Overlooked Links In Ancient History

Overlooked Clues of Ancient History S.N.Mahalingam Superintending Engineer Tamilnadu PWD (Retd) A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future - Oliver Wendell Holmes Depuis la préhistoire et jusqu'à nos jours l'Inde a été en rapport constant avec le monde méditerranéen. Qu'il s'agisse de commerce, de religion, d'art, de philosophie, on ne peut comprendre l'histoire de l'Europe ni celle de l'Inde sans tenir compte des échanges entre ces deux mondes. -Alain Daniélou

ABSTRACT A person with Telugu as mother tongue found himself as an alien in Tamilnadu and searched for his roots. He found it as a town by name Santhri in Haryana. This search revealed the whole community might have had its origin in Indus valley region. Further Search indicated their presence in the State of Arrapha. As a bonus the ancestry of Nagarathar and hence Tamils traced to ancient Nagar and present day Tel Brak of Syria. Incidentally based on the surnames pointed to the ancestral place of families, ancestral place of three Rishis of Sapta Rishis have been identified in addition to the heritage of Kautilya Chanakya. He cannot help but to touch the Aryan question, prevalence place names in the name of Rama and its variants distributed throughout the world. Sami is a popular name of persons in southern states of India. The existence of a tribe by that name in Scandinavia and about xxx places spread over the globe has to be pointed out. This article is similar to a FIR of a police Station and has to be investigated further by specialists of the related disciplines and so the author has not made any attempt to present any theory but only presented the findings.

Genesis A person with Telugu as his mother tongue felt alien in the land of Tamils that is Tamilnadu, in spite of his love of Tamilnadu, its language, culture and its heritage. In fact he took active part in the pure Tamil movement in his school days. He was always thinking about his roots, the country of his ancestors and this thought was lurking in his subconscious mind. He read, in his school days the works on ancient Indian history, Indus civilization, Lemuria or Kumarikkandam etc.

Years later, he had an opportunity to serve in Algeria, a former French colony where he had to interact with the local Arab population. At a certain point of time he was introduced to a staff member as Mr.Benegala. In Algeria, generally people were introduced to strangers only by their family name or surname. Only intimate family members and friends will call them by their given name or name proper. He was surprised, as he was reminded of the illustrious ICS officers, Benegal Narasinga Rau and Benegal Rama Rau. The word Benegal indicated their surname. Later he came to know of Syam Benegal a famous cinema director. A few months later he had to meet a local engineer who belonged to a tribe called Kabil which has a distinct language called Kabili. The area they live in large numbers is also called as Kabili. In the course of conversation he came to know that the Algerian’s surname was Kadi a surname of a Telugu devangar family in Salem. He also informed that one of the ministers of that country who belonged to their tribe visited a village in north India where a language similar to Kabili was spoken. The above information hibernated in the person’s subconscious mind. At the fag end of his service in India, one of his colleagues informed about the existence of Hindi speaking devangar community in Chanderi town in Madhya Pradesh. Then he thought whether this could be his ancestral town. After retirement he passed his time by reading French books on religion, history and philosophy of which the works of Alain Daniélou, an Indologist impressed him and kindled his passion for trying to know the hitherto unknown areas of history.

Root traced and further developments In the year 2006 by chance he typed santhri, his surname, in Google search. To his astonishment he found a town by name Santhri in Haryana State tourist site. When he opened the link he found the name of another town by name Karnal. Suddenly he thought why not this town Santhri be the town of his ancestors. The family name of his friend is Karna and why not Karnal corrupted into Karna or vice versa. Another name Bhirrana is found to be a Harappan site in Haryana. Then he remembered another family of his friend arappa. Why not the name arappa be the corrupt form of Harappa? But in Haryana no one appear to speak Telugu. The population at Haryana speaks only Hindi or Haryanovi the local dialect. The Telugu Devangar community is found dispersed throughout the Southern States. But most of their family names do not match town and village names in the Southern States. By chance I found the existence of a village called Santhri in Haryana. This is one of the family names of Telugu Devangar caste. On further search, two more family names were identifies with names of towns in the north. Of course it is not possible to get matches for every family name because the place names as well as family names are subject to change due to various circumstances.

