Book Title: Indian Antiquary Vol 48
Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications
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MAY, 1919)
NEW LIGHT FROM PREHISTORIC INDIA
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NEW LIGHT FROM PRE HISTORIC INDIA. BY PROF. PANCHANAN MITRA, M.A.; CALCUTTA.
1.-Scripts and Signs from Indian Neoliths. In the course of my studies of the prehistoric artifacts of India deposited in the Indian Museum (as arranged and catalogued recently by Mr. Coggin Brown), I began to come across distinct marks os etchings on some neolithic specimens. A list of these marks is given here and they are of special interest; not so much as giving us "marks": sometimes similar to those found by Mr. Yazdani from the prehistoric pottery of the Madras Museum (vide the Journal of the Hyderabad Archeological Society, 1917, pp. 56---79), as being almost identical with some signs and scripts of prehistoric Egypt. Already the systematic search in Southern and Western Europe has brought to light marks belonging to prehistoric ages from various parts of the Iberian peninsula. Thus Estacio la Viega! found them from Fonte Velha near Bensafrim, from Portella, the harbourside of Bartholomew de Messines, from Monte de Boi, from the environments of Martin Longo and other places of the provinces of Algarve and Almetjo and also in Minho and Traz09-Montes. So also Delgado 2 reports similar marks' from Alcala del Rio, northward of Seville and Gongora Y Martinez, 3 from Fuencaliente, the cave of the Letreros, cavern of Cero del Sol and other places of Andalusia. And the seven signs from Pouca d'Aguiar in the province of Traz-os-Montes in Portugal have been ascertained to be of alphabetic value and even to indicate a prayer to the Sun-god by Severo. These belong to the early Neolithic period there, which is reckoned roughly as belonging at least to 5000 B.C. 5
Similarly when dealing with the later brilliant Bronze Age of the Ægean culture area in the Histoire Ancienne dans l'Antiquite, in 1894, Monsieur Perrot had felt justified in summing up as follows:-"The first characteristic which attracts the historian's notice when he tries to define pre-Homeric civilisation is that it is a stranger to the use of writing. It knows neither the ideographic signs possessed by Egypt and Chaldæa, nor the alphabet properly so called, which Greece was afterwards to borrow." Yet in 1893-4 seal-stones began to be discovered in Greece by Greville Chester 7 and Crete by Evans, and by the year 1895 it was possible to conclude, not only that the engravings of certain soalstones showed all the characteristics of a system of writing, but even that the script was of the nature of a syHabary. If such was the state of affairs in Europe, no wonder that the reviewer of the Megalithic monuments of the Deccan would pass on with a hasty mention of some cup-markings, 8 and Breeks in his classic Primitive Tribes of the Neilgheries, while giving us a plate photographing a prehistoric cromlech at Melur with some evident inscriptions, did not care to describe what it was. But the pity is even
Antiguidades Monumentales de Algarve, Vol. 4, pp. 275, 285, 286-8. • Nuove metodo de classificacion de las medallas autonomes de Espana, Book I, p. 132. 3 Ant. preist. de Andalausia (Madrid, 1868), pp. 65, 67, 73, 131. 4 As necropoles dolmenicas de Traz-os-Montes (1903), Vol. I, pp. 757.
3 Vide Sudwest Europaische Megalith kultur und ihre Beziehungen zum Orient, by Dr. G. Wilke, (1912), p. 46.
6 English Translation, p. vi. 1 Vide Man, 1903, Art. No. 28. 8 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1870, p 58.
