The Languages of Harappa - People Fas Harvard

They, or a large section of the population of Sindh left this area towards the end of
the Indus period (Allchin 1995, Shaffer and Lichtenstein 1999: 254), moving further east, to
Gujarat, where we find a late, local phase of the Indus civilization (Rangpur phase IIb, IIc,
see Allchin 1995: 32 sqq., Kenoyer 1998: 173 sqq.), and, again, Drav. place names.
There are a number of facts which point to a dialect difference between the northern
and southern Indus language. Wheat, the staple of the Indus civilization, is called in
Dravidian by an adaptation of a local word: *gō-di 'low red plant' (Southworth 1988, 1979,
1990) which is quite different from the Panjab word *go-dum > Vedic godhūma 'cow
smoke' (but note Avestan gantuma!). Similarly, the Southern word is preserved by PDrav.
*variñci 'rice' and must have reached Iran (> M.Pers. brinj); this form differs from the
northern one, *vrijhi > Ved. vrīhi, which moved, via the northwestern Khaiber Pass, into
Pashto wrizẽ, etc.
As seen in Avestan gantuma : Ved. godhūma, in some Vedic loan words of the
northwest and the Panjab, original *-an- is opposed to southern -o-. The same relationship
is also found in northwestern ś : subcontinental k, northwestern -ñ- : subcontinental zero
in the word for 'rice'. We can discern a clear difference between the Panjab (-->Vedic) and
Sindh/Gujarat (--> Dravidian) forms of the Indus language (details in Witzel 1999 a,b).
Dialect differences between Panjab and Sindh seem even to be indicated in the Indus
inscriptions themselves. Seals and plates from Harappa (Panjab) differ in a number of
items from those found at Mohenjo Daro (Sindh), for example in the probable sign for
'container, quantity' which looks like a V; this is almost only found at Harappa (B. Wells
1998). The same applies to some 'suffixes' in the inscriptions (Wells, by letter 1999).
It can be concluded that the southern, 'Meluan' variety of the Indus language
(after the name the Sumerians gave to the country, Melua), the 'original' language of
Sindh, differed slightly from that of the Panjab, Para-Munda Harappan. Its traces might
still be found in modern Sindhi -- a type of research that has not been undertaken. There is
no etymological dictionary of Sindhi.
There are some indications that this Meluhhan language was prevalent in Sindh
before the immigration of the Dravida. The trade of the Indus civilization with Sumeria
and later Mesopotamia has left us a number of words that are not Dravidian. Meluhhan
was also sufficiently different from Elamite or Sumerian to require a 'translator from
Melua' (Possehl 1996a: no. 2), whose name is Šu-ilišu (Parpola 1994: 132). In fact, "the
language of Marhaši [Bampur area, just west of Iranian Baluchistan] is different from that
of the Simaškians [Tepe Yahya in southern Central Iran], and only very partially Elamiterelated."
(Vallat 1985: 52). Apparently, there was a language boundary, somewhere to the
west of the present Iran-Pakistan border. Possehl identifies the area of Melua (1996a,
1997) as having a center in the hills and mountains of Baluchistan, closer to the population
center of the early Indus civilization. This allows for a hypothetical identification of the
Marhaši language with that of Melua, and makes a thorough investigation of the data of
RV 8 even more important.
In Mesopotamia, there are men with Melua as a personal name, thus apparently,
'the Meluan'; several persons, among them Urkal and Ur- d lama, are called 'the son of
Melua'. There also is a 'village of Melua', from where a person called Nin-ana comes.