Family name Santhri Karna Bhirrana Banalu Arappa

Identified village Santhri in Haryana Karna(L) in Haryana Bhirrana in Haryana Banalu in Punjab (H)arappa

This could indicate that the ancestors of the Telugu Devangar community might have been one of the linguistic groups of the Indus Civilization. Another interesting fact is that there is another branch of Devangar community who speak Kannad. Both communities have the same culture but only their mother tongue is different. Thewir community deity is the same by name Sowdeswari or Sowdambika and they celebrate the same community festivals in addition to the hindu festivals. They appear to have ben moving together as wherever you find the telugu speaking community you find the Kannada speaking community also in the same town but in a different locality. For instance in Sale, Tamilnadu, telugu speaking devangars settled in the northern bank of a river whereas the Kannada speaking community is settled on the southern bank. So both the community might have moved together to the south in the distant past on an uncertain age. There are more than one hundred Telugu speaking castes living in Tamil Nadu. They also might have had their origin in the north and migrated to the south around 1000 BCE, when the people fled the Indus Valley. According to historians, “The Brahui speech in Baluchistan is the only Dravidian dialect in the North and may be regarded as the sole surviving fragment.” A similar study of family names of Saurastra community, Nattuk Kottai Chettiar community may throw more light on the History of India that will form entirely another study to connect the South India to Mesopotamia region. Only fragmentary facts were presented as a deeper probe could be made only by specialists.”

Further leads One of the customs prevalent in Haryana is also followed by this Devangar community. They have the ‘Gothra’ and marriage within the same gothra is not allowed. The problem arises because families having different surnames may have the same gothra and comes to the fore only just before the marriage ceremony. In such cases, when the marriage becomes unavoidable, by a simple ceremony, the bride is arranged to be adopted by a family having different gothra. In one known case the families with the surnames, Santhri, Raga and Angapa have the same gothra: an old man of Santhri family has revealed this just before his death. Interesting information presented itself when this person by chance referred a French book of stories for children. The book was published by one George G. Harrap & Co,

Ltd. To his mind it occurred that the ‘Harrap’ could be a family name. It is a British publishing house with branches in Europe. He thought whether it could be a corrupted form of Harapp(a). This with the comment of Sir John Marshall “that the town planning of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro resembled that of Lancashire and Manchester of England.” This statement was found in a 6th standard book, Chronicle of History and Civics which forced him to think whether the ancestor of Harraps could be a migrant from the Indus Valley and he are other co-migrants could be the architects of Manchester and Lancashire. May be this also needs a deeper probe?

Surnames of Rishis? He tried his method of using the surnames to find the ancestry of the following of the Sapta Rishis perhaps the august audience may find in interesting. The results are as follows: Rishi Atri Marisi Krathu

Ancestral place? ATRI TE Italy Gissi CH – Italy : and also Lebanon Krathuse-Ikast, Ringkobing, Denmark

Perhaps only the above Rishis were known by their surnames and the others by their proper names? A similar exercise for Kautilya, perhaps the surname of Chanakya, pointed his ancestry to Kautiala in Finland having Latitude 61.533 and Longitude 24.25 a town named Khutayleh in Irak, Latitude 34.388 and Longitude 41.147, also shown by the search engine. A letter by the author was published in the magazine Madras Musings, October, 1 – 15, 2007 which is reproduced below;

Persian Pallavan. “The dynasties of the kingdoms were known by different names, Mauryas, Pallavas, Pandyas, etc. None of the text books reveal why they were called by such names. The French TV channel TV 5 Monde ran a feature film on Sha of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. The name Pahlavi sounded to me like Pallava. So collected the following details from the Internet. 1. Pahlavi: a middle Persian language spoken in Pre-Islamic Iran from 3 rd Century BCE to 9th Century CE during the rule of Sassanian dynasty. Naresh and Vishtam (a corrupted form of Vishnu? Narasimha and Simha Vishnu of Pallava dynasty) are names of persons of that period. Pahlavi are the royal house name. Pahlavan is a village on Azarbayjan-e-Gharbi in Iran. Could Pallavan be a corrupted form of Pahlavan? Will the historians probe further?”

