A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c8: Chapter III. The Earliest Peoples and Cultures
A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c8
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Chapter III. The Earliest Peoples and Cultures
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Nature of the subject and evidence—Paleolithic Stage—Upper Paleolithic—Mesolithic Stage and Microliths—Neolithic Stage—rock-paintings—Megaliths and their date—Adichanallur—Nilgiris—race-types: negrito; proto-Australoid; proto-Mediterranean; Mediterranean; Alpine-Armenoid; Nordic—Languages: Indo-Aryan; Dravidian; Austro-Asiatic—linguistic affinities of Dravidian in western Asia—cultural affinities between western Asia and South India—Haimendorf’s view of the Dravidian problem.
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THE people of South India cannot be said to have any well-marked racial characteristics. They are ‘a miscellany of differing physical types’, most clearly the product of a mixture from immemorial antiquity of many different strains, and modern attempts to distinguish these strains are matters of opinion based on the appraisal of obscure and intricate evidence along several lines. The subject-matter of this chapter affords therefore little scope for confident assertions of a categorical nature.
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The evidence bearing on the cultural and racial problems of the prehistoric period is threefold. First, there is the actual distribution of physical characteristics among the population of the country today which may, when carefully related to similar characteristics of peoples elsewhere, furnish clues to the early origins and movements of peoples. Secondly, there is the distribution of language-groups and the interrelations among them. It is now well recognized that language has no definite relation to race, but the value of good linguistic evidence for the study of cultural history can be very great. Lastly, archaeological excavation brings to light the tools and utensils used by men in different places and times, and comparison of their types and designs, particularly in pottery, as also of the different levels at which they are found in the earth’s surface, often gives clues to the movements and relative ages of the cultures of these localities. The remains of human skeletons found in ancient graves sometimes throw light on the probable racial elements in the population. Clearly each of these lines of evidence is difficult to study and interpret properly, and the co-ordination of results reached along the different lines is much more so. Such study and co-ordination has hardly yet begun, and without going into details we can only set forth the broad conclusions so far reached by scholars.
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When did man begin to inhabit South India? The answer is suggested by the examination of fossil remains of fauna found along with primitive stone tools in the terraces of river valleys like the Godāvari and the Narmada, and of mountain ranges like the Siwaliks. The antiquity of human life in these regions goes back about 300,000 years; but for quite a long time man lived at what is known as the ‘Old Stone’ (Paleolithic) Stage, using only crude stone implements and able only to gather his food as he found it instead of growing it according to his needs. His tools were simple hand-axes and cleavers, Clactonian or Levalloisian flakes at first, but later blades and burins came into use. The Paleolithic industries of India can be grouped as follows: (1) the ‘Chopper’ industries of the North (Sohan); (2) the Abbevilleo-Acheulian hand-axes of the South (Madras); and (3) a mixture of both prevailing. This cannot, however, be a hard and fast rule, and the Singrauli basin near Mirzapur (U.P.), Deogarh in Jhansi district (U.P.) in the basin of the Betwa, Gujarat, and the Mayurbhanj region, have been found to furnish meeting points of the two tool traditions of Sohan and Madras.
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The Paleolithic Stage is generally divided into Early or Lower Paleolithic and Later or Upper Paleolithic. We cannot be sure if India had an Upper Paleolithic Stage. According to Movius its presence is suggested by the ‘evolved Sohan’; on the other hand the Microlithic industries of South India are not linked up with the Upper Paleolithic, and Seshadri derives them from a hypothetical Levalloisian flake industry and this excludes the Upper Paleolithic from the succession of the Stone Stage cultures of India. Further exploration and the study of the tēri industries of the south-east littoral and Bruce Foote's finds of the Kurnool caves may throw light on this question.
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The Paleolithic Stage was followed by the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Stage and Neolithic or New Stone Stage, all names related to the implements used in each stage. In India the Mesolithic Stage is not so well defined as the Paleolithic. Two kinds of industry, one Microlithic and the other styled ‘protoneolithic’, may be assigned to this Stage.
