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120-484: Āryāvarta ( Sanskrit : आर्यावर्त, lit.   ' Land of the Aryans ' , Sanskrit pronunciation: [aːrjaːˈʋərtə] ) is a term for the northern Indian subcontinent in the ancient Hindu texts such as Dharmashastras and Sutras , referring to the areas of the Indo-Gangetic Plain and surrounding regions settled by Indo-Aryan tribes and where Indo-Aryan religion and rituals predominated. The limits of Āryāvarta extended over time, as reflected in

240-691: A Readership in Indian Studies in 1972. Away from Cambridge, his achievements were also recognised through being made a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1953, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1957, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1974 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1981 as well as having an Honorary D.Litt. conferred by Deccan College , Pune in 2007. He also served on

360-578: A biannual platform for South Asian archaeologists, numismatists , epigraphers and historians of art and architecture to exchange information from current research. Forming the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists, the Allchins organised the first meeting, which was held at Churchill College in Cambridge in 1971. In reaction to the lack of institutions, teaching posts or funds devoted to

480-458: A buffer zone around the site, this report was later used by the Japanese architect, Kenzō Tange , as the core for his masterplan for Lumbini, which has directed the development of the site over the last thirty years into the present. Recognition of Raymond's contribution to South Asian archaeology was rewarded in Cambridge when he was appointed a Fellow of Churchill College in 1963 and promoted to

600-498: A dead language in the most common usage of the term. Pollock's notion of the "death of Sanskrit" remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says that "most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead." Raymond Allchin Frank Raymond Allchin , FBA (9 July 1923 – 4 June 2010) was a British archaeologist and Indologist . He and his wife, Bridget Allchin , formed one of

720-527: A distinctive, highly burnished red ware covering an area of 13 hectares along the foot of the spur. Raymond recognised that these sherds belonged to the category of Burnished Red Ware associated with the Gandhara grave culture , dating to the beginning of the first millennium BC at the end of the Chalcolithic period . Also aware of the parallel presence of such sherds in the basal levels of Wheeler 's excavations at

840-433: A focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit. Though written in a number of different scripts, the dominant language of Hindu texts has been Sanskrit. It or a hybrid form of Sanskrit became the preferred language of Mahayana Buddhism scholarship; for example, one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna (~200 CE), used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts. According to Renou, Sanskrit had

960-581: A language competed with numerous, less exact vernacular Indian languages called Prakritic languages ( prākṛta - ). The term prakrta literally means "original, natural, normal, artless", states Franklin Southworth . The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is found in Indian texts dated to the 1st millennium CE. Patañjali acknowledged that Prakrit is the first language, one instinctively adopted by every child with all its imperfections and later leads to

1080-643: A limited role in the Theravada tradition (formerly known as the Hinayana) but the Prakrit works that have survived are of doubtful authenticity. Some of the canonical fragments of the early Buddhist traditions, discovered in the 20th century, suggest the early Buddhist traditions used an imperfect and reasonably good Sanskrit, sometimes with a Pali syntax, states Renou. The Mahāsāṃghika and Mahavastu, in their late Hinayana forms, used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature. Sanskrit

1200-581: A long heritage of medical practitioners, including Dr Thomas Monro , an ancestor who had attempted to treat the 'madness' of George III . Allchin, Bridget, and F. Raymond Allchin 1968. The Birth of Indian Civilization: India and Pakistan Before 500 B.C. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Allchin, Bridget, and F. Raymond Allchin 1982. The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allchin, Bridget, and F. Raymond Allchin 1997. Origins of

1320-454: A natural part of the earliest Vedic language, and that these developed in the centuries after the composition had been completed, and as a gradual unconscious process during the oral transmission by generations of reciters. The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion, with the same phrases having sandhi-induced retroflexion in some parts but not other. This

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1440-479: A negative evidence to Pollock's hypothesis, but it is not positive evidence. A closer look at Sanskrit in the Indian history after the 12th century suggests that Sanskrit survived despite the odds. According to Hanneder, On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken, written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be