Reading this letter in the magazine, a reader sent a Xerox copy of a report that appeared in the New Indian Express on Ram about the work of Lalith.. Pathak details given below. The New Indian Express column published on 20-07-1888, ‘Ram only a historical figure, says expert’ gives the following account: Some documents on West Asian and Egyptian history bring to light that king Dasrath of Sanskrit speaking Aryan race succeeded his father Shurtarna to the Maitanian throne in north Syria in BC 1365. The people were called ‘Hurrians’ and claimed themselves to be ‘Ikshakus’ which meant ‘a representative sent by god to rule over people’ who arrived in West Asia about BC 1800. But the Maitanian kingdom of the Sanskrit speaking Aryan race lasted only around one hundred years from BC 1465 to BC 1355, the study said, adding it appears that the term ‘Hari’ and ‘Hari OM’ in Indian scriptures is the remnant of Hurrians in Maintanni.’ The expert is reported to be Prof. Lalit P. Pathak and the title of his work is ‘Indian names – West Asian origin’ This provoked a log on to the internet for browsing the information on hurrians and in this process some new facts presented itself for an analysis and were presented as follows.

Aryans For instance, the Bible talks a lot about God but does not offer proofs for the existence of God. It rather assumes the existence of God and then proceeds to establish not the basis but the consequence of such belief. The same paradigm may be tried in establishment certain events in ancient history. One such event could be the Aryan question. Roman script is widely used in almost all the European languages. Each language has its own way of pronouncing the letters. Regional variations are also there to make it a bit complicated. One such example is the name Kandasami written using English pronunciation. But it will be Candasami if French pronunciation is used. In the pronunciation of the letter ‘h’ is also a classic case. In some languages it is silent and in other languages there are specific rules for the pronunciation depending upon its place in a word. In reading ancient scriptures it is all the more difficult. In some cases one letter may be mistaken for the other. Suppose assuming that the letter ‘h’ has been misread instead of ‘a’ and in that case the name ‘hurrians’ will become ‘aurrians’ in the source language and this will be ‘Aryans’

in English but Aryens in French. So the people who were called as hurrians could be in fact Aryans. Prof. Pathak has dealt with the name of Ram and so it may be worthwhile to supplement additional information that came across while investigating the roots. The name of Ram has not occurred in any literature of Hurrians or Hittites or any people during prehistoric period. It is a mystery how it suddenly appeared as the title of Egyptian kings.

On RAM According to Paul Johnson (1999), the last king of eighteenth dynasty Hortemheb had no heir and he arranged for the succession to pass to another general from the delta, the vizir of lower Egypt, (Menpeh.tirê' ), who took the throne as Ramesses I founder of the nineteenth dynasty. It was his son Sethos I, and grandson Ramesses II, who built the Asian empire to something approaching to its old splendour. The history of Egypt is dotted with the invasions from Asia and invasion of Asian states by Egypt. So there should have been cultural exchanges between the two. Probably the legend of Ram could have been known to them due to their contact with their neighbours. As vizier of Lower Egypt, Ramesses, having known the popularity of Ram would have adopted it as his title Ramesses I. The Ram’s name is popularly adopted in Scandinavian countries as Ramussen. The antiquity of that name has to be investigated. A review of the literature on prehistory different spellings was used in denoting the same name. For example, the Egyptian kings noted above were spelt as Rames and Ramesses. It is the same with the name of the kingdoms also, for example Maintanni and Mitani indicate the same kingdom. So there is no guarantee that the word to denote the Aryans could have been correctly spelt and given as Hurrians. The following information of the genealogy of the kingdom of Indraprastha which was ruled by Indians for 124 generations for a period of 4157 years, 9 months and 14 days between the event of Mahabharata and the beginning of the Mughal era in 1193 AD was given in http-www-hindunet_org-hindu_history-medieval-kings_chron.htm. There was only one king by name Ramchand had the name of RAM during the whole period of about four millenniums whereas about 11 Egyptian kings were named after Ram as Ramesses during the period from 1320 BCE to 1085 BCE. (Paul Johnson, 1999). Consider a variant of Ram spelt as ROM then there is a Romulus who found the city of Rome, the house of Romanov to the dynasty of which belonged the last Czar of Russia and a country Romania. Perhaps there will be more such cases if one searches persistently. Can this be taken as indicative that the name of Ram was not so popular in India during prehistoric period whereas it was more popular in the West Asia, North Africa and Europe? More questions and fewer answers!

