Bronze Age Linguistic Doctrine
Executive summary
How did the Meluhh (Mleccha) language, Munda, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan language families constitute themselves into an Indian sprachbund? Bronze Age imperative!
Bronze Age intensified the prospecting for key alloying minerals to create metal tools, pots and pans. This led to movements of lapidaries, miners and metalsmiths to move, in search of mineral resources, to places far-off from their homes.
The new revolutionary products created from precious stones, minerals of tin and zinc alloyed with copper to create bronze and brass ingots, metal tools, sharp and heavy, non-brittle metal weapons, metal pots and metal pans, by lapidaries, miners and metalsmiths resulted in a demand for the stoneware and metalware across a wide area extending from Rakhigarhi (Delhi, India) to Haifa (Israel). This demand necessitated long-distance trade by sea-faring artisans and merchants. This trade also necessitated the invention of writing systems to document the nature of products traded and identify the parties involved in the trade contracts. One such writing system was Indus Writing which provided rebuses using Meluhha (Mleccha) words to describe and incise (takṣat vāk, incised speech) words as Indus inscription texts and pictorial motifs which are verily stoneware and metalware catalogs. These catalogs were complemented by cuneiform texts to specify contracting parties and contract terms for the trade.
Thus, the Bronze Age imperative led to increased exchange of technical terms, particularly those related to metalwork, which were absorbed into various languages of the contact areas involved with the production and trade of stoneware and metalware. This Bronze Age absorption of technical terms is comparable to the terms generated by the communications revolution of recent decades involving computers and cell-phones which have been incorporated into lexicons of languages all over the globe.
The Meluhha prospectors, artisans and traders established settlements in Sumer and Mesopotamia and had trade agents along the Persian Gulf in Dilmun and Magan, as evidenced by cuneiform texts and seals/tablets with incised Indus writing, categorized as Dilmun or Failaka or Persian Gulf seals.
The Bronze Age imperative which impacted languages is briefly delineated by the phrase, Bronze Age Linguistic Doctrine. An outline of this doctrine need not be detained by polemics of Aryan Invasion or Migration Theories or Out of India Theories since direction of borrowings is not required to be specified to delineate the Indian sprachbund, a linguistic area which included many cognate semantic clusters with terms necessitated by the inventions of the Bronze Age.
Nature of doctrine
A doctrine is postulated as an informative proposition or truth claim of objective reality. A doctrine gains the attributes of an authoritative dogma. Doctrines are common in theological domain but it is surprising to find a doctrine in the domain of language studies.
One such doctrine postulated by linguists to explain cognate glosses among Indo-European languages was the Aryan Invasion Theory (with variants such as Aryan Migration or Trickle-in Theories). This doctrine sought to explain many glosses in a category called Indo-Aryan languages. The doctrine was, simply that Aryan-speakers invaded India and forced their Indo-European language on the natives’ and forced modifications in the natives’ tongue or speech, creating Indo-Aryan. Counter-arguments have been advanced that an Out of India Theory is also consistent with the evidence of glosses in Indo-Aryan languages cognate with Indo-European and polemical views point to many areas as possible urheimat, original homeland of IE speakers.
Bronze Age Linguistic Doctrine as alternative for Aryan Invasion Linguistic Doctrine
An alternative to the Aryan Invasion Linguistic Doctrine is proposed to explain the essential semantic unity of many ancient Indian languages of the Bronze Age. Many cognate metallurgical terms invented during the Bronze Age were adopted within the speech area — cutting across Munda, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan language families. Bronze Age Linguistic Doctrine explains the raison d’etre for the formation of Indian sprachbund, a language union because tin-bronzes resulted in a revolution in ways of living of the people living and identified with the sprachbund. Earlier arsenical bronzes from the Anatolian peninsula of Turkey produced brittle weapons that shattered on impact. Widespread and large-scale use of bronze for tools such as ploughshare, hammer, sickle changed the nature and scale of daily activities and use of bronze for sharp swords, spear or arrow tips and other weapons changed the nature of warfare and areal contacts and relationships. With bronze and later iron tools, stone cutting, dressing, and sculpting were possible. The revolutionary nature of cultural change brought about by the use of bronze is comparable to the revolution witnessed in the use of modern computers and mobile phones or in the wake of industrial revolution, the use of railway trains for long-distance or commuter travel. Such technological inventions profoundly alter the speech forms in vogue all over the world with the common use of lexical terms such as train, ticket, cell-phone, call – in almost all languages of the globe.
