verse of the Vedas. In addition to the normal, continuous recitation of the verses of the Vedas, applying the rules of phonetic and euphonic combination of the words (the so called Saṃhita), there was a tradition of recitation with a pause applied after each word (the so-called Pada Pāṭha), and other traditions where the words were permuted, combined and repeated in various ways (the Krama Pāṭha, the Ghana Pāṭha, etc.). There were eleven such ways of rendering the verses, and Vedic scholars memorized every one of these! This ensured that any error that crept into a recitation was automatically corrected with reference to the other types of recitations. Now why did the ancients devise such an elaborate system of oral transmission to ensure fidelity over the ages? Why didn’t they just write the Vedas down? Many of the current authorities think that the main reason was that the ancients considered the technique of preserving the fidelity of the Vedas using the Pāṭha techniques to be so “pure” that rendering and communicating them in any other fashion, would make them lose their character. But I think that the main reason why our ancestors did not choose to write the Vedas down, but chose to invent some elaborate recitation schemes to preserve the oral chants, was that when the Vedas were composed, writing had not yet been invented. If writing had been invented, surely, the Vedic seers, who had the energy to create such complicated systems to maintain the fidelity of their creations, would not have balked at another, new (and surer) approach to preservation? There were no elaborate techniques yet then to consider “pure”. So, they could have written them down, without violating any ‘pure’ traditions. Remember that the Vedas were considered sacred, handed down to our ancestors by divine authority. So, any method for preserving their purity would have been eagerly welcomed in the early stages of the Vedas. No, writing was not invented when the Vedas were composed. And this again attests to their great antiquity. Definite proof of writing being available comes from around 5500 years ago from the Euphrates-Tigris regions. (Of course, other civilizations, including that of our ancestors, may have also independently invented writing). This writing method is supposed to have spread from Euphrates-Tigris regions to the other regions like the Indus-Saraswati regions. This spreading would have happened over many generations. The Indus-Saraswati civilization (The Indus-valley civilization) clearly had some form of writing. So, we can safely guess that writing must have reached this area around 5000 to 5200 years ago. Now, the ancient seers of India were constrained to devise complicated systems for preserving the fidelity of the Vedas precisely because writing was not available to them. So, the R̥g Veda (and portions of the other Vedas) were composed and in use before writing was widely available. This again pushes the compilation of the R̥g Veda to around 6000 years ago. ----------------------------------------------- Western Sanskritists have arbitrarily set the date of the composition of the R̥g Veda at around 1500 BCE (or 3500 years ago). This date was, I think, set by people like Max Mueller, trying to reconcile the Vedic dates with the time periods deduced from the Bible for the creation of the world (based on Semitic and Sumerian mythologies for the creation of the world). There was also a need to reconcile the dates of the development of Indian thinking and literature with the development of thinking and literature in the Semitic (and Sumerian) world. Max Mueller divides the Vedic literature into four periods – the Chandas (the golden age of poetry of the ancient R̥ṣis) , Mantra (the age of rituals, or the age of priests rather than poets), Brāhmaṇa (the age of pedantry and exegesis) and the Sūtra (the practical age; the age of grammar, etymology, phonetic, astronomy etc.). He assumes that these four periods were sequential, arbitrarily assigns 200 years to each period, decides on a date of around 400 BCE for the Sūtras and so gets the date of around 1200 BCE for the composition of the early Vedic literature. Interestingly other western scholars have assigned 500 years for each period and arrived at 2400 BCE using the same base! [If we assign 900 years, which is as believable as 200 or 500, to each period, we will reach our 4000 BCE! [One argument in favour of these large gaps is the fact that we can clearly see the writers of the Brāhmaṇas struggling with the import and the meanings of the Vedas and indulging in wild speculations. This means that when the Brāhmaṇas were composed, the meanings of the Vedas had already become obscure owing to the long gap between their creations. A couple of hundred years is too short for this level of haziness to have happened.] Also, the absence of any reference to the catastrophic flood that gave rise to the flood myths of other civilizations, attests to the antiquity of the Vedas. The Vedas have to be pre-flood. But, sure enough, the flood myths are mentioned in the Brāhmaṇas. Any attempts to use astronomical references in the Vedas to date them, were dismissed by most Western Sanskritists, because they felt that the early Aryans were too primitive to have had any astronomical accuracy! Tilak says that “This means that we must refuse to draw legitimate inferences from plain facts when such inferences conflict with our preconceived notions about the primitive Aryan civilisation.” Tilak also asks, “I cannot also understand why scholars should hesitate to assign the Vedic works the same period of antiquity which they allow the Chinese and the Egyptians.” I think the answer is clear. India was a colony of the Europeans! Now, one argument against the early (6000 years ago) dates for the composition of the Vedas is the close connection between the language of the Vedas and the language of the oldest parts of the Avesta, which is claimed by these Sanskritists to be only around 3000 years old. How could the Vedas that were composed 6000 years ago and the Avesta composed 3000 years ago have very similar language? It had to mean that the language of Persia had to remain unchanged for 3000 