Grant of notional Increment on 1st July/1st January to the Armed Forces Personnel who are retiring/retired on 30th June/31st December respectively: MoD Order
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Thursday, 22 October 2026
Grant of notional Increment on 1st July/1st January to the Armed Forces Personnel who are retiring/retired on 30th June/31st December respectively: MoD Order
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carrying carnelian timber, ivory, and
2:36
other luxury goods. Most scholars think
2:38
Meloha was the Indis Valley. And here is
2:41
a wonderful clue. In the Louvre Museum
2:44
in Paris, there's a Mesopotamian
2:46
cylinder seal from more than 4,000 years
2:49
ago. It belonged to a man named
2:51
Shuilishu and its inscription describes
2:54
him as an interpreter of the Melohan
2:56
language. So we know the Indis people
2:59
spoke a language different enough from
3:01
the languages of Mesopotamia that
3:03
traders needed a professional
3:04
interpreter. We just don't know what
3:07
that language was. Then from around 190
3:10
BC, the great cities began to decline.
3:13
Rivers shifted, the climate became
3:15
drier, and trade with Mesopotamia faded.
3:19
Over the next few centuries, people
3:21
moved away from the big cities into
3:23
smaller villages further east and south.
3:25
The civilization didn't vanish
3:27
overnight, but its cities and its
3:30
writing fell silent. So why can't we
3:32
read the Indiscript? It's not for lack
3:35
of trying. Over the last h 100red years,
3:38
scholars, amateurs, and computer
3:40
scientists have published more than a
3:41
100 claimed decipherments. None has
3:44
convinced the experts. The problem
3:46
starts with the inscriptions themselves.
3:48
They're very short. Most are carved on
3:51
small square stamp seals, often with a
3:54
picture of an animal, a bull, an
3:56
elephant, a rhinoceros, or a mysterious
3:59
one-horned creature that's usually
4:01
called the unicorn. Above the animal is
4:03
a short line of signs. On average, an
4:06
Indis inscription is only about five
4:08
signs long. Even the longest are just a
4:11
few dozen. Imagine trying to decode an
4:14
unknown language using only thousands of
4:16
labels the length of a car number plate.
4:20
Scholars have counted around 400
4:22
different signs, possibly more depending
4:24
on how you count the variations. That's
4:27
too many for an alphabet which usually
4:29
has 20 or 30 letters. But it's far too
4:32
few for a system like Chinese with
4:34
thousands of characters. So most
4:37
researchers think the Indis script
4:39
combined signs for whole words with
4:41
signs for sounds like Egyptian
4:43
hieroglyphs or Mesopotamian ununiform.
4:46
At Doa Vera, archaeologists even found
4:48
what looks like a large signboard with
4:51
10 big signs once set into wood. Perhaps
4:54
it once hung over a gateway announcing
4:56
the city's name or its ruler. But the
4:59
biggest problem is this. To crack linear
5:02
B, Michael Ventress guessed the language
5:04
was Greek. To crack Egyptian
5:06
hieroglyphs, Champolon had the Rosetta
5:09
Stone with the same text in Greek. For
5:11
the Indis script, we have no bilingual
5:14
text, and we don't know which language
5:16
family it belongs to. We have neither
5:18
key. There's even a debate about whether
5:20
the Indis signs are writing at all. In
5:23
2004, three scholars argued that the
5:26
signs might be symbols like emblems or
5:29
heraldic badges rather than a script
5:31
that records language. Most specialists
5:34
disagree. They point to patterns in the
5:36
order of signs that look very much like
5:39
language. But the fact that this debate
5:41
exists at all shows how little we really
5:44
know. So which language could the Indis
5:46
people have spoken? Let's look at the
5:48
main candidates fairly. The most widely
5:51
discussed theory is that it was an early
5:53
form of Dravidian. Today, Dravidian is
5:57
the language family of southern India.
5:59
It includes Tamil, Telugu, Carnada and
Mallayalam and is spoken by around a
6:04
quarter of a billion people. Scholars
6:07
such as Asco Parola in Finland and
6:10
Aravatham Mahedan in India spent decades
6:13
working on this idea. One of the most
6:15
famous arguments involves a single sign,
6:18
a fish. In Dravidian languages, the word
6:20
for fish is mean, but men also means
6:23
star. So the argument goes, the
6:26
indescribes may have used a fish sign to
6:28
write the word for star or the name of a
6:30
star god in the same way that you might
6:32
draw a picture of an eye to mean I. It's
6:35
an elegant idea, but it is not proof.