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Microliths have a fairly wide distribution extending, as they do, from Jamālgarhi (Peshawar district) in the NW. Frontier to Sawyerpuram (Tinnevelly district) in the extreme south, and from Karachi in Sind on the west to Serai Kalā in Bihar on the east; and very often they are not truly Mesolithic in stage and overlap with the Neolithic and the Metal Stages. The material employed consists of jasper, agate, cornelian, flint, chert, chalcedony, quartz and other semi-precious stones, while the types include blades, crescents, trapezes, triangles, points, beaked engravers and side-and-end scrapers. These tiny tools must have been attached singly or collectively to a handle for effective use as arrow heads, sickles, etc. ‘In their typology they exhibit a striking similarity with the Western Capsian of the Mesolithic Stage. It may, in all probability, be derived from the western Mesolithic, inasmuch as the Mesolithic has not yet been found in Burma’ (Krishnaswami).
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Foote observed that the Tinnevelly Microliths lay embedded in the fossil sand-dunes (tēris) and were stained red by their long contact with the ferruginous soil; in 1949 Zeuner found Microliths near Tuticorin in a geological section which suggests that some of them may be of considerable antiquity. These facts and similar evidence from Nandi Kanama and Khandivli have led to the supposition that the first appearance of Microliths may be placed some time between 8000 and 6000 B.C.
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The Microlithic industries of India may be divided roughly into two classes: (1) pre-pottery industries and (2) those associated with pottery. Gordon has given an elaborate list of the Microlithic sites of India, and the discovery of a large number of sites subsequently in recent years will have to be added to the list. Special studies of the Microlithic industries of Gujarat, particularly Langhnaj, have been made by Zeuner and Sankalia, and the Mysore ones by Seshadri. It is now fairly certain from the evidence from Mysore and elsewhere that some of the Microlithic industries are contemporaneous with metal industries. The problem of similarities of the Indian Microliths with those of South Africa and Palestine is a fascinating but unexplored field as yet. Attempts have been made to differentiate the Microliths as coastal and inland groups; the former are perhaps older, simpler and cruder than those found inland, but their range of types is different and rather larger, though the only type that they may possess which the inland ones definitely do not is the burin. From the functional point of view it may be well to classify these industries into (a) hunting group and (b) peasant group. The evidence from Langhnaj and elsewhere has been held to warrant the possibility that some primitive form of agriculture was practised before pottery came into use. If this is correct, we have evidence here ‘of a Microlith- and bone tool-using people being introduced to agriculture and pottery and the original Mesolithic food-gatherers becoming Neolithic food-producers, albeit probably on a very restricted scale’ (Gordon).
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It is noteworthy that Microliths are associated with polished stone celts. This has been proved from a carefully conducted excavation at Brahmagiri in Mysore State. This site is remarkable for its culture continuity extending from the polished stone axe culture to early historic cultures. Whether, in India, there was any break or not in this continuity from Paleolithic through the so-called Mesolithic to Neolithic requires more careful investigation. In Europe and elsewhere this continuity prevailed, the Mesolithic merging into the Neolithic when the art of grinding and polishing stone tools became generally known together with domestication of animals and plants. The great revolution from food-gathering to food-producing, typical of the Neolithic, had a long transition. In Palestine have been discovered mounted on bone handles Microlithic sickle blades with that peculiar gloss consequent on cutting grass and plant.
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In India it is exceedingly difficult to reconstruct the Neolithic complex. This difficulty has been pertinently pointed out by Zeuner. Not much evidence is available for the domestication of plants from our sites. The study of skeletal material with a view to differentiate wild species from domesticated ones should go a long way to throw light on the problem. But large quantities of polished stone axes, adzes and chisels come from all our so-called Neolithic sites in Bellary, Mysore, ‘Hyderabad’ and other parts of the Deccan. Since the material for these tools came from trap dykes, the sites and settlements of these people are situated in the neighbourhood of these dykes. As yet excavation has been confined to three important sites: Sanganakallu near Bellary town, Brahmagiri in North Mysore, and Burzahom in Kashmir. At Brahmagiri two phases of the polished stone axe culture have been distinguished on the basis of pottery and also by the presence of a sterile layer. The authors of this culture besides using Neolithic celts and Microliths, had knowledge of the working of copper and bronze though in a restricted degree. The pottery study at Brahmagiri and Sanganakallu relating to this culture is of great value to the student of the prehistoric cultures of India. Sanganakallu has yielded evidence of fresh stone axes, a fine Microlithic industry, and pale grey ceramic ware decidedly earlier than though apparently of the same culture complex as Brahmagiri, and going back to 1000 B.C. or beyond, dubbed ‘True Neolithic’ by Subba Rao.