The ruling IE linguistic doctrine is now on its last legs of decay: the fate of doctrines is that If once true, is always true and if once false, is always false.
The situation calls for a new doctrine to replace the terms of the decayed linguistic doctrine of Aryan Invasion because mere trickle-in by tourists cannot explain displacement of entire sets of languages or speech of ‘natives’ and there is no archaeological evidence for any Aryan invasion.
Doctrinal reconciliation, without calling for capitulation, is possible by postulating a replacement doctrine which explains the realities in three dimensions to reconstruct the living of life over millennia: anthropology/archaeology, culture (value systems) and language.
George A. Lindbeck presents the nature of doctrine in his book, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984). The presentation occurs in the context of his effort to seek unity in the church, reconciling varying church doctrines. Lindbeck notes that religion refers to "a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought ... it is similar to an idiom that makes possible the description of realities, the formulation of beliefs, and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments.”[Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 33]Lindbeck mentions that Wittgenstein conceives of private languages as “logically impossible.”[Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 38] However, on a closer reading, one finds that ‘logical impossibility’ is not a category in which Wittgenstein is working as much as the category of ‘sense’ [Sinn] and ‘non-sense’ [Unsinn].[ E.g. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §245, §247, §252-3, §257, §278, §282.] For Wittgenstein’s discussions on private language, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), §243-315.
http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2007/01/lindbeck_after_.htmlEric Lee, 2007, Lindbeck After Wittgenstein?
Even in physics or chemistry, a theory alters the facts to be observed and use of observation terms. This is demonstrated by shifts from Aristotlean to Newtonian to Einsteinian physics and from Darwinian biology to Genetic chemistry. Similarly, in the IE linguistic doctrine of Aryan Invasion Theory, the term ‘invasion’ was modified by using terms such as ‘migration’ or ‘trickle-in’ to explain the reality of features of Indo-Aryan languages which were found to be in common with other Indo-European languages. This theory soon ran into rough weather by questions raised by archaeological realities and by the presence of a large number of agricultural terms in many Indo-Aryan languages which had no cognates in other Indo-European languages. This led to the amendment of the doctrine of Aryan Invasion Theory to posit an Indian sprachbund, a linguistic area where different language families absorbed core language features from one another to create a linguistic union called the sprachbund. This doctrinal capitulation is merely an attempt to still retain the framework of a linguistic theory positing an essential unity of Indo-European (IE) languages including the Indo-Aryan languages. This capitulation runs into further rough weather when linguists began to see the presence of Munda words in Sanskrit and affinities between Munda and Dravidian languages.
An event more profound than the Aryan invasion or trickle-in was the advent of the Bronze Age which had a decisive impact on the realities of material life, culture and language. The Bronze Age created an adventure of ideas and experiments in metallurgy in relating man to the material world which travelled far and wide without requiring large scale movements or migrations of people. The Bronze Age in reality solidified the Indian sprachbund. Hundreds of etyma of Munda, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages have provided cognates for the semantics of a particular metalware term, clearly pointing to the emergence of the sprachbund with the incorporation of such terms. Vidura conversing with Yudhishtira in Mleccha (Meluhha) language is attested in the Great Epic. The specific reference to the language and rebus readings of Indus writing hieroglyphs incorporate meluhha (mleccha) within the sprachbund. And, this incorporation occurred in the Bronze Age.
From an anthropological or archaeological perspective, the march of time is viewed in linear sequence with Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, a classification proposed by a Danish antiquarian, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. A refinement of the period of transition to Bronze Age is a Neolithic Age. Isaac Taylor in The Origin of the Aryans, 1889, mentions the Mesolithic as "a transition between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic Periods." Neolithic (New Stone) Age begins about 10,200 BCE in some parts of ancient Near East and ending between 4,500 to 2,000 BCE. This Age is commonly seen as related to the beginning of a revolution called farming. The Age ended when copper age or bronze age or iron age tools became widespread. The Age is characterized by the cultural advances in domestication of animals.
