Indian Antiquary Vol 06

SR No.: 032498
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jas Burgess
Publisher: Swati Publications
Publication Year: 1984
Total Pages: 458
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 21 MB

Page 335

SEPTEMBER, 1877.]
CORRESPONDENCE AND MISCELLANEA.
275
through your columns, to all those who may happen to possess specimens of any of the types enumerated below, for their contributions to the publication in question.
The plates for Sir W. Elliot's article will be delayed, pending a reasonable interval, to test the result of this ap lication, or will otherwise be supplemented by woodcuts illustrating the more tardy arrivals.
I have been permitted to examine and avail my. self of the information I have obtained from the Kolhapur collection, which has already formed the subject of an article for the Journal of the Bombay Branch Royal Asiatic Society by Bhagvanlal Indraji. I have expressly reserved myself from any inspection of his paper, which is in the hands of Dr. Codrington, in order that I might give you my free and independent interpretation of the legends on the coins themselves, and the inductions I have arrived at in regard to their bearing upon an important social question in India of olden time.
I allude to the ascendancy of women. Some indication of such state of things was to be gathered from the inscriptions in the Nasik caves, so ably translated by Professor Bhandarkar in the Transactions of the International Congress of Orientalists in London. The coins, however, very materially extend and confirm the references to the acknowledged supremacy of the female line in royal houses, and lead up to & much more extended inquiry as to the parallel practices of other cognate or associate nations.
Our earliest intimation of the existence of such customs is derived from Herodotus, who testifies to its exceptional currency with the Lycians, but it is clear that similar ideas prevailed among (perhaps extended to the Etruscans.
Herodotus' statement is as follows:
"The Lycians are, in good truth, anciently from Crete; which island, in former days, was wholly peopled with barbarians . . . . Milyas was the ancient name of the country now inhabit
ed by the Lycians: the Milya of the present day were in those times called Solymi.... Their customs are partly Cretan, partly Carian. They have, however, one singular custom in which they differ from every other nation in the world. They take the mother's and not the father's name. Ask a Lycian who he is, and he answers by giving his own name, that of his mother, and so on in the female line."'+
There need be no reserve in admitting that Hetairism held an important place in the earlier civilization of India, and indeed constituted a potent feature in the state policy. I
Polyandry and polygamy equally prevailed in ncient times, as we learn from the annals of the Mahabharata, where Arjuna is seen to have brought home a new wife in addition to his onefifth share of the charms of Draupadi, who was held in common by the joint brotherhood. I will loave our native friends, who are so much more at home in such matters, to follow out these investigations, and conclude this section of the inquiry by drawing attention to the curious identity of the rights of females in Australia country linguistically and otherwise associated with the Indian Peninsula, and once, if we are to credit geologists, even constituting a continuation of the continent itself. “The Australians (according to Sir G. Grey) are divided into great clans, and use the clan name as a sort of surname beside the individual name. Children take the family name of the mother, and a man cannot marry a woman of his own name : so that here it would seem that only relationship by the female side is taken into account. One effect of the division of clans in this way is that the children of the same father by different wives, having different names, may be obliged to take opposite sides in a quarrel."
Sir G. Grey further remarked upon "the practice of reckoning clanship from the mother, and the prohibition of marriage within the clan, as all bearing a striking resemblance to similar usages found among the natives of North America."
• The mention of the mother's name after the father is a genuine Etruscanism. It is general in Etruscan epitaphs, and was retained even under Roman domination, for some Barcophagi bear similar epitaphs in Latin with natus affixed to the mother's name. (Dennis's Etruria, vol. I. p. 133.) "Her rate was honoured with even more splendour than that of her lord" (p. lxi.; conf. aloe vol. II. p. 170.) This custom the Etruscans must have derived from the East as it was not practised by the Greeks or R ans; but the Lycisns always traced their descent through the maternal line, to the total exclusion of the paternal- fact recorded by Herodotus, and verified by modern researches-Fellows's Lycia, p. 276. The Etruscans, being less purely Oriental, made use of both methods, ib. vol. I. P. 183 ; see also vol. I. pp. xli. xliii: "TusOos Asis sibi vindirat" -Seneca, vi. 9; Hor. Sat. 6, &c.
"Of marriages, no representation which has not a mythi. cal reference has yet been found on the sepulchrul urns of Etruris, though most of the early writers on these antiqui. ties mistook the farewell soenes, presently to be described,
where persona of opposite sexes stand hand in hand, for scenes of nuptial festivity."-Dennis's Etruria, vol. II. p. 189.
Rawlinson's edition, vol. I. p. 173. I Bachofen and McLennan, two of the most recent authors who have stadied this subject, both agree that the primitive condition of man, socially, was une of pare Hetairism, when marriage did not exist; or, as we may perhaps for convenience call it, communal marriage, where every man and women in a small community were regardod as equally married to one another. Bachofen considers that after a while the women, shocked and scandalized by such a state of things, revolted against it, and established a system of marriage with female supremacy, the husband being subject to the wife, property and descent being con. sidered to go in the fernale line, and women enjoying the principal share of political power. The first period he calls that of Hetairism the second of Mutterrecht, or mother right.- Sir J. Labbock's Origin of Civilieation, p. 67.
L. B. Tylor, Early History of Mankind (1865), p. 280.