Indian Antiquary Vol 48

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 65

MAY, 1919]
NEW LIGHT FROM PRE ISTORIC INDIA
61
tound wild, so anthropologists would tend strongly in favour of the land as the primitive and original home where the earliest wild stages are still as unmistakably found as the later higher developments clearly missed. Lastly, it must be remembered that if Petrie's arguments that proto-Egypt is the ultimate source of all prehistoric signs in Europe and Africa, as it possesses the largest number, is sound, prehistoric India is in a much more vantage ground, as Mr. Yazdani's already published signs, together with the signs found later by himself and me, far outweigh in number those from Egypt.
With these words I pass on to the other remarkable artifact, the piece of red earthy hæmatite whose very make suggests to Egyptian hieroglyph for representing roughly a t o sound joined to the symbol for aah' a . Its immediate deciphering speaks volumes of the soundness of the Indian palæography as well as the epigraphic abilities of Prof. D. R. Bhandarkar, whose reading has been more than amply justified by the hieroglyphic indication of the value of the artifact itself as well as independent evidence from another quarter. I may mention here that another small beautifully shaped Neolith (Catalogue No. 20991) is identical in shape with the Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for "R'd" or "R'j."
Coming now to the script itself, we start with the clue of the hieroglyphic determinative which gives us the idea that the word is an "aah-ta" ending word, so if any doubt remain that the word was to be read from the left to the right is at once done away with and we also get the value of the large symbol as "TA" and we have already stated that Prof. Bhandarkar's reading from the purely Indian palæographic standpoint gave us the identical value when it was taken for granted that it was a reverse Brahmi " Ta", whose existence has always been pre-supposed from the older manner of writing of the Brahmi script notably in Eran. Similarly the first symbol on the extreme right was once for all settled for "Ma" though the right hand horn on the loop forming a straight line with the right hand side of the loop itself showed that it was of considerable antiquity-much more anterior to the Eran form. For though historic palæography has a tendency to pre-suppose a later date, the straighter the lines, prehistoric palæography has given once for all the lie direct to it, for the more we go back for at least in the history of the prehistoric script in S.-W. Europe we do not often get the preceding picture-writing but definite bold stroke. It seems that to the earliest man ay to the young child it was easier to give indiscriminate dots and d&shes rather than faithful artistic representations of objects round them not to speak of attaching a pbilosophic or rationalistic symbolical meaning to them, which pre-supposes a considerable development of the intellect taking thousands of years in the history of human culture. Tt is for this reason perhaps that the Hieratic has been definitely disproved to be merely a cursive development of the Hieroglyphic, as archæological excavations have given us a long series of its fora-runners at a time when probably the latter was unknown. That is why also, perhaps, pre-Columbian Mexico whose civilisation left little to be desired or at least was not at all rude and primitive, gloated in the possession of probably the best form of picture-writing the world has ever known. In short we are even tempted to say that the palæographist's occupation is gone in the face of Piette's epoch-making discoveries of the painted symbols from Masd'Azil of which the modest date would be more than 6000 B.C. and which give us the capital letters "E'
"1" or "L" in a form which leaves little to be desired in the twentieth century A.D. At least now no one should enter into the question of the origin of the alphabet