It’s one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world: which languages did the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation speak? Existing in...
It’s one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world: which languages did the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation speak? Existing in the Bronze age, the Indus hosted the largest such civilisation of its time, with settlements spanning what is now northwestern India and Pakistan.
Yet, while we know what their cities looked like, we know nothing about their languages, given that the Indus script remains, as yet, undeciphered.
The mystery further acquires sharp political overtones in India, given that the ruling Hindutva ideology has strongly argued against the idea that modern Indian culture has ever been influenced by forces from outside the subcontinent. Culturally placing the Indus Civilisation thus becomes critical both for academic as well as political purposes.
A new paper published in Nature by independent researcher Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay innovatively looks at cultures which were in contact with the Indus people to try and sift out words that might have been adopted from the Indus language. She finds that one particular word – “elephant” – traces quite clearly back to the Proto-Dravidian, the ancestor of all Dravidian languages in existence today, thus proving that it was at least one major language spoken in the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Linguistic mystery
Some of the sharpest minds in linguistics have...