years. I can see an objection to this argument. For one, Sanskrit has a track-record of staying surprisingly stable till the Prakrit (prākṛta ‘natural’ as opposed to saṃskr̥ta ‘refined’) revolutions of the late first millennium BCE. Even then, what was Sanskrit remained fairly stable becoming what is called Classical Sanskrit. As we saw before, our ancestors took extreme care to preserve their Vedic compositions. I think this sort of exercise also preserved the language, especially the language of the elite. There may have been earlier Prakrit-like deviations into local languages, but the basic Sanskrit in which the Vedas were composed remained the same. That is, even if the vernaculars in Persia had deviated away, the liturgical language remained unchanged and this is what our Persian cousins used to compose what were their Veda equivalents. Of course, an easier explanation, which Tilak proposes, is that the Avesta is also much older than is supposed by the historians! --------------------------------------------- Coming back to India; when writing later became generally available, the seers of those generations may have vigorously opposed the rendering of the Vedas into writing, for the same reasons that some authorities have proposed to explain why the Vedas were not written down. So, “6000 years ago” is a good, round figure for the antiquity of the Vedas. If so, then the Sanskrit language is at least 6000 years old. It should in fact be older, because the full structure of the language had developed and was in use 6000 years ago. Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx III Dec 22, 2023 Hindustan times The discovery has been made during the third phase of excavations carried out by the ASI along with various teams across the country Researchers from Deccan College Pune along with the Central Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) have established that human remains discovered at an ancient site of Rakhigarhi – a village in the Hisar district of Haryana – date back around 8,000 years. The discovery has been made during the third phase of excavations carried out by the ASI along with various teams across the country, including researchers from Deccan College Pune. The first phase of excavations at Rakhigarhi was carried out by Dr Amarendra Nath of the Indian Archaeology Department from 1997 to 2000 during which evidence of the North Harappan culture dating back to 2500 BC was found. The first phase of excavations at Rakhigarhi was carried out by Dr Amarendra Nath of the Indian Archaeology Department from 1997 to 2000 during which evidence of the North Harappan culture dating back to 2500 BC was found. The second phase of excavations at RakhiGarhi was carried out by professor Vasant Shinde from Deccan College Pune from 2006 to 2013 during which Shinde’s team collected evidence and conducted DNA tests to establish that this culture could be over 4,000 years’ old. Over the past two years, the ASI and Deccan College Pune have jointly carried out the third phase of excavations at Rakhigarhi through a team led by ASI joint director Sanjay Kumar Manjul and Deccan College Pune assistant professor Prabhodh Shirwalkar. Shirwalkar said, “There are three parts to the Harappan culture; East Harappan, Middle Harappan, and North Harappan (Modern). The earlier two excavations found evidence of the Middle and Modern Harappan cultures dating back around 4,000 years. But now, the evidence found in the third phase of excavations shows that the culture dates back 7,000 to 8,000 years. The final report of the work is being prepared by our team.” Shirwalkar said that the research on this will continue for many more months. “Human ‘DNA’ has remained the same for 8,000 years which we have found during our research. When human traps were found here, they were thoroughly tested. Scientists have drawn conclusions based on this. A large burial ground was found here and it had human traps as well as animal traps,” Shirwalkar said. The ASI is actively involved in excavations at the Rakhigarhi archaeological site, and the primary goal of these excavations, according to Ajay Yadav, additional director-general of the ASI, is to make the site accessible to the public. This involves exposing and conserving the structural remains for future viewing and providing amenities for visitors. About utensils of various metals including gold and silver found during the excavation, Shirwalkar said that old silver and copper ornaments, too, have been found. “The most beautiful are the clay pots. A dinner set from that period has been found,” Shirwalkar said. “We think that the words bedroom and kitchen are of recent origin. Whereas in Rakhigarhi, an even larger settlement of the largest ancient houses ever was found underground. A courtyard and a drainage system were also found in it. There were two to six- bedroom houses that were also available at that time. The clothing fashion of the people of that time is also known. A colourful worn piece of cloth, a shawl and skirt were also found,” he said. “This research has found strong evidence that the Harappan civilisation is 7,000 to 8,000 years old. Scientists from the department of archaeology of India and Deccan College have worked together on the project. It is agreed that there was human habitation or civilization in our country 8,000 years ago. The evidence shows that the people of that time were as advanced as they are today,” said Shirwalkar. Earlier this year, union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had highlighted Rakhigarhi in her budget speech of 2023, emphasising on the development of five iconic sites of archaeological significance, including Rakhigarhi, with on-site museums. The plan is to showcase the antiquities uncovered at Rakhigarhi, now considered the largest Harappan site spanning 350 acres, in an under-construction museum near the site. The museum is estimated to be worth ₹23 crores. Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Kr Therefore the age of Sanskrit is faar older than any language of the earth. K RAJARAM IRS 22 2 24 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. 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