6:38
The Dravidian theory has some strong
6:40
points. Dravidian languages are clearly
6:43
very old in South Asia. And as we'll see
6:45
in a moment, one Dravidian language is
6:48
still spoken today in Pakistan, close to
6:50
the old Indis lands. The second theory
6:53
is that the Indis people spoke an early
6:55
form of Indo-Aran, the branch of
6:57
Indo-Uropean that includes Sanskrit. A
7:01
few scholars particularly in India have
7:03
proposed readings based on Sanskrit but
7:06
most linguists and archaeologists think
7:08
Indo-Aran languages arrived in the
7:11
region later after the great cities had
7:13
declined. We'll come back to that. The
7:16
third theory is a family called Munda
7:19
part of the Ostroyatic family spoken
7:21
today in eastern and central India. Some
7:24
scholars have suggested that a related
7:26
language was once spoken further west.
7:29
And the fourth possibility is perhaps
7:31
the simplest. The Indis language may
7:33
belong to a family that has disappeared
7:35
completely, leaving no living relatives.
7:38
Some linguists talk about a language X,
7:41
an unknown language whose words survive
7:43
only as borrowings in other languages.
7:46
In the 1970s, the linguist Colin
7:49
Massacre found that a large share of
7:51
Hindi's words for crops and farming
7:53
couldn't be traced to Sanskrit,
7:55
Dravidian or Munda. They might have come
7:57
from a language that is now lost. The
7:59
Indis Valley may well have been home to
8:01
more than one language. Big trading
8:04
civilizations usually are. Ancient DNA
8:07
has added new evidence. In 2019,
8:10
geneticists published the genome of a
8:12
woman buried at Rakagahi about 4 and a
8:15
half thousand years ago. Her ancestry
8:18
was a mixture of two ancient groups long
8:20
established in South Asia, and it showed
8:23
no trace of the ancestry associated with
8:25
the Bronze Age herders of the Eurasian
8:27
step, the people most linguists link to
8:30
the spread of Indo-Uropean languages.
8:33
DNA can't tell us what language she
8:35
spoke, but it does fit the view that
8:37
Indo-Uropean languages arrived in South
8:40
Asia after the time of the great Indies.
8:43
To find more clues, we can turn to the
8:46
oldest text in Sanskrit, the Rigva. The
8:49
Rigveta is a collection of more than a
8:50
thousand hymns to the gods composed in
8:53
an early form of Sanskrit called Vadic.
8:56
Most scholars date its composition to
8:58
around 1,500
9:00
to 1,200
9:02
BC in the northwest of the subcontinent
9:05
in a land the hymns call the land of the
9:08
seven rivers. For thousands of years,
9:10
the Rigva was passed down orally,
9:13
memorized syllable by syllable with
9:15
extraordinary precision. In 2003, UNESCO
9:19
recognized the tradition of Vadic
9:21
chanting as a masterpiece of humanity's
9:24
oral heritage. Vadic Sanskrit is clearly
9:26
Indo-Uropean. Its words have relatives
9:29
across Europe. The Sanskrit pyar father
is related to Latin pa and English
9:35
father. Martar mother is related to
9:38
Latin ma but hidden in the rigva are
9:41
words that don't fit. Linguists have
9:43
identified hundreds of words in it that
9:46
have no clear Indo-Uropean origin. Many
9:49
of them are words for things that the
9:51
newcomers would have met for the first
9:52
time in South Asia. Local plants and
9:55
animals, farming tools and crafts. Take
9:58
the word for plow langala. It doesn't
10:01
look Indo-European at all and some
10:03
scholars think it was borrowed from an
10:05
Austroatic language, a relative of
10:07
Munda. The word for a mortar used for
10:10
grinding grain, oua seems to be
10:13
borrowed, too. These were people
10:15
learning to farm the land of the
10:17
subcontinent and learning the local
10:19
words as they went. There are clues in
10:22
the sounds as well. Sanskrit has a whole
10:24
set of consonants called retroflex
10:27
consonants made by curling the tip of
10:29
the tongue back towards the roof of the
10:30
mouth. You can hear them today in Hindi
10:33
words like tamar, tomato or in the
10:36
Indian English pronunciation of letters
10:38
like t and d. Most other Indo-Uropean
10:42
languages don't have these sounds but
10:44
Dravidian languages are full of them. So
10:47
when the early speakers of Indo-Arans
10:49
settled in South Asia, they lived
10:51
alongside people speaking other
10:53
languages. Over generations they mixed,
10:56
married and traded and the older
10:58
languages left their mark on Sanskrit
11:00
itself in its vocabulary and in the very
11:03
way it was pronounced. Now let's go to
11:06
Baloistan in western Pakistan. This is a
11:09
dry mountainous land on the western edge
11:12
of the old Indis world. Not far away is
11:15
Magagar, one of the earliest farming
11:17
villages in South Asia, settled around
11:20
9,000 years ago. And here nearly 3
11:23
million people speak a language called
11:25
Brahoui. What makes Brahoui
11:27
extraordinary is its family. Brahoui is
11:29
a Dravidian language, a relative of
11:32
Tamil, Telugu, Carnada, and Mallayalam.
