Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
- A new research paper has provided some new insight on the linguistic culture of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC)
- Earlier, a study found that the diet of the people of IVC had a dominance of meat, including extensive eating of beef.
- In July 2021, UNESCO announced the Harappan city of Dholavira in Gujarat as India’s 40th world heritage site.
Important points:
- IVCs have their language roots in Proto-Dravidian, which is the ancestral language of all the modern Dravidian languages.
- The basic vocabulary items of a significant population of the IVC must have been proto-Dravidian, or that ancestral Dravidian languages must have been spoken in the Indus Valley region.
- The speakers of ancestral Dravidian languages had a greater historic presence in northern India including the Indus Valley region from where they migrated.
- Proto-Dravidian was one among several languages being spoken in the Indus Valley region.
- The research claims that there were more than one or one group of languages spoken across the one-million square kilometre area of IVC.
IVC & Other Civilizations:
- Few words in Akkadian (language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia) had roots in the Indus Valley.
- The study took into account the thriving trade relations between the IVC and the Persian Gulf as well as Mesopotamia.
- Mesopotamian civilizations formed on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is today Iraq and Kuwait.
- Elephant-ivory was one of the luxury goods coveted in the Near East, and archaeological, and zoological evidence confirms that Indus Valley was the sole supplier of ancient Near East’s ivory in the middle-third to early-second millennium BC.
- Near East, usually the lands around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, including northeastern Africa, southwestern Asia, and, occasionally, the Balkan Peninsula
- Since people of ancient Persia had functioned as intermediaries between Mesopotamia and IVC traders, while exporting IVC’s ivory, they had arguably spread the Indic words to Mesopotamia as well.
Important Sites:
- Kalibangan (Rajasthan), Lothal, Dholavira, Rangpur, Surkotda (Gujarat), Banawali (Haryana), Ropar (Punjab).
- In Pakistan: Harappa (on river Ravi), Mohenjodaro (on Indus River in Sindh), Chanhudaro (in Sindh).
SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT
