potters, brahmins, and RSis (contd.)

Dominique.Thillaud thillaud at UNICE.FR
Sun Oct 5 21:37:17 UTC 1997


At 8:15 +0200 5/10/97, Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan wrote:
>In a message dated 97-10-02 02:40:41 EDT, thillaud at UNICE.FR writes:
>
><< But backed bricks are too common if you have a lot
> of wood and workers. That can't be a proof. Informations on similar shapes
> would be better. >>
>F. Staal in his description of Agnicayana ritual cites Converse (1974) as
>saying,"The bricks of the Harappa civilization in its mature phase were
>beautifully made, well fired, and standardized in size. The basic size for
>the bricks was 11 1/2 inches long, 5 3/4 inches wide, and two or three inches
>thick. There were also double bricks 11 inches square, and special bricks for
>well copings, drain covers, corners, etc.
>       Now in the whole of the Rg-Veda there is no word for brick, nor any
>descriptive phrase for bricks.....Thus, in the BrAhmaNas, when references to
>bricks begin to appear, their use is confined to one specialized rite, and
>the rite itself is found only in the Yajurveda tradition......
>       The size of the bricks to be used in the rite was one foot square, and
>half-bricks were also to be used (ZB vii, 5,3,viii,7,2,17). This size ans
>shape corresponds very closely to that of the Harappa bricks described
>above..."

        I suppose there are technical constraints on the size of the
bricks. All over the world and the time it seems approximately the same (no
small, no large). The Vedic altar have a very particular shape. If you
don't find this shape, made with bricks, elsewhere, you just proove a
possibility, nothing else.

>There seems to be several problems for deriving an IE etymology for "aGgiras"
>. Considering that "agni" is frequently called "aGgiras" and first "aGgiras",
>I wonder why nobody looked to see if Classical Tamil could help in this
>regard. In CT texts, there are two instances when "agni" is referred to by
>the word-form "aGgi" (paTTin2ppAlai 54, and paripATal 11.7). (In fact, this
>form "aGgi" can be seen in later texts also. Here there is an alternation
>much like nuclear vs. nukelar or ask vs. aks in American English.  n before g
>in Tamil becomes a homorganic nasal.)Thus aGgiras could be related to a
>Dravidian group borrowing "agni" to give themselves an Aryan name, in that
>process altering it to aGgi. Then the name could have been re-Sanskritized to
>aGgiras.
>
>While I do not know what processes could takeplace in this
>re-Sanskritization, out of curiosity I applied what we saw in the change from
>"agni" > "aGgi" to a possible suffix that might have been added to "agni"
>when it was first borrowed to create a name for this group of people in
>Dravidian.
>
>agni+ ar > agni+y+ar  ,
>where y is a glide and ar is a suffix denoting people, meaning people of agni
>
>agniyar > agnisar
>( intervocalically y alternates with "c" pronounced as "s" in Tamil. For
>instance, the form "kuyavar" (potter) alternates with "kucavar" pronounced as
>"kusavar")
>
>agnisar > aGgisar (based on agni > aGgi)
>
>If the second part of the word "sar" undergoes a similar process, we get
>
>aGgisar > aGgiras
>
>This is interesting. Is it  not? I am not a subsriber to the theory of
>deliberate inversion in Dravidian. But we know that the exigencies of trying
>to get themselves elevated in the Aryan/brahminical hierarchical social
>structure has led many groups in India to concoct for themselves far more
>etymologically fanciful names and histories. So who knows if this could not
>have happened even in the pre-historic times?

        We don't need such complicated proof to link Agni and Angiras.
There are many other possibilities. Just an example:
        From *ag- 'to lead, sacrify, burn': *ag-n- 'fire', locative in
Agnideva 'the God in the fire' > 'the fire'. With a nasal infix with
causative sense *ang- 'to make a fire, a sacrifice', with agent suffix
*-h1-l- : *angir- 'sacrificer'. The masculine sigmatic thema is an
intensive abstraction: 'THE sacrificer'.
        We don't know the first rapports between Aryans and Dravidians. To
suppose one of them better than other is just a fiction intending to attise
the hate between today's people. In fact, both contribute to give birth to
India. Compare the best known rapports between Greece and Roma: who was the
winner ?
        Regards,
Dominique

Dominique THILLAUD
Universite' de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France





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