11:35
And yet its nearest Dravidian relatives
11:37
are more than 1 and a half thousand
11:39
kilometers away in central and southern
11:42
India. Brahoui is surrounded by
11:44
completely different languages mainly
11:46
Baloti an Iranian language and Cindi an
11:50
Indo-Aryan one over the centuries it has
11:53
absorbed many words from them but its
11:55
grammar and its core words are still
11:57
clearly Dravidian so how did a Dravidian
12:00
language end up here for many scholars
12:03
the most natural explanation is that
12:05
Brahoui is a survivor Dravidian
12:08
languages may once have been spoken much
12:10
more widely across North Asia including
12:13
the Indis region before Indo-aran and
12:16
Iranian languages spread. If so, Brahoui
12:19
would be the last island left as the
12:21
tide came in around it. And that for
12:24
some is one of the strongest clues that
12:26
the Indis people spoke something
12:28
Dravidian. But other scholars disagree.
12:31
They point out that Brahoui seems to
12:33
lack the very old borrowings from
12:34
Iranian languages you might expect if it
12:37
had been there for 4,000 years. Instead,
12:41
they argue Brahoui speakers migrated
12:43
northwest from central India much later,
12:46
perhaps after 1,000 AD. So, Brahoui is
12:49
either one of the most important clues
12:51
to the Indis language or a much more
12:54
recent traveler. Linguists are still
12:56
arguing, and that's exactly what makes
12:59
it so fascinating. Dravidian and
13:01
Indoarian are the two biggest language
13:03
families of South Asia, but they're not
the only ones, and the others hold clues
13:08
of their own. In the forests and hills
13:10
of eastern and central India in states
13:13
like Jarkand, Adissa and West Bengal
13:16
live speakers of the Munda languages.
13:18
The largest is Santali spoken by around
13:21
7 million people. It even has its own
13:24
script old chickiki created in the 20th
13:27
century. The Munda languages belong to
13:29
the Austroatic family and their closest
13:32
big relatives are far to the east. Kare
13:35
in Cambodia and Vietnamese. Most
13:38
linguists think Austroatic speakers
13:40
reached India from Southeast Asia,
13:42
probably bringing rice farming with
13:44
them. High in the Kakorum mountains of
13:47
northern Pakistan in the valleys of
13:49
Hanza and Naga, people speak Buraski.
13:52
Around 100,000 people speak it and it is
13:56
a language isolate. Like Basque in
13:58
Europe, it has no known relatives
14:00
anywhere in the world. Linguists have
14:02
tried to link it to everything from the
14:04
languages of the Caucusesus to languages
14:07
of Siberia. None of these links has been
14:10
proved. Bureaski may be the last
14:12
survivor of a family that was once
14:14
spread much more widely across the
14:16
mountains of central Asia. India has
14:19
isolates of its own too. In central
14:21
India, a language called Nihari is
14:24
spoken by a few thousand people. It too
14:27
has no clear relatives. In the northeast
14:30
in the hills of states like Manipur,
14:32
Nagaland and Assam and along the
14:34
Himalayas are dozens of Tibetto Burman
14:37
languages relatives of Tibetan and
14:39
Burmese. One of them mate or Manipuri
14:43
has its own ancient script and
14:45
literature and is one of India's
14:47
official languages. And far out in the
14:49
Bay of Bengal on the Andaman Islands are
14:52
the Andamanes languages spoken by some
14:55
of the most isolated peoples on earth.
14:57
Some of them may be among the oldest
14:59
surviving language lineages in Asia.
15:02
Several are now nearly extinct. So,
15:04
South Asia isn't just a two family
15:07
story. It's one of the most
15:08
linguistically diverse regions on the
15:11
planet. A place where language families
15:13
from the west, the east, and the north
15:15
met, and where some of the oldest
15:17
survived in the mountains and forests.
15:19
If you're enjoying this journey across
15:21
the map, subscribe to Language Atlas.
15:24
Every video in this series tells the
15:26
story of what came before. So where does
15:29
Sanskrit fit in? Most linguists,
15:32
archaeologists, and geneticists today
15:34
think that Indo-Aran languages arrived
15:37
in South Asia from Central Asia during
15:39
the second millennium B.C. after the
15:42
great Indis cities had begun to decline.
15:44
Ancient DNA studies show that ancestry
15:47
linked to the step appears in South Asia
15:50
around this time. Some scholars,
15:53
especially in India, argue instead that
15:55
Indo-Aran languages developed within
15:58
South Asia itself. It's a debate that
16:00
still matters to many people today. But
16:02
the evidence from DNA and from
16:04
linguistics points mostly towards
16:07
movement into the region. Not a single
16:09
invasion, but a gradual spread of
16:11
people, livestock, and language over
16:14
many centuries. From the northwest,
16:16
Indo-Aran languages spread east along
16:18
the Ganges plane. Vadic Sanskrit became
16:22
the language of ritual and learning.
16:24
Later classical Sanskrit became a
16:27
language of literature, philosophy and
16:29
science across much of South and
16:31
Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, ordinary
16:34
people spoke everyday forms called
16:36
praits. And from those praits came the
16:38
languages spoken by around a billion
16:40
people today. Hindi and Udu, Bengali,
16:44
Punjabi, Maratti, Gujarati, Sinhala and
16:47
many more. But the older languages
16:49
didn't disappear. In the south, the
16:51
Dravidian languages flourished. Tamil
has one of the longest continuous
16:56
literary traditions in the world with
16:58
poetry going back around 2,000 years and
17:01
inscriptions older than that. And these
17:04
older layers are everywhere, even in
17:06
English. The word mango came to English
17:09
through Portuguese from the Dravidian
17:11
languages of southern India. Curry
17:14
probably comes from the Tamil Karai, a
17:16
word for a spiced sauce. Katamaran comes
17:19
from the Tamil K82 Maram, tide logs. And
17:23
when someone in India today curls their
17:25
tongue back to pronounce a T or a D,
17:29
whatever language they're speaking, they
17:31
may be preserving a sound that was heard
17:33
in South Asia long before Sanskrit
17:35
arrived. So what was spoken in India
17:37
before Sanskrit, we still can't say for
17:40
certain. The Indiscript remains unread,
17:43
but the clues are real. A Mesopotamian
17:46
interpreter for the language of Meluha,
17:48
a fish that may also be a star. Hundreds
17:51
of borrowed words hidden in the Rigva, a
17:54
Dravidian island in Pakistan, a mountain
17:57
language with no relatives, and the
17:59
sounds of South Asian speech itself.
18:02
Most likely, the land of the Indis was
18:04
home to several languages. Perhaps early
18:07
Dravidian, perhaps something related to
18:09
Munda, perhaps a family now lost
18:11
forever. And their echoes still live on
18:14
in the languages of more than a billion
18:16
people. Now, I'd love to hear from you.
18:19
What do you think the people of the
18:20
Indis Valley spoke? And if you speak a
18:23
South Asian language, which of these
18:25
clues surprised you most? Tell us in the
18:28
comments. And if you want to know how
18:30
scripts like this are cracked or why
18:32
some never are, watch our video on the
18:34
Manoan script next. Thanks for watching
18:37
Language Atlas.
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