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The problem of the ‘shouldered celt’ is not to be mixed up with the ‘pointed butt’ type; very probably it was confined to an Austric people who had more affinities with the peoples and cultures of Indo-China and Malay Peninsula.
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The date of the rock-paintings of peninsular India was at one time thought to go back to the Stone Stage. But recent studies assign them to a later period when iron had come into common use. A considerable number of paintings have been found in the Mahadeo Hills from Tamiā on the east to just south of Seoni-Malwa in the west; the latest of them are believed to be of the tenth century A.D., and it has been held unlikely that any are earlier than the seventh century B.C., but certainly not beyond the limits of the first millennium B.C. The paintings back to the earliest series show obvious metal arrowheads. The rock-paintings of Singhanpur and Kābrā Pahār ‘Raigarh State’ (Madhya Pradesh) have been connected with the earlier paintings of the Mahadeo Hills; they are probably contemporary with part of the Microliths found in their immediate vicinity, and this applies also to the shelters, paintings and Microliths of the Son Valley.
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Lastly, the Megaliths of South India present a series of questions that have found no satisfactory answer as yet. Their existence has been noticed for well over a century, and some investigations were made in the early years of this century at Ādichanallur (Tinnevelly district), Perumbair and the Nilgiris. But the work was not followed up. It is only since 1945 that the Indian Archæological Department has resumed systematic work on these monuments. A detailed ground survey has been conducted in the Chingleput district and adjoining areas, Pudukkottai, and Cochin; and a few monuments have been excavated. The monuments of each of these areas apparently belong to a common Megalithic complex; the dead were exposed for excarnation, and the bones were collected in part and interred in different ways—in sarcophagi with legs, in urns, in pits or dolmenoid cists with port-holes, besides circular rock-cut underground vaults with or without a central pillar (typical of the West Coast). Without stopping to note these differences in detail, we may observe that iron implements and polished black-and-red ware pottery are generally found all over. ‘These monuments have invariably been found to occur on rocky high grounds which are themselves unfit for cultivation, in close juxtaposition to a hillock and an irrigation-tank, but in very close proximity to arable land’ (Srinivasan and Banerjee). This was perhaps the beginning of irrigated rice-cultivation in South India.
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On the data obtained at Brahmagiri in Mysore, Maski in Raichur district and Porkalam in Travancore-Cochin, Sanur, Amritamangalam and Kunrathūr in Chingleput, this culture is thought to have been introduced by an iron-using people from the south some time between 300 B.C. and the middle of the first century A.D.; and 800 B.C. has been suggested as the earliest possible date for the first occupation of Brahmagiri. The date suggested for the commencement of Megalithic culture appears, however, to be rather too late; Gordon’s date some time between 700 and 400 B.C. sounds better, but it may go still further back.
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Many of the South Indian Megaliths show a similarity, seemingly amounting to kinship, with Megaliths in other parts of the world—in the lands bordering upon the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, in the Caucasus, in Iran. The monuments in Europe have yielded Stone Stage implements on the basis of which they have been dated to about 2000 B.C. and the dolmens in the Caucasus area are assigned to a somewhat later date, 1500 B.C. Between Iran and India lies a vast expanse of space without any known trace of Megalithic monuments. While the distribution of Megaliths in the West is coastal, elsewhere, particularly in India, this culture penetrated far into the interior, and they generally contain iron implements. In spite of these rather wide gaps, spatial and chronological, Gordon Childe has suggested that ‘Sialk B (graves in Iran) might be used to link with the west, with the Caucasus or Palestine, the celebrated Indian dolmens; for these too may at least be entered through port-hole slabs.’ He adds:
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* But they are concentrated in the south of the Peninsula in areas not likely to be affected by land borne impulses from Iran, but exposed rather to maritime influences. If their distribution do suggest inspiration from the West, that must surely have come by sea.'
