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British archaeologist’s statue to mark 100 yrs of discovery of Indus Valley Civilisation: Stalin
Tamil Nadu will install a statue of John Marshall to commemorate 100 years since the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation, CM MK Stalin announced.
The Tamil Nadu government will install a life-size statue of British archaeologist John Marshall to mark 100 years of the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), chief minister MK Stalin announced on Friday.
Marshall was the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) from 1902 to 1928 during which time the Harappa and Mohenjodaro, two main cities that comprise the Indus Valley Civilisation, were discovered.
“Exactly 100 years ago, on 20th September 1924, Sir #JohnMarshall announced the discovery of the #IndusValleyCivilisation, reshaping the history of the Indian subcontinent,” Stalin posted on X. “I look back with gratitude and say, Thank you, John Marshall. By taking the right cognizance of the material culture of the #IVC, he linked it to the #DravidianStock. My government has already announced that the centenary of this historic discovery will be marked by an international conference and the installation of a life-size statue of Sir John Marshall in Tamil Nadu.”
Stalin posted a reference from Marshall’s book that “the Indus civilisation was pre-Aryan and the Indus language or languages must have been pre-Aryan also. Possibly, one or other of them…was Dravidic. This for three reasons seems a most likely conjecture-first because Dravidic-speaking people were the precursors of the Aryans…Dravidians of India, who, though now restricted to the South of India, are believed on linguistic and ethnological grounds to have once populated virtually the whole of the peninsula, including the Punjab, Sind, and Baluchistan…”
Since forming the government in 2021, Stalin has said that his DMK government’s mission was to prove scientifically that the Indian subcontinent’s history should be written, starting from the Tamil landscape. That year, the chief minister announced in the assembly that there’s conclusive proof of a civilisation existing in Tamil Nadu around 3,200 years ago, citing scientific evidence — a finding that means a thriving city-based river valley civilisation existed in the state, coinciding with the latter half of the Indus Valley civilisation.
In June, the state launched its ambitious archaeological excavations in four existing sites, including Keeladi, the Sangam Era site 12km south-east of present-day Madurai district dated to be at least 2,600 years old with a thriving industrialised settlement on the banks of Vaigai river. Fresh digging was launched at four new sites.
In August, during the ongoing 10th phase of archaeological excavation in Keeladi, a terracotta pipeline was found in further indication of an ancient water management practice followed by those who inhabited the settlement at least 2,600 years ago. Previously archaeologists have found an open drain, a closed channel and small tanks here.
One of the significant findings last year was the discovery of 2,030 graffiti marks, including four with Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions, from Thulukkarpatti in Tirunelveli district. Scientific dates obtained through accelerator mass spectrometry dating of samples collected from archaeological sites excavated by the Tamil Nadu state department of archaeology have pushed the origin of Tamili (Tamil-Brahmi) script by hundred years to 7th century BCE. The state government is embarking on a comparative study of the graffiti marks, potsherds, with those from the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Artefacts unearthed in Keeladi pushed the Sangam era to 600 BCE from 300 BCE, rice husks found in a burial urn in Sivakalai was found to be 3,200 years old, and that Tamils were aware of iron technology in 2172 BCE, 4,200 years ago. The carbon dating pushed the Sangam era by 300 years that it was thought to be. Keeladi was first discovered in 2014 by Amarnath Ramakrishna of the Archaeological Survey of India.