In the context of documentation for languages, writing systems occur during the Bronze Age. Viable writing systems arose in Indus (hieroglyphs mũh‘face’. mũhe ‘ingot’.), China (oracle bone script), Near East (cuneiform – related to Sumerian, Akkadian or Elamite or Hittite or Ugaritic), Egypt (hieroglyphs
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Determinative hieroglyph for copper/bronze), and the Mediterranean (Linear B ![]()
‘bronze’).
Proto-cuneiform metals list. Composite text of “Archaic Metals”. Cf. Englund, Robert K. (1998). Texts from the Late Uruk Period. In Bauer, Josef; Englund, Robert K.; and Krebernik, Manfred (1998). Mesopotamien: Späturuk-Zeit und Frühdynastische Zeit. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 160/1; Annäherungen, 1. Freiburg, Switzerland: Academic Press Freiburg.
Bronze Age is characterized by the widespread use of copper and its alloy bronze. In some parts of the globe, Iron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic, as in the evidence of iron smelting in Lohardiva, Malhar and Raja Nal ki Tila of Ganga basin, dated to ca 18th century BCE.
A revolution comparable to organized farming during the Neolithic occurred in the Bronze Age. The revolution was the result of the invention of alloying tin with copper to produce tin-bronze. One ton of tin when alloyed with copper could produce 11 tons of bronze. Tin bronzes replaced naturally occurring arsenical copper bronzes because tin was prospected and distributed in a widespread area of anient Near East – an area which extended from Rakhigarhi (near Delhi) to Haifa (Israel). In this area, either copper was smelted and alloyed with tin to produce tin-bronze, or alloyed bronze was directly obtained by trade from a nearby production area called Meluhha. This trade was destined for Sumer or Mesopotamia through the transit areas called Dilmun, Magan and Elam. Evidence exists for Meluhhan settlements to authenticate this trade. [Parpola, Asko; Parpola, Simo (1975). "On the relationship of the Sumerian Toponym Meluhha and Sanskrit Mleccha". Studia Orientalia 46: 205–238.]
Muhly notes: "A long-distance tin trade is not only feasible and possible, it was an absolute necessity. Sources of tin stone or cassiterite were few and far between, and a common source must have served many widely scattered matallurgical centers. This means that the tin would have been brought to a metallurgical center utilizing a nearby source of copper. That is, copper is likely to be a local product; the tin was almost always an import...The circumstances surrounding the discovery of these ingots are still rather confused, and our dating is based entirely upon the presence of engraves signs which seem to be in the Cypro-Minoan script, used on Cyprus and at Ugarit over the period 1500-1100 BCE. The ingots are made of a very pure tin, but what could they have to do with Cyprus? There is certainly no tin on Cyprus, so at best the ingots could have been transhipped from that island. How did they then find their way to Haifa? Are we dealing with a ship en route from Cyprus, perhaps to Egypt, which ran into trouble and sank off the coast of Haifa? If so, that certainly rules out Egypt as a source of tin. Ingots of tin are rare before Roman times and, in the eastern Mediterranean, unknown from any period. What the ingots do demonstrate is that metallic tin was in use during the Late Bronze Age...rather extensive use of metallic tin in the ancient eastern Mediterranean, which will probably come as a surprise to many people." (Muhly, James, New evidence for sources of and trade in bronze age tin, in: Alan D. Franklin, Jacqueline S. Olin, and Theodore A. Wertime, The Search for Ancient Tin, 1977, Seminar organized by Theodore A. Wertime and held at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C., March 14-15, 1977, p.47).
Shipwrecked cargo exhibit in National Maritime Museum (Hebrew: המוזיאון הימי הלאומי, HaMuze'on HaYami HaLe'umi), a maritime and Archaeological museum in Haifa, Israel. Uruluburn shipwreck dated to the late 14th century BCE or the late Bronze Age also resulted in the discovery of copper and tin ingots being traded.
Muhly, the archaeo-metallurgist scholar notes that Meluhha supplied tin to Mesopotamia.