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At Ādichanallur in Tinnevelly district another class of interments, urn-burials without any Megalithic appendage in the form of a bounding circle or otherwise, has been found in large numbers; though they cannot be brought strictly into the orbit of Megalithic monuments, they seem to be somehow related to them as iron implements, black-and-red ware, and fragmentary burials are common to both. There are other notable differences also. The pottery of Ādichanallur is more primitive than the Megalithic pottery of the other sites. There is found here also a quantity of bronze ware and gold diadems or mouth pieces not found elsewhere in South India but having typological parallels in Palestine about 1200 B.C. as also in Syria and Cyprus. Among the tombs of the early Iron-Age of the time of Solomon in Palestine an outstanding find was a remarkable three-pronged iron fork or trident similar to the Ādichanallur tridents in the same metal. And the eastern Mediterranean has been suggested by Childe as the region where the Megalithic complex originated, presuming that it had a single origin at all. But it is difficult as yet to say exactly when and in what order the urn-burials and the dolmen and port-hole slab reached the Indian peninsula. It seems to be clear that this iron-using culture did not grow out of the earlier Neolithic culture.
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The evidence from Ādichanallur also appears to suggest that the worship of Murugan or Velan, a popular deity with the Tamils from very early times, was known at the time. The god's favourite weapon was the *vēl* (trident) and his banner carried a wild fowl as his emblem. Besides iron tridents, there have been found at Ādichanallur iron banner-bases and representations of fowls in bronze. The practice of wearing mouth pieces, still maintained by devotees carrying *Kāvadi* to the shrine of Murugan in the Palni Hills, may well be a survival from prehistoric times.
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The people of Ādichanallur cultivated rice; several earthenware bowls containing the husk of paddy and bronze bowls with grains of rice in them have been found.
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The Nilgiri cairns and barrows are different from the Megaliths of the plain in their structural details and pottery. The bronze vases and bowls found there were thought by Richards to have a philogenetic connexion with a gold bowl from Ur discovered by Woolley. Other likenesses were also discovered by the earlier archæologists, but until their work is checked again and confirmed by fresh studies, no conclusions can be drawn from such vague and stray data.
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We turn now to a brief consideration of the racial composition of the population. We do not know to which stock the men of the Paleolithic Stage in South India belonged, as no human skeleton associated with this culture has yet been discovered in peninsular India, apart from a tibia at Attirampākkam (Chingleput). At Vadnagar in Baroda a fossil skeleton of a Pygmy man, thirty inches in height, was discovered in 1935; in this skeleton we probably have the earliest representative of the negrito in India. The negrito is a diminutive type of negro which, rising in Africa like the negro, passed through India eastward, and is found in the Andamans associated with a prelithic stage of culture. There is reason to hold that a large part of peninsular India was inhabited by this type for a considerable period of the old Stone Stage. The occurrence of dwarfish woolly-haired individuals with more or less round heads among the Kādars of Parambikkulam and the Pulaiyans of the adjoining Ānaimalai hills in the extreme south of the peninsula may be taken to attest the influence of this early negrito type. Designs on the bamboo combs of the Semangs, a negrito people of Malaya, seem to be identical with those on the combs used by Kādar women, a fact suggesting that originally the Kādars and the Semangs shared the same culture and possibly even belonged to the same ethnic group which underwent a change in India in consequence of the later advent of long-headed peoples.
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Next must be mentioned the proto-Australoid element with long heads, protruding faces, broad flat noses and pronounced brow-ridges. There is no early evidence from India supporting the presence of this element; but evidence from neighbouring lands, too complicated to be set out here, strongly supports the assumption of its presence in India. There is no doubt that the bronze figure of a dancing girl from Mohenjo-Daro has unmistakable proto-Australoid features; her coiffure is strongly reminiscent of the coiffure of the present-day proto-Australoid jungle-folk of Central and Southern India. In South India this element generally entered into the composition of the so-called exterior castes and forms the basis of jungle-folk like the Chenchus, Malayans, Kādars, Kurumbas, and Yeruvas.
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A third element is furnished by the proto-Mediterranean type with its long narrow head and face, nose of medium length and straight or aquiline shape, and dark brown hair. This is the dominant type among the Dravidian-speaking peoples of South India at the present day.
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As there was perhaps no break in continuity between the Mesolithic and Neolithic Stages, it seems safe to conclude that the people of the Neolithic Stage were the descendants of the proto-Mediterranean stock. Proto-Mediterranean was also the prevailing type at Ādichanallur and in the iron-age cairns of the Deccan.
