Meluha

To me--- it looks like that Meluha is the corrupted form of Milahu (pepper)---land of pepper is kerala---most probably the term meluha refers to kerala-- may not be for Indus valley area--

In the vast plains of the Indus and Sarasvati valleys of northwest India and Pakistan, a great urban civilization arose between about 2500 and 2000 BC. While the civilization is known to archaeologists as Harappan or Indus Valley or Sarasvati-Sindhu civilizations, the only known contemporary name is "Mehluha", the Mesopotamian word for the people who came to trade and live in the great Akkadian period port cities.

The great cities of the Mehluha were built along a precise grid-plan of streets and contained a sophisticated drainage system. Two of the most important urban centers,Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, four hundred miles apart, have been excavated since the early 20th century; the others, including Ganweriwala, Chanhu-daro, Lothal, Dholavira, and Kalibangan, have not been as extensively investigated to date. The Indus Valley peoples were farmers, fishers,and herders, subsisting primarily on barley and wheat, but with a wide variety of domesticate and gathered crops such as dates, chickpea, field pea, grapes, and jujube. They also herded cattle, water buffalo, sheep, goats, and pigs. Chickens and dogs were domesticated in the cities.

Kalyanaraman on meluha

http://www.indoeurohome.com/Meluhha-Dilmun.html

The Indus traded with Andronovo from Kur zar-duga to the Arial lake. Once the Indus river dried up the natural route to water is north around the Caspian and Arial lakes.

The Mesopotaimian's wrote that the land of Dilmun escaped the flood where the seven rivers are high on the Indus river and not on the coast as this map is showing , they also wrote that it was the land of paridise this matches the archeaologic standard of living found of the Indus culture.

The Indus seals were made with three parts; a date that uses the stars, a pictorial hieroglyphic image that had to do with the contant shipped (discussion below) and last a abstract image that had to do with distination or origin of goods.

This is a referance to an E-mail I got from the Sarasvati Research Centre; Subject: Bharatiya languages: history and formation of jati-bhaasha

INDIA, September 17, 2006: In yesterday's HPI,we mentioned about this book:

Kalyanaraman, S, 2006, Bharatiya Languages--history and formation of Jaati-bhasha -- Sarasvati hieroglyphs as mlecchita vikalpa (Decipherment of the Indus script), Bangalore, Babasaheb (Umakanta Keshav) Apte Smarak Samiti, 652pp. It includes an up- to-date and comprehensive corpus of inscriptions of Sarasvati civilawation (indus Script) -- including finds of the year 2000 season, proto-elamite parallels, artifacts in museums and mss. of Schoyen collection.

The work discovers some lexemes of the Meluhha language and tags them to epigraphs of Indus script, containing hieroglphs. A few 'rosetta stones' validate the decipherment.

Through the entire corpus of about 4,000 epigraphs is included the document, only one instance of a broken seal (chipped in a corner) is-used as reconstructed by Huntington. This is a seal which shows a face with tiger's mane ligatured to a person seated in a yogic posture and surrounded by a set of animals. Yes, there are many cracked pottery which also comtain epigraphs. Tigers's mane =cu_l.a; rebus: furnace. person seated in penance =kamad.ha; rebus: kampat.t.a 'mint'. Face =mukha; rebus: mu-ha 'ingot'. In the contewt of Iranica, there is an Akkadian cylinded seal which shows aa Meluhhan merchant who required an interpreter. This indicates that Meluhhan was a non-Akkadian language. A substrate language has however been reconised from terms such as tibira 'merchant'; sanga 'priest'-- words which have cognates in Bharatiya languages.

Muhly, the archaeo-metallurgist scholar notes that Meluhha supplied tin to Mesopotamia. The general identification of Meluhhu as Baloch region is concordant with early Amri-Nal culture in the Makran coast (south of Karachi). A cognate term Meluhha is Mleccha which is mentioned in ancient text such as Manusmruti and Mahabharata. In the Mahabharata, a miner named Khanaka speaks Mleccha. In Manusmruti, languages are classified as Mleccha vaacas and Arya vaacas ( that is, lingua franca and literary Sanskrit).

The objective of the work is to delineate the glosses of mleccha vaacas.

In addition to the Leluhhan shown on the Akkadian cylinder seal, there are three other objects with epigraphs: two tin ingots and one cylinder seal with pictographs. Rebus (Latin: 'by means of things') is a graphemic expression of the phonetic shape of a word or syllable.The two tin ingots contain glyphs which do not find any parallels in cretan but have concordant glyphs in Indus Script. These pictographic glyphs can be read rebus as related to tin (ran:ku; rebus: antelope ). On one cylinder seal, a tabernae montana plant is depicted as identifies by Potts. That tabaerna montana is called tagaraka in many Bharatiya (Indic) languages; read rebus: tagara, 'tin'.

Only a smith had the competence to inscribe on metal ingots and slso on bronze tools/weapons, apart from copper plates. Many epigraphs have been found on such objects. The language mleccha is a Bharatiya language. Over 2000 lexemes include homonyms depicting pictographic glyphs (such as rhino, elephant, tiger etc.) and also substantive repertoire related to a mine or a smithy: furnace types , minerals, metals, alloys.

This identification of language lexemes and corresponding glyptic representation in pictographic writing is primised on the existqance of a linguistic area circa 2500 BCE. (A linguistic area is recognized as a region where languages absorb features from one another and make them their own). Thus, proto-versions of Tamil, Austtric, Munda, Prakrits, Sanskrit (and over 20 present-day languages in India) have hundreds of cognates, in particular, related to agriculturai terms and smithy terms and smithy terms, consistent with the maritime-riverine civilization along the Indian ocean Rim and with trade transactions with ANE. Muhly rightly notes the link between the emergence of the bronze age and the Invention of a writing system.

some background notes are the following URLs (apart from a 7-volume encylopaedic work on Sarasvati Published in 2004):

http//sarasvati96.googlepages.com Thanks and regards,

S. Kalyanaraman, Ph.D.

Sarasvati Research Centre