Indus Valley People Spoke Dravidian Language

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The archaeological site was first discovered in 1921 at Harappa in the Punjab region and then in 1922 at Mohenjodaro, near the Indus River in the Sindh (Sind) region, both in present-day Pakistan.
The Indian region of the civilisation extends in Punjab’s Ropar at the foot of the Shimla Hills.
Though the IVC was the most expansive civilisation of its time – spanning parts of present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northwest India – and its archaeological sites are of great scholarly interest,
We don’t yet know which language(s) its people spoke.
Their script is also yet to be deciphered.

What has happened?

The Indus Valley Civilisation, the earliest known urban culture of the Indian subcontinent, has always been a source of intrigue and a source to look back into the past.
A new observation sheds light on the language of this ancient civilisation, which could have its roots in ancestral Dravidian languages.
Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, an independent researcher, analysed numerous archaeological, linguistic.
The research published under Humanities and Social Sciences Communications in Nature group journal indicates the possibility of Proto-Dravidian speakers migrating from Indus valley to South India.
The research claims that the ancestral forms of the Dravidian languages currently spoken in South India were once dominant linguistic groups in the ancient civilisation.

Since the ancient world was generally more multilinguistic, Researchers believe that the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation too hosted more languages than today.
Several scholars have worked on tracing the linguistic base of the expansive civilisation that extends over almost one million
square kilometres of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the North-Western part of India.
Today these regions speak Indo-Aryan languages that includes Punjabi in Punjab with dialects Siraiki and Lahnda;
Sindhi in Sindh, Hindi, Marwari, Gujarati in eastern parts of Greater Indus Valley;
Dardic including Shina, Khowar, Kohistani; Iranian that has Baluchi, Dari, Pashto, and Wakhi in western parts of Greater Indus Valley;
Nuristani in northeastern Afghanistan; Dravidian; Brahui spoken in Baluchistan and Sindh; and Burushaski, a language spoken in northernmost Pakistan close to the Chinese border.

The study took into account the thriving trade relations between the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) and the Persian Gulf as well as Mesopotamia.
Accordingly, Mukhopadhyay searched through the near-Eastern texts to locate foreign words with roots in the Indus Valley.
The logic, as the paper suggests, is the fact that when a commodity is not locally produced, we call it by its foreign name.

Mukhopadhyay, a software developer by profession, analysed the Akkadian (language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia) word,
‘Piru’ that was used to refer to an elephant in Mesopotamia (2000-1600 BC) and pîru that refers to ivory in Hurrian language from the Old Persian inscriptions of Darius.
She claims that the word ‘piru’ comes from the Indian word ‘pilu’, which was adopted by the ancient Iranian tongues, who used ‘l’s as ‘r’s.
She further explained that pilu, is a Proto-Dravidian elephant-word, which was prevalent in the Indus valley civilization.
She argues that there is sufficient evidence of an ancient Dravidian word pi/pl, which means splitting/crushing and was related to meaning ‘tooth/tusk’ of an elephant.
She also says that ‘pilu’ is among the most ancient and common names for a toothbrush derived from plants.
Salvadora persica is a characteristic plant found in the Indus valley, whose roots and twigs have been widely used as toothbrushes.
Her study claims that this phytonym ‘pilu’ had also originated from the same Proto-Dravidian tooth word.
And since these names were widely used across Indus Valley Civilisation regions, a significant population of the civilisation must have used that Proto-Dravidian tooth-word in their daily communication.

The word pilu’, ‘palla’, ‘pallava’, ‘piuvam have also been found in Dravidian dictionaries related to the Proto-Dravidian tooth word “pal”.
The paper argues that the ‘pilu’-based words, which were used to convey the meanings of ivory, elephant and toothbrush tree in IVC,
Had originated from the Proto-Dravidian tooth-word which can be reconstructed as ‘pal’/‘pil’.

The paper corroborated similar arguments made by a few scholars in the past, particularly that of Asko Parpola.
Parpola in his work published in 2010 mapped the symbols used in the Indus Valley script and connected them to words used in modern Dravidian languages.
Based on this he concluded that the underlying language of the Indus script was Proto-Dravidian.

Mukhopadhyay emphasised on the fact that proto-Dravidian was perhaps one among several languages being spoken in the Indus Valley region.
She noted that Dravidian group languages, despite being spoken mainly in southern India “also have scattered representations in India’s North-Western (Brahui), North-Eastern (Kuṛux, Malto), and Central (e.g., Kolami, Naiki, Parji, Ollari, Gadaba) parts,
Indicating that Dravidian speakers possibly had much greater pre-historic presence in Northern India, including IVC regions”.

Q) The social system of the Harappans was?