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Another racial element that is traceable has been called Mediterranean and seems to have been the major element among the mixed population of the Indus valley. Slender build, short to medium height, a long head, small brow-ridge, an oval face and, usually, a pointed chin are its dominant characteristics. Typical examples of this stock occur most frequently today among the Telugu Brahmins, and the Kallars. If the Mediterranean type was not evolved from the proto-Mediterranean in India, but represented an imported strain as it seems to have done, then its arrival in India has to be placed in late Neolithic times.
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In certain parts of South India the basic long-headed element represented by the proto-Mediterranean and Mediterranean has been overlaid by a short-headed element. Its occurrence is greatest in Mahārāshtra and can be traced through the Mysore plateau into Tamilnad beyond. It has affected Andhradeśa slightly but has left Kerala untouched. This short-headed element is of two main types, the Alpine and the Armenoid which is a specialized variety of the Alpine. The Alpines are concave or straight-nosed, square-jawed people with globular heads. They were in evidence in the Indus valley during chalcolithic times, and are now traceable in Gujarat, Mahārāshtra, Coorg and Karnātaka.
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The Armenoid type is short-headed with a markedly convex high-bridged nose, and a high-vaulted head rising steeply from the nape of the neck. This type seems to have been evolved in south-west Asia. These characteristics are now found, though both seldom occur together in the same individual, among peoples inhabiting the mountainous tract extending from the Pamirs and the western flanks of the Himalaya to the mountains of Anatolia.
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In South India the Armenoid type is found especially among the Tamil-speaking people. But this type could not have arisen in South India. The present home of this type—the wide tract of Asia stretching from the Pamirs to the Levant—must also have been its original home, that is to say the area of its characterization. According to Keith, the Armenoid in India is the result of an early trade migration from Persia (Iran) or an adjacent country along the Persian Gulf. Round-headedness among the Tamils can be traced through the Deccan, Gujarat and Sind into the eastern portions of the Iranian plateau where there is a striking group of round-heads. In Iran they are more numerous in the uplands than in the plains. Some writers postulate a connexion between these round-heads of the Iranian plateau and uplands and the Dravidian-speakers of India, a connexion borne out by resemblances between the culture of the Caspians, the earliest inhabitants of the highlands of Iran, and the Dravidian-speakers.
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The fact that Andhradeśa and Kerala—Andhradeśa to a lesser degree than Kerala—are free from the round-headed (Alpine-Armenoid) element, shows that it came in by way of Sind, Gujarat and Mahārāshtra, and broke into Tamilnad over south-eastern Mysore. If numbers be any criterion, the round-heads who constitute a small percentage when compared with the basic long-heads (proto-Mediterranean and Mediterranean) are later arrivals in India—a conclusion supported by the evidence on the succession of race strata elsewhere.
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Lastly, there remains to be noticed another progressive long-headed element, the Nordic, which entered South India in late prehistoric or proto-historic times. Deriving from the same original stock, the Mediterranean and the Nordic show resemblances in the shape of their heads; but whereas the Mediterranean head is small, the Nordic is massive. The largest percentage of this element in South India is found among the Chitpavan or Konkanastha Brahmins. Its presence among Tamil Brahmins is not entirely unknown.
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It remains to add that another type of round-headedness, different from that of Alpine-Armenoid and akin to the Mongolian, has also been noticed in South India, though only in a very slight degree, from Orissa in the east to Malabar in the west; this is supposed to be the result of an oceanic migration in prehistoric times.
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The languages of South India fall into three main groups—the Indo-Aryan represented by Marāthi, the Dravidian represented by Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayālam besides Gondi and other minor dialects, and the Austro-Asiatic by the Munda languages including Kharia, Juang, Savara and Gadaba of the north-eastern portions of the Deccan, the Kurku of the north-western districts of Madhya Pradesh. Though the Indo-Aryan vocabulary shows traces of Munda influence, the number of Dravidian loan-words in it is much larger and the conclusion seems inevitable that the Dravidian group of languages is more recent than the Austro-Asiatic which is usually recognized as pre-Dravidian. There is no doubt that at one time the Munda languages spread over the whole of North India, for they form the basis of a number of mixed languages along the Himalayan fringe from the Punjab to Bengal. But the Dravidian languages have also left survivals in north-western India, including the islet of Brahui in Baluchistan in an ocean of Indo-Aryan. Hence this group of languages may have prevailed in the north-west at the time the Indo-Aryans arrived. If this view is correct, throughout the bulk of India, Dravidian speech was preceded by Austro-Asiatic and followed by Indo-Aryan. Von Fuerer-Haimendorf, however, has, with good reason, questioned the correctness of this view, and held that the Dravidian speech never prevailed in India outside its present area. Brahui in Baluchistan, he thinks, can be explained by a migration of Dravidian speakers on land or by sea along the coast from more western lands.
