Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s12.27

c12.s12.27

The Dravidian language-family is now confined to India: but if the original Dravidian speakers were a Mediterranean people, then Dravidian must be relegated to a common stock with the language of the ancient Aegean and Asia Minor peoples who were living in Greece and the Islands and Asia Minor before the Indo-European Hellenes came to Greece. I have suggested that a tribal name of this people was *Dr(a)mil-* or *Dr(a)miẓ*, which is found in one branch of them in the Island of Crete in the Hellenised spelling as *Termilai*, and in another branch of it in Lycia in Southern Asia minor as *Trimmili*. Various tribes with their different names naturally made up these Mediterranean invaders of India, and *Dramiẓ* was evidently one of them. This name was Aryanised as *Dramiḍa* or *Dramiḷa* and then as *Draviḍa*, certainly earlier than the Christian era. Round about the time of Christ, the name became *Damiz* in the mouth of the people who bore the name, and they had by this time been fully settled and had built their culture and founded their states in the extreme south of India. The ancient Sinhalese Aryan-speaking settlers from Gujarat and Sindh, heard this name and wrote it in Pāli and Sinhalese as *Damiḷa*; and Greek and Egyptian traders similarly heard the name as *Damir* and called the country the native name of which was obviously *Damirakam* *Damirikē* in Greek. Then certain wide-spread phonetic changes swept the language of the *Dramiẓ-Damiẓ* (and probably also of the Kannaḍiga) people, among which was the unvoicing of the voiced stops *g ḍ d b* to *k ṭ t p*; and in a few centuries after Christ, the language entered a phase which we find in the oldest Tamil texts now found (the Śaṅgam texts), and the name became *Tamiẓ* or *Tamil* which is the form still obtaining in the Tamil language.