The discovery of a Neolithic stone
celt, a hand-held axe, with the Indus script on it at Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamil
Nadu is, according to Iravatham Mahadevan, "a major discovery because for
the first time a text in the Indus script has been found in the State on a
datable artefact, which is a polished neolithic celt." He added:
"This confirms that the Neolithic people of Tamil Nadu shared the same
language family of the Harappan group, which can only be Dravidian. The
discovery provides the first evidence that the Neolithic people of the Tamil
country spoke a Dravidian language." Mr. Mahadevan, an eminent expert on
the subject, estimated the date of the artefact with the Indus script between
2000 B.C. and 1500 B.C.
It was in February 2006,
when V. Shanmuganathan, a school teacher living in Sembian-Kandiyur, near
Mayiladuthurai in Nagapattinam district, dug a pit in the backyard of his house
to plant banana and coconut saplings, that he encountered two stone celts. The
teacher, who is interested in archaeology, rang up his friend G. Muthusamy,
Curator of the Danish Fort Museum at Tranquebar, which belongs to the Tamil
Nadu Department of Archaeology. Mr. Muthusamy, who also belongs to the same
village, took charge of the two celts from his friend and handed them over to
T.S. Sridhar, Special Commissioner, State Department of Archaeology.
When Mr. Sridhar examined
one of the two stones, he found some engravings on it. So he asked the
epigraphists of his Department to study the particular celt. To their absolute delight,
they found fours signs on it - and all four of them corresponded with the
characters in the Indus script. When the celt with the Indus script was shown
to Mr. Mahadevan, he confirmed that they were in the Indus script. The celt
with the script measures 6.5 cm by 2.5 cm by 3.6 cm by 4 cm. It weighs 125
grams. The other celt has no engravings on it.
Mr. Mahadevan, one of the
world's foremost scholars on the Indus and the Tamil-Brahmi scripts, is the
author of the seminal work, The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance and Tables. It
was published by the Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi in 1977.
First Indus sign
The first Indus sign on the
celt showed a skeletal body with ribs, seated on his haunches, body bent, lower
limbs folded and knees drawn up. The second sign shows a jar with a handle. The
first sign stood for "muruku" and the second for "an."
Together, they read as "Murukan." They formed a very frequent
combination on the Indus seals and sealings, especially from Harappa. The first
"muruku" sign corresponded with the sign number 48, the second with
the number 342, the third, which looks like a trident, corresponded with the
sign number 367, and the fourth with 301.
These numbers are found in
the sign list published by Mr. Mahadevan.
He said: "`Muruku' and
'an' are shown hundreds of times in the Indus script found at Harappa. This is
the importance of the find at Sembiyan-Kandiyur. Not only do the Neolithic
people of Tamil Nadu and the Harappans share the same script but the same
language." In Tamil Nadu, the muruku symbol was first identified from a
pottery graffiti at Sanur, near Tindivanam. B.B. Lal, former Director-General
of ASI, correctly identified this symbol with sign 47 of the Indus script. In
recent years, the muruku symbol turned up among the pottery graffiti found at
Mangudi, near Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu, and at Muciri, Kerala. But this was
the first time that a complete, classical Indus script had been found on a
polished Neolithic stone celt, Mr. Mahadevan pointed out. He emphasised that
the importance of the discovery was independent of the tentative decipherment
of the two signs proposed by him.
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