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Munda languages now survive also in the Mahadeo Hills of Madhya Pradesh and are found as far south as the Godāvari; they must have prevailed at one time over the whole of the Deccan, for Bhili shows Munda affinities. Whether they extended farther south cannot be determined at present; a few tribes in the extreme south like the Kakkalans of Travancore are said to possess languages peculiar to themselves, but how far, if at all, they include Munda elements is not known.
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There is a divergence of opinion among scholars as to which particular race was responsible for the introduction of the Austro-Asiatic languages into India. The proto-Australoid, the Mongolian and the proto-Mediterranean have all been suggested by different writers. Racial prehistory when correlated with linguistic prehistory seems to suggest the following provisional general conclusions. Indo-Aryan was the latest language family to reach India, and it seems reasonable to ascribe it to the Nordics, the last ethnic element to arrive. But the Nordics were by no means a pure stock when they entered India; on their way they must have absorbed much of the Alpine element of the Pamirs and their neighbourhood. For a similar reason, Dravidian must have been the speech of the round-heads, particularly the Armenoids who represent the earlier amongst the two strata of round-heads in India, and Austric the language of the Mediterraneans. About the language of the other ethnic elements noted above we have no knowledge.
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Dravidian language and culture hark back to the highlands of Anatolia, Armenia and Iran, the area of characterization of the Armenoid type. The script of the Indus valley seals has not yet been satisfactorily deciphered, and this casts a shadow of doubt over all the problems of pre-Aryan Indian culture. Yet there are not wanting many indications that point to some connexion between the great culture-complex that spread from the Mediterranean to the Indus valley in the third and second millennia B.C. and the prehistoric culture of South India. The name Trimmlai by which the Lycians of Asia Minor called themselves in their inscriptions is a very close approach to Dramila (Tamil). Caldwell indicated a connexion between Susian and Dravidian as regards structure. A large number of ancient place-names in Afghanistan, the highlands of Iran, the plains of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and Mesopotamia generally, have been shown to conform to Dravidian forms, and the non-Semitic, non-Aryan prehistoric peoples of this region have been held to have been Dravidian-speaking. The Hurrian and Kassite languages possess a clearly demonstrable affinity with Dravidian. One writer has connected Elamite and Brahui. The conclusion seems unavoidable that there is some genetic connexion between all these languages. Western Asia being the home of Elamite, it seems not unlikely that the Dravidian or rather proto-Dravidian language and its speakers also reached India from this part of the world.
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A number of cultural affinities enforce this conclusion suggested by linguistic data. Inheritance through women which still survives in Dravidian India was in vogue among the Elamites, the earliest branch of the ‘Caspian’ to emerge into history. There is evidence of the prevalence of the snake-cult in the earliest pre-historic stratum at Persepolis; Dravidian-speaking India is the stronghold of snake worship at the present day. The worship of the Mother-goddess under the name ‘Lady of the Mountain’ and the annual celebration of her nuptials with the Moon-god of Ur closely resemble the Indian worship of Pārvati in her various forms and the annual celebration of the *tirukkalyāṇam* (divine marriage) in South Indian Śiva temples; in fact the resemblance is so close that, in spite of the absence of any direct proof of connexion, it is difficult to believe that it is accidental. Again, the nature of the worship offered in the temples of ancient Sumeria and the organization and even the structure of the temple itself have much in common with what has prevailed in South India to this day, allowance being made for the changes that naturally flowed from the increasing aversion to meat-eating among the higher classes of India. ‘The essence of worship,’ says Leonard Woolley, of ancient Sumer, ‘was sacrifice, and by the ritual of sacrifice the cooked flesh of the animal was shared between the god, his priests and the worshipper; the kitchen was therefore not the least important part of the temple, and at all times of the day the fires would be burning and the priests would be overseeing the slaves who carried on the work of butchers, bakers, scullions and cooks.’ Numerous medieval inscriptions of southern India bear abundant testimony to the readiness of the people to enrol themselves as the slaves of a neighbouring temple and bind their descendants also to the same status. The institution of *devadāsis* common in South India was well known in ancient Sumer. Again, what can be more accurate as a description of the form and spirit of worship in the Indian temple of today, of the *rājopacāra* offered to the image of God, than this account given by Woolley of worship in the Sumerian temple: ‘Where the God was also the King, where church and state were so nearly synonymous, material efficiency was only too likely to get the better of faith. Long life and well-being in this world was the reward men asked in return for formal service such as they might have rendered to a human overlord, and they regarded the wealth and prosperity of the Moon-god as a pledge for the welfare of the city.’ The temple and the palace are both indicated by one word *kōyil* in Tamil, and *prāsāda* in Sanskrit, and it is universally recognized that temple-worship was not part of the original Vedic religion.
