of the Neolithic cultures, some of incalculable age, others later than the beginning of the Christian era, include the usual types of stone weapons, pottery, and dolmens. In northern India a copper age succeeded and in part overlapped (Mohenjo-Daro, etc.) the neolithic. Finds of copper weapons have been made in many places, the most important being that at Gungeria, C.P., where silver ornaments were also found. The weapons include bare and shouldered celts, plain and barbed spearheads, swords and harpoons, often in handsome shapes and finely wrought; some are of great weight and may have been used for cult purposes. There is no bronze age, nor does bronze begin to appear much before the first century A.D. Iron may have come into use in the earlier part of the first millennium B.C., or may have been known to the Āryans still earlier; the facts that there is no copper age in the south, that then is a continuity of stone and iron using cultures, that the technique of chank working requires a thin iron saw, and that iron weapons (of uncertain age) are characteristic of prehistoric sites in the south, that iron ore is abundant and readily worked, and that steel was known already in India and Ceylon in the second century B.C.,⁷ all suggest that iron and steel may have come into use at an early date and may have been discovered in India. Against this view are the facts that iron is not mentioned in the early Vedic literature, and that the Hittites were using iron already about 1500 B.C. According to Sayce the Khalybes, who were neighbours of the Hittites, and perhaps of the same race, had the reputation of being the discoverers of steel; in any case, they were its transmitters to the Greeks.⁸ The existence in India of Muṇḍā languages, of Mon-Khmer affinity, seems to show that the southward migration of Sino-Tibetan races which peopled the Irawadi, Menam and Mekong valleys and the Indonesian islands had also entered India at some very early period. A pre-Dravidian element in Southern India is probably Negrito or proto-Malay, and Hornell finds a trace of this first connection of India with the east in the single outrigger boat. Sylvain Lévi recognizes survivals of a pre-Dravidian language in the occurrence of doublet place-names.⁹

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⁷Hornell, I.

⁸For the prehistoric remains see Foote, 1, 2; Bloomfield; Smith, V. A. in Imperial Gazetteer. Vol. II; and references in C. H. I., pp. 692, 693. Most of the literature on the stone age in Ceylon will be found in Spolia Zeylanica (Colombo). For the literature on iron see p. 34, note 4. The making of steel in small ingots by a true "Bessemer" process has survived in Southern India and Ceylon into the present century. If the early Vedic ayas refers to iron we might suppose that the use of iron weapons enabled the invaders to overcome the indigenous copper-using Dasyus.

⁹Hornell, 2 (the introduction of the coconut, of Pacific origin, and of the double-outrigger boat, due probably to the seafaring Malays wno colonised.