Further information from internet: Internet sites on Hurrians gave information that a Hurrian kingdom called kingdom of Arrapha also benefited from the demise of Babylonian power in sixteenth century BC. Compare the name of Harappa of Indus Civilization and this Arrapha. Do they not appear similar? What could be the relation between these two names? Also compare the surname arappa of Telugu Devangar community. Again a mystery? In the foregoing presentation it has been shown the probability of the presence of Telugu devangar community that represents Telugu linguistic group of Dravidian family. The Indus civilization is a multi-ethnic society so certainly other linguistic groups should have been present for which data could not be procured. One possible group that could have been represented the Tamil language may be that of Nattuk Kottai Chettiar community of Tamilnadu. They also feel that they were not native to Chettinad and their ancestral place is elsewhere.. Because they were also called as Nagarathaar they feel that their ancestral place Nagara could be Kancheepuram as some Sanskrit poet has written ‘Nagareshu Kanchi’. But for that there appears to be no evidence that it is called as Nagara. In the near past they had settlements only in an area called Chettinad located in Pudukkottai, Sivagangai and Madurai districts of Tamilnadu. Their family profession is commerce and they were Saivites. They lived in at least two storied palatial buildings with many rooms. The above facts and the town planning of Chettinad Towns suggest them as possible candidates of Tamil linguistic group in Indus Civilization as the town planning and architecture of Indus civilization resembled Chettinad town planning and architecture. The only place with the name Nagar in the prehistoric times is located in Irak at Tell Brak which was called in pre-akkadian era as Nagar or Nawar (see Appendix III). Another reference to Nagara was given by Alain Daniélou as a town near the present day Jalalabad of Kabul Valley in Afghanistan. This place was also called as Nysa or Dionysopolis by Greeks and Ptolemy called this place as Nagara (perhaps the present Nakora in Afghanistan) in his Geography and this is supposed to be an ancient religious place of worship by Saivites. If the analysis of surnames or the names of communities are taken as indicative of the ancestral place, then for the Tamil group it will be Nagar in Iraq or Nagara in Afghanistan or Harappa and for the Telugu group with family name arappa, it will be the kingdom of Arrapha or Harappa. Does it mean the Dravidians and their languages originated in Babylon before the pre-akkadian period? Or Indus Valley people went to Mesopotamia to find kingdoms? Does it indicate that Dravidian influx preceded the Aryan? Are the population that inhabited Indus Valley prior to Dravidian influx were also invaders? Did some mysterious people inhabit Indus valley as suggested by Alain Daniélou (1983)? Again this calls for a detailed study. Surnames generally indicate the place of origin of a family if such name is used by that family. Suppose a place is indicated by a surname. It may be a second or third settlement of that family. In that case it will indicate the latest settlement and not the ancient one. For instance santhri is indicated as the ancestral place for a family. But the ancestors of that family might have come from some other place. So some families may have surnames indicating the latest ancestral place and some other families have the surnames