There were Meluhhans in various Sumerian cities; there was also a Meluhhan town or district at one city. The Sumerian records indicate a large volume of trade; according to a Sumerian tablet, one shipment from Meluhha contained 5,900 kg of copper (13,000 lbs, or 6 ½ tons)!
These two hieroglyphs were also inscribed on two tin ingots discovered in the Haifa shipwreck. They are allographs. Both are read in Meluhha (Mleccha) of Indian sprachbund: ranku‘liquid measure’; ranku‘antelope’. Rebus: ranku‘tin’. An allograph to denote tin is: tagara ‘ram’ Rebus: tagara ‘tin’. Rebus: damgar ‘merchant’ (Akkadian)
“The Early Bronze Age of the 3rd millennium BCE saw the first development of a truly international age of metallurgy… The question is, of course, why all this took place in the 3rd millennium BCE… It seems to me that any attempt to explain why things suddenly took off about 3000 BCE has to explain the most important development, the birth of the art of writing… As for the concept of a Bronze Age one of the most significant events in the 3rdmillennium was the development of true tin-bronze alongside an arsenical alloy of copper…” (J.D. Muhly, 1973, Copper and Tin, Conn.: Archon., Hamden; Transactions of Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 43, p. 221f. )
Arsenical bronze occurs in the archaeological record across the globe, the earliest artifacts so far known have been found on the Iranian plateau in the 5th millennium BCE. [Thornton, C.P.; Lamberg-Karlovsky, C.C.; Liezers, M.; Young, S.M.M. (2002). "On pins and needles: tracing the evolution of copper-based alloying at Tepe Yahya, Iran, via ICP-MS analysis of Common-place items."Journal of Archaeological Science 29 (29): 1451–1460.]
Some metalware terms which spread across a wide contact area of the Bronze Age may be cited merely as a reference list to explore further the spread of specific sememes as in the case of ayas ‘metal, bronze’:
http://www.george-broderick.de/INDO-EUROPEAN.docGeorge Broderick, 2009,Indo-European and non-Indo-European aspects to the languages and place-names in Britain and Ireland explains non-Indo-European features of Insular Celtic in the realms of syntax, phonology, lexicon, place-names. “Given that the Celtic derivations appear unsatisfactory Vennemann (1998: 464-465) offers the meaning ‘copper island’ for Ériu deriving from Paleosemitic Etyma from Hebrew ‘-y- ‘island’ and Akkadian werûm, erû, Assyrian often eriu(m) ‘copper, bronze’. From paleosemitic *’y-wr’(m) ‘copper island’ constructed and vocalised as *’iy+weri’um, *iyweri’im, it would be possible for such a construct to pass easily as a loanword into Greek, Latin and Celtic.
http://alterling2.narod.ru/English/MetalAngl.docValentyn Stetsyuk, Lviv; Ukraine, 1989, About some names of metals in Turkic and Indo-European languages midnycia “copper bowl” in Ukrainian (mid’ “copper”).
Munda
med ‘iron’
— Slavic
Мед [Med] Bulgarian
Медзь [medz'] Belarusian
Měď Czech
Miedź Polish
Медь [Med'] Russian
Meď Slovak
Мідь [mid'] Ukrainian
Медзь [medz'] Belarusian
Měď Czech
Miedź Polish
Медь [Med'] Russian
Meď Slovak
Мідь [mid'] Ukrainian
— Indo-Iranian/Iranian
Мис [Mis] Tajik
— Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan
مس [ms] Persian
مس [ms] Persian
— Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan
જસતનો [jasatano] Gujarati
जस्ता [jastā] Hindi
sathiya Kannada
જસતનો [jasatano] Gujarati
जस्ता [jastā] Hindi
sathiya Kannada
Other (Europe)
თუთია [t'ut'ia] Georgian
თუთია [t'ut'ia] Georgian
Afro-Asiatic
אבץ [avats] Hebrew
אבץ [avats] Hebrew
Other Asiatic
നാകം [nākam] Malayalam
நாகம் [nākam] Tamil
நாகம் [nākam] Tamil
Indo-European
Мышъяк [Myš"jak] Russian
Міш'як [miš'jak] Ukrainian
Міш'як [miš'jak] Ukrainian
— Indo-Iranian/Iranian
Мышъяк [myš"jak] Ossetian
Арсен [Arsen, ²Mysh'yak] Tajik
Арсен [Arsen, ²Mysh'yak] Tajik
Indo-European
Stannum Latin
— Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan
قلع [ql'] Persian
त्रपु [trapu] Hindi
قلع [ql'] Persian
त्रपु [trapu] Hindi
Altaic
Qalay Azerbaijani
Тăхлан [Tăhlan] Chuvash
Къалайы [k"alajy] Kazakh
-- [--] Kyrgyz
Цагаан тугалга [cagaan tugalga] Mongolian
Kalay Turkish
قەلەي [qäläy] Uyghur
Qalay Uzbek
Тăхлан [Tăhlan] Chuvash
Къалайы [k"alajy] Kazakh
-- [--] Kyrgyz
Цагаан тугалга [cagaan tugalga] Mongolian
Kalay Turkish
قەلەي [qäläy] Uyghur
Qalay Uzbek
Other (Europe)
კალა [kala] Georgian
კალა [kala] Georgian
Other Asiatic
വെളുത്തീയം [veḷuttīyam]Malayalam
தகரம் [takaram] Tamil
தகரம் [takaram] Tamil
Indo-European
Aurum Latin
— Baltic
Auksas Lithuanian
Auksos Samogitian
Auksos Samogitian
— Celtic
Aour Breton
Aur Welsh
Òr Gaelic (Irish)
Òr Gaelic (Scottish)
Airh Gaelic (Manx)
Owr Cornish
Aur Welsh
Òr Gaelic (Irish)
Òr Gaelic (Scottish)
Airh Gaelic (Manx)
Owr Cornish
— Other Indo-European
Ar[i] Albanian
Ar[i] Albanian
Indo-European
Plumbum Latin
— Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan
سرب [srb] Persian
સીસુંનો [sīsu'no] Gujarati
सीसा [sīsā] Hindi
سرب [srb] Persian
સીસુંનો [sīsu'no] Gujarati
सीसा [sīsā] Hindi
Other Asiatic
കറുത്തീയം [kṟuttīyam]Malayalam
ஈயம் [īyam] Tamil
ஈயம் [īyam] Tamil
Proto-Indo-European Dictionary
IE: amsus familia germanica,occidentālis: RUN. a[n]suR; Ase; 3a2.-ōs 3a3.-āss (Oslo <As-lo ?) familia germanica, orientalis: got-lat anses 'sēmideī' familia indoriania aut Anatolia: ásu 'spīritus'; ásura 'spīritālis' 5.3.-aŋhu- 'id'; ahura 5.5.-hassu 'rex' hassa- 'genitūra' Source: Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary, 2012 Fernando Lopez-Menchero, Indo-European Language Association.
ancu, ‘iron’ (tocharian) amśu ‘soma’(vedic)
áyas n. ʻmetal, ironʼ RV.Pa. ayō nom. sg. n. and m., aya -- n. ʻironʼ, Pk. aya -- n., Si. ya. (CDIAL 590). ayaskāṇḍa m.n. ʻ a quantity of iron, excellent iron ʼ Pāṇ. gaṇ. [áyas -- , kāˊṇḍa -- ] Si. yakaḍa ʻironʼ.(CDIAL 591). *ayaskūṭa ʻiron hammerʼ. [áyas -- , kūˊṭa -- 1 ] Pa. ayōkūṭa --ayak° m.; Si. yakuḷa ʻ sledge -- hammer ʼ, yavuḷa (< ayōkūṭa -- ).(CDIAL 592).
early 15c., "gold, gold-colored," also figuratively, "splendid, brilliant," from Latin aureatus "decorated with gold," from aureus "golden," from aurum "gold," from PIE *aus- (cf. Sanskrit ayah "metal," Avestan ayo, Latin aes "brass," Old English ar "brass, copper, bronze," Gothic aiz "bronze," Old Lithuanian ausas "gold"), probably related to root *aus- "to shine" (see aurora).
aes, ajos brass copper; aereus, ajesnos brassy (IE) The semantic variations across languages point to the early meaning of ayas as ‘metal, alloy bronze’.
S. Kalyanaraman
Sarasvati Research Center, July 11, 2013