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It must be admitted that much of this evidence on which the old approach to the Dravidian problem was based is vague and circumstantial, and furnishes no reliable chronological framework. Not so the recent and very plausible attempt of Fuerer-Haimendorf to equate the Dravidian-speakers with the iron-using Megalithic folk who came to South India from the west by sea, perhaps leaving colonies along the coast in the course of their migration—which may account for the Megaliths near Karachi and Brahui in Baluchistan. He thinks that an immigration of Dravidian speakers about 500 B.C. would allow sufficient time for the development of the early Tamil Literature of the Śangam; but this may well be doubted and the mention of four well-ordered Tamil Kingdoms in the Aśoka inscriptions may also indicate the need for postulating an earlier date. This view suggests that the Dravidian civilization of South India is much younger than has been supposed, and that the Aryan occupation of the North and the Dravidian occupation of the South were more or less contemporary. Haimendorf writes: ‘It is in Mahārāshtra that the megalithic iron-age civilization must have clashed with the southward movements of the first Aryan people to invade the Deccan’; this suggestion gains some support from the Agastya legends centering round Vātāpi (Bādāmi) as will be seen in the next chapter. But the whole question needs further study and it is too early yet to decide if the postulate of Haimendorf should be accepted as it is or should be modified suitably to take into account the other racial and cultural data briefly reviewed above.
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A. AIYAPPAN: ‘Mesolithic Artefacts from Sawyerpuram in Tinnevelly Dt., S. India’ (*Spolia Zeylania*, Vol. 24, Pt. 2, 1945)
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J. C. BROWN: *Catalogue of Prehistoric Antiquities in the Indian Museum, Calcutta* (Simla, 1917)
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BP. CALDWELL: *Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages* (London, 1913)
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L. A. CAMMIADE: ‘Pygmy Implements of the Lower Godavari’ (*Man in India*, IV)
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—: ‘Prehistoric Man in India and the Karnul Bone Caves’ (*Man in India*, VII, No. 1-12)
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L. A. CAMMIADE AND M. G. BURKITT: ‘Fresh Light on the Stone Ages in South-east India’ (*Antiquity*, Vol. IV, 1930)
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S. N. CHAKRAVARTI: ‘The Prehistoric Periods in India’ (*Journal of the University of Bombay*, Vol. X, Pt. I, July 1941)
c8.47
—: ‘An Outline of the Stone Age in India’ (*JRASB Letters* X. i. 1944)
c8.48
V. GORDON CHILDE: ‘Megaliths’ (*Ancient India*, No. 4, July 1947-January 1948)
c8.49
H. DE TERRA AND T. T. PATTERSON: *Studies in the Ice Age in India and Associated Human Cultures* (Carnegie Institute of Washington, Pub. No. 493, Washington, 1939)
c8.50
—: ‘The Siwaliks of India and Early Man’ (*Early Man*, 1939)
c8.51
R. B. FOOTE: *The Foote Collection of India, Prehistoric and Protohistoric Antiquities, Catalogue Raisonné*, (Govt. Museum, Madras, 1914)
c8.52