indicating very ancient places of origin. May be that is why the surname arappa indicate also the kingdom of Arrapha. Of course it requires a detailed scrutiny. At the present status of available information it is not possible to say which of the two places is their initial habitation.. One or two months back there was a media report in TV news about the Al Qaeda commando attack on an isolated tribe in Irak for their refusal to embrace the benevolent and peace preaching Islam. An appraisal of their culture, language and religious beliefs may furnish some missing links to piece together Ancient History not only of India but also of the world. Similar data of family names (surnames?) has to be obtained for the various linguistic groups at least in the southern states for a detailed analysis. This could be possible only by a team and not by a single individual and involvement of the media. The above facts have been presented based on the information that presented itself during the course the author’s search for his roots and is brought to the notice of the enlightened historians for a deeper probe that may throw more light on the prehistory and expand the horizon of history. The author is indebted to Alliance Français of Madras, ICHR Southern Regional Centre at Bangalore and Mythic Society, Bangalore for permitting him to utilize heir facilities. Reference : Alain Daniélou : Histoire de l'Inde, Editions du fayard, Paris,1983 : Shiva et Dionysos, Fayard. Anneli Airaksinen. Le peuple dont descendent tous les Scandinaves : Minorités : GEO. No.302, Avril 2004 Mahalingam S.N. An Outline for Research in Prehistory of India, International Symposium on Indus Civilization and Tamil Language, 15 &16-2-2007, Chennai. Mahalingam S.N. Algerian Connection? : Madras Musings, July 1-15, 2007, Lokhavani Hall-Mark Press, Chennai. Mahalingam S.N. : Persian Pallavan, Madras Musings, July 1-15, 2007, Lokhavani Hall-Mark Press, Chennai. Paul Johnson. The Civilization of Ancient Egypt, Harper-Collins Publisher, 1999. Safi Douhi. L’incroyable Voyage des premier Hommes, GEO, No. 310, Décembre 2004. News Item in The New Indian Express Dated: 20-07-1998 Hurrians – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Landon, Dale E. (Indiana IUP); Hurrians and the Ancient Near East History;[The Hurrians and the Ancient Near East History-Landaon,D_A] The Kassites, the Hurrians, and the Arameans: The Encyclopedia of World History. 2001.

To Dr.Om Prakash, Email:[email protected] Dear Sir, Sub: International Conference on Indian History – submission of Papers – reg. Ref: MLBD Newsletter, September 2008. Following the announcement cited I am furnishing the abstract of my paper with the title ‘Overlooked Clues of Ancient History’ for your consideration. If approved I shall send the article (around 4000 words) in MS Word, by email to you as an attachment.. This may be formatted to your requirements. Guidelines to authors, if any, may be sent early. I will

not be able to be present at the venue of the conference due illness and old age. Expecting an early email. With regards, Yours truly, S.N.Mahalingam B.E., MSc(Engg)(IISc) F.I.E., FIV Superintending Engineer ,Tamilnadu PWD (Retd), (Formerly Research Scholar at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.) P.No.64-A, Kalamegam Street Extn., SBI Colony II Street, Kamarajapuram, Chennai – 600 073 Tele:0091-44-2227 5403 Email:[email protected] Dated: September 24, 2008 Overlooked Clues of Ancient History

ABSTRACT A person with Telugu as mother tongue found himself as an alien in Tamilnadu and searched for his roots. He found it as a town by name Santhri in Haryana. This search revealed the whole community might have had its origin in Indus valley region. Further Search indicated their presence in the Kingdom of Arrapha in the ancient Mesopotamia. As a bonus the ancestry of Nagarathar and hence Tamils traced to ancient Nagar now known now as Tel Brak in Syria. Incidentally the family names (surnames?) indicated the ancestral places of three Rishis of Sapta Rishi Mandala. In addition the ancestral place of Kautilya Chanakya could be identified by the same technique.. He cannot help but to touch the Aryan question, prevalence of place names with the word Rama and its variants distributed throughout the world. Sami is a popular name of persons in southern states of India. The existence of a tribe by that name in Scandinavia and about 75 places with the name as Sami spread over the globe has to be pointed out. This article is similar to a FIR of a police station and the clues have to be investigated further by specialists,