pre-Indo-European Mediterranean people, called themselves in their inscriptions (written in their own speech in a script allied to the ancient Greek) Trmmili. Herodotus has noted that the Lycians originally came from the island of Crete, and that in Crete the pre-Hellenic Asianic people were known by a name which the Greeks wrote as Termilai. It would not perhaps be too much to assume that some at least of the Dravidian speakers of India who came ultimately from the Eastern Mediterranean tracts brought with them one of their national or tribal appellations Termilai-Trmmili-Dramiza, which became transformed into the modern name Tamil by the middle of the first millennium A.D. In South Sind, the Greeks noted a people called Arabitai: they might very well have been Dravidian speakers in the fourth century B.C., and the name suggests the one which the Telugus apply to the Tamilians-Aravaḷu: and Arava is explained scholastically as the Sanskrit word a-rava "speechless, voiceless," suggesting the unintelligibility of Tamil as a language for the Telugus. Be that as it may, the culture-world presented by Dravidian (Tamil) linguistic palaeontology gives a fairly high background of civilization, which can be compared with what has been unearthed at Mohenjo-daro and other places, and with such indirect refẹrences to non-Aryan (Dravidian) civilization and non-Aryan milieu as can be found in the Vedic writings. In 1856, Bishop Caldwell gave the following sketch of the pre-Aryan civilization of the Dravidians from the evidence of the words in use among the early Tamilians.1 (I give the Tamil words within brackets after the English words): The Tamils or Dravidians "had 'kings' (ko, ventan, mannan) who dwelt in 'strong houses' (koṭṭai, aran) and ruled over small 'districts of country' (nāṭu). They had 'minstrels' (puḷavan) who recited 'songs' (cheyyul) at 'festivals' (koṇṭāttam, tiruviza); and they seem to have had alphabetical characters (ezuttu) written (varai) with a style (iraku) on palmyra leaves (olai), and a bundle of leaves was called a 'book' (eṭu); they acknowledged the existence of God, whom they styled Ko or king-a realistic title little known to orthodox Hinduism. They created to his honour a 'temple' which they called Ko-il, God's house (koyil, kovil). They had 'laws' and 'customs' (kaṭṭalai, pazakkam), but no lawyers or judges. Marriage existed among them. They were acquainted with the ordinary metals, with the exception of 'tin,' 'lead' and 'zinc', with the planets which were ordinarily known to the ancients (e.g. veḷḷ='Venus', chevvay='Mars', viyāzam='Jupiter' with the exception of 'Mercury' and 'Saturn.' They had 'medicines' (maruntu), 'hamlets' (paḷḷī) and 'towns' (ūr, peṭṭai), 'canoes,' 'boats', ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages, third edition (1913), p. 113. |