—: ‘Notes on Their Ages and Distribution’ (Govt. Museum, Madras, 1916)
c8.53
D. H. GORDON: ‘Early Use of Metals in India and Pakistan’ (*Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute*, 1952)
c8.54
—: ‘The Stone Industries of the Holocene in India and Pakistan’ (*Ancient India*, No. 6, Jan. 1950)
c8.55
B. S. GUHA: *Racial Elements in the Population* (Bombay, 1944)
c8.56
CHRISTOPHER VON FUERER-HAIMENDORF: ‘When, How and From Where Did the Dravidians Come to India?’ (*The Indo-Asian Culture*, Vol. II, No. 3, January 1954, pp. 238-47)
c8.57
E. HERZFELD AND A. B. KEITH: ‘Iran as a Prehistoric Centre’ in A. U. Pope’s *Survey of Persian Art*, Vol. I, Ch. II (Oxford)
c8.58
J. H. HUTTON: *Census of India, 1931*, Vol. I, Pt. I
c8.59
V. D. KRISHNASWAMI: ‘Megalithic Types of South India’ (*Ancient India*, No. 5, Jan. 1949)
c8.60
—: ‘Progress in Pre-history’ (*Ancient India*, Special Jubilee Number 9, 1953)
c8.61
—: ‘Environmental and Cultural Changes of Pre-historic Man near Madras’ (*Journal of the Madras Geographical Association*, Vol. XIII, pp. 58-90, 1938)
c8.62
—: ‘Prehistoric Man Round Madras’ (*Indian Academy of Sciences*, Madras Meeting, 1938)
c8.63
B. B. LAL: ‘Protohistoric Investigation’ (*Ancient India*, No. 9, 1953)
c8.64
H. L. MOVIUS (JR.): ‘Early Man and Pleistocene Stratigraphy in Southern and Eastern Asia’ (*Peabody Museum Paper* XIX, No. 3, 1-25)
c8.65
STUART PIGGOTT: *Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C.*, (London, 1950)
c8.66
L. V. RAMASWAMI AIYAR: ‘Dravidic Place-names in the Plateau of Persia’ (*QJMS*, Vol. XX, Bangalore, 1929-30)
c8.67
H. D. SANKALIA: *Investigations into the Prehistoric Archaeology of Gujarat* (Sri Pratapa Simha Maharaj Rajyabhisheka Grantha Mala, Memoir IV, Baroda State Press, 1946)
c8.68
H. D. SANKALIA AND I. KARVE: ‘The Second Gujarat Prehistoric Expedition’ (*New Indian Antiquary*, Vol. IV, No. 4)
c8.69
—: ‘Preliminary Report on the Third Gujarat Prehistoric Expedition and Human Remains Discovered So Far’ (*Times of India Press*, 1945)
c8.70
K. A. N. SASTRI: ‘Southern India, Arabia and Africa’ (*New Indian Antiquary*, Vol. I, 1938)
c8.71
M. SESHADRI: ‘Microlithic Industries of Mysore’ (*Annual Report of the Institute of Archaeology*, London, 1953)
c8.72
M. SESHADRI: ‘New Light on Megalithic Dating in India’ (*Journal of the Mysore University [Arts]* 1956) —: *Prehistoric and Protohistoric Mysore*, (London, 1956) —: ‘The Paleolithic Industry of Kibbanahalli’ (Mysore State), (*Artibus Asiae*, 1955, xviii, pp. 271-87) K. R. SRINIVASAN AND N. R. BANERJEE: ‘Survey of South Indian Megaliths’ (*Ancient India*, No. 9, 1953) B. SUBBA RAO: *The Personality of India*, (Baroda, 1956) B. K. THAPAR: ‘Porkalam 1948: Excavation of a Megalithic Urn-burial’ (*Ancient India*, No. 8, 1952) K. R. U. TODD: ‘Prehistoric Man Round Bombay’ (*Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia*, Vol. VII, Ipswich, 1932) —: ‘Paleolithic Industries of Bombay’ (*Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute*, Vol. LXIX, London, 1939) —: ‘The Microlithic Industries of Bombay’ (*Ancient India*, No. 6, Jan. 1950) R. E. M. WHEELER: ‘Brahmagiri and Chandravalli, 1947’ (*Ancient India*, No. 4, July 1947-January 1948) F. E. ZEUNER: ‘The Microlithic Industry of Langhnaj, Gujarat’ (*Man*, article No. 182, September 1952)