Elamite and Dravidian, and the Inds-Aryans

South Asia contains languages that belong to four quite separate families - IndoEuropean (Indo-Aryan subgroup, in turn a subgroup of Indo-Iranian), Dravidian, Munda (part of the larger Austroasiatic family of Southeast Asia), and Tibeto-Burman (Figures 10.1, 10.4, 10.7, 10.8A). Today, Indo-Aryan (IA) languages are dominant in the north, and it is often assumed that they have achieved this dominance at the expense of the other language families. As I will explain below, this may not be quite so transparent as it might appear. That IA languages have replaced others in northern India and Pakistan is clear, but that these others were necessarily all Dravidian or Munda is not so clear at all.

One of the historical documents that is often brought forward as a witness for IA invasion from the northwest is the compilation of hymns and supplicatory chants known as the Rigveda, an oral creation of the middle or late second millennium BC, committed to writing in the late first millennium BC. Parts of the Rigveda describe battles and attacks on cities in the region of Punjab, and many earlier authorities regarded this compilation as a record of the conquest, by incoming Indo-Aryanspeaking pastoralists, of a Dravidian-speaking Harappan civilization already in decline. The discovery of apparent massacres at Mohenjo-Daro once appeared to support the idea, but current radiocarbon dates indicate that the Mature Indus Phase had ended by 1900 se, long before the events described in the Rigveda took place. Instead, modem scholars regard the Rigveda as recording events in a Punjab that was already Indo-Aryan and had long been so (Erdosy 1989, 1995; Witzel 1995). We can no longer blame the followers of Indra for the Mature Harappan decline.

In order to put South Asia in a "Post-Rigveda" linguistic perspective we need first to review what modern linguists state about language history, in the first instance of Dravidian. In 1974, linguist David McAlpin (1974, 1981) proposed the existence of a language macrofamily that he termed "Elamo-Dravidian," based on a comparison between the Dravidian languages of South Asia and Elamite texts found in the Achaemenid palaces at Persepolis in southwestern Iran (late sixth to fifth centuries sc) (see also Blazek 1999). The ancient Elamite

language was used from the late third millennium BC into Achaemenid times, and its early history is best documented from cuneiform documents found in the huge city mound of Susa in Khusistan (Potts 1999). Even older pictographic and numerical texts, dating from about 2800 BC and known as "Proto-Elamite," have been found in several sites from Susa across the Iranian Plateau to Shahr-i- Sokhta in eastern Iran, but these tablets remain undeciphered and no definite link with the true Elamite language of a millennium later can yet be demonstrated. Elamite civilization was urban, closely related to that of the Sumerians and Akkadians, and occupied large areas of Iran prior to the dominance of the IndoEuropean Medes and Persians in the first millennium sc.

The Dravidian languages themselves, except for the outlier of Brahui in the Indus valley, are today confined to central and southern India (Figure 10.1). Internal reconstruction of proto-vocabularies and subgrouping structure has proceeded quite far in terms of the Indian members of the family, such that we can guess at a northerly South Asian homeland in a general sense. But McAlpin's Elamo-Dravidian lies too far back in time to be amenable to linguistic proof, even though many Dravidianists, including Kamil Zvelebil (1985), have commented on it favorably. The issue is also confused by the massive overlay of IA languages in the northwest, erasing the linguistic footprints of deeper time levels. Brahui could be a remnant of a once more widespread layer of Dravidian that existed in the Indus Valley, but in reality it seems to be a very poorly recorded language, of uncertain historical significance (Coningham 2002:86 quotes Elfenbein's view that it could even represent a Medieval migration from the south).

At present, most linguists seem to agree that the Dravidian languages of southern and central India (with Brahui remaining uncertain) shared a common ancestor around 2500 Bc, with a reconstructed agricultural vocabulary that contained terms at least for cattle, date, and plough (Southworth 1975, 1990, 1992, 1995; Gardner 1980). Dorian Fuller (2003) suggests that terms for some native South Indian crops such as mung bean and horsegram reconstruct back to very early stages within Dravidian, and he also regards the whole family as being of southern Indian pre-agricultural origin. If he is correct, then McAlpin's claims for links with Elamite become less credible. Unfortunately, the linguistic data do not seem to be firm enough to clinch the matter. If McAlpin is correct, and if the Dravidian glottochronological estimates are worth anything (they fit

well with the dated archaeological record for the spread of agriculture in South India), then any genetic linkages between Elamite and Dravidian must have predated 2500 Bc by a long period.

Before moving further into the Elamo-Dravidian conundrum, it is necessary to return to the Indo-Aryan languages. The separation of the Indo-Iranian languages from the remainder of Indo-European was a relatively late process in the totality of IE history, according to majority linguistic opinion. Many scholars place the IndoIranian homeland in the steppe lands to the north of the Black Sea, running eastward toward the Caspian, favoring a movement toward Iran and India at about 2000 Bc or soon afterward (Anthony 1991; Parpola 1988, 1999; Mallory 1989; Masica 1991; Kuzmina 2001). The Indo-Iranian languages belong to the satem group, so in this regard their closest subgroup relatives are Armenian, Slavic, Albanian, and Baltic. The Bronze Age Andronovo steppe culture with its emphasis on herding was distributed from north of the Caspian toward the Hindu Kush during the second millennium Be, and this is believed by many to be the most likely source for the migrating IndoAryans, who split into their Iranian and Indic branches as they moved through what are now Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. From this viewpoint, the IA arrival in the Indus region occurred at about the time of Mature Harappan decline, or later. Needless to say, this reconstruction depends in part upon a view of the early Indo-Aryans as essentially a pastoralist people, a view that has no clear archaeological justification within the South Asian subcontinent itself, or within the Rigveda, or within the family tree of the Indo-European languages.'

Against this mainstream reconstruction we have a number of statements of disagreement. Colin Renfrew (1987:208) tentatively raised the possibility that the IndoIranian languages could have originated from the Mehrgarh Neolithic, representing a spread from the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia. However, the linguistic position within IE of the Indo-Aryan languages would seem not to support an antiquity as far back as 6000 BC, even allowing for a fair degree of linguistic diversity in the form of the Nuristani (Kafiri or Dardic) languages of the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan. Another argument against an equation of the early Indo-Iranians with the Andronovo culture, or with its contemporary in the Amu Darya and Syr Darya basins (the mellifluously tagged Bactrian Margiana Archaeological Complex), has recently been put forward by C. C.

Lamberg-Karlovsky (2002). This is that one cannot equate archaeological cultures with languages at all. Such a statement represents a great challenge.