Sunday, September 8, 2019

The Burushaski civilisation

Turtle Island is discussing Rakhigarhi. He notes that "Peripheral Indus" - that is, Bronze Age Indus - is its own farming-group, independent of the "Iranian" plateau both in its modern Iranian form and in its existence before the Iranian peoples showed up (Elamite, I guess). Where he adds his own observation, is that the autochthonous Indus was less South Indian than it is today.

Turtle Island believes that Ockham's Razor is best applied if we accept that the Dravidian languages had always been South Indian, and that a few of them trickled up north to contribute to the multicultural Indus. They'd be following the same path as the Brahui later, and the Gypsy Dom/Romani later still. I would allow that some Dravidian language or languages were, indeed spoken in the Indus cities...

... but that these languages were not dominant. Dravidian is unlikely to be recorded in any of such official inscriptions as we have, which so far are (notoriously) just seal-impressions. We are, still, doing better with Linear Elamite per François Desset.

So if Dravidian was a minority tongue in the Indus then as today... what was the majority? We can wholly rule out any flavour of Elamite, and the Aryans.

I'd have to go with Burushaski.

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