1560-546: A pan-Indo-Aryan accessibility to information and knowledge in the ancient and medieval times, in contrast to the Prakrit languages which were understood just regionally. It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent. As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified, Sanskrit served as the common language. It connected scholars from distant parts of South Asia such as Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, states Deshpande, as well as those from different fields of studies, though there must have been differences in its pronunciation given

1680-573: A refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars, the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini . The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa , wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and

1800-534: A restrained language from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded". The Classical form of the language simplified the sandhi rules but retained various aspects of the Vedic language, while adding rigor and flexibilities, so that it had sufficient means to express thoughts as well as being "capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature", according to Renou. Pāṇini included numerous "optional rules" beyond

1920-439: A similar phonetic structure to Tamil. Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil on Sanskrit. Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived – "that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from

2040-692: Is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages . It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age . Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism , the language of classical Hindu philosophy , and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism . It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in

2160-508: Is akin to that of Latin and Ancient Greek in Europe. Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent , particularly the languages of the northern, western, central and eastern Indian subcontinent. Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century. This coincides with the beginning of Islamic invasions of South Asia to create, and thereafter expand

2280-452: Is found in the writing of Bharata Muni , the author of the ancient Natya Shastra text. The early Jain scholar Namisādhu acknowledged the difference, but disagreed that the Prakrit language was a corruption of Sanskrit. Namisādhu stated that the Prakrit language was the pūrvam ('came before, origin') and that it came naturally to children, while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through "purification by grammar". Sanskrit belongs to

2400-524: Is rare in the later version of the language. The Homerian Greek, like Ṛg-vedic Sanskrit, deploys simile extensively, but they are structurally very different. The early Vedic form of the Sanskrit language was far less homogenous compared to the Classical Sanskrit as defined by grammarians by about the mid-1st millennium BCE. According to Richard Gombrich—an Indologist and a scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli and Buddhist Studies—the archaic Vedic Sanskrit found in

2520-479: Is taken along with evidence of controversy, for example, in passages of the Aitareya-Āraṇyaka (700 BCE), which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases. The Ṛg-veda is a collection of books, created by multiple authors. These authors represented different generations, and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest. Yet,

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2640-580: Is the predominant language of one of the largest collection of historic manuscripts. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE, such as the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh) . Though developed and nurtured by scholars of orthodox schools of Hinduism, Sanskrit has been the language for some of the key literary works and theology of heterodox schools of Indian philosophies such as Buddhism and Jainism. The structure and capabilities of

2760-526: The Bhagavata Purana , the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language. The Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was thus the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants of it as well as other natural Indian languages. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside

2880-529: The Bala Hisar of Charsadda challenged received wisdom at the time that suggested that such cities had been founded no earlier than the sixth century BC as the Persian Empire expanded eastwards and annexed the satrapy of Gandhara, and that the urban sequences of the region stretched back before Persian contact, possibly back to the late Chalcolithic. Though Raymond never excavated to prove such assertions, he

3000-741: The British Museum and Professor Ken Thomas of UCL . Later as Joint Director of the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan with Bridget, the focus shifted away from the Bronze Age to the Early historic period and particularly onto the site of Taxila. On a walk around the Hathial ridge one February morning in 1980, not far from the Taxila Museum guesthouse, they discovered numerous sherds of

3120-876: The Bronze Age Indus cities or those of the Early Historic period in the north of the Subcontinent. After undertaking a survey of sites within the District, he selected the ash-mound of Piklihal for further investigation. Excavating in 1952, and again in 1957, with the assistance of the Andhra Pradesh Department of Archeology and Museums , Raymond demonstrated that the ash mound had a distinct Neolithic sequence with later evidence of Iron Age occupation above. In order to test some of his earlier theories about Piklihal, Raymond selected Utnur for excavation, one of

3240-568: The Dalai Lama , the Sanskrit language is a parent language that is at the foundation of many modern languages of India and the one that promoted Indian thought to other distant countries. In Tibetan Buddhism, states the Dalai Lama, Sanskrit language has been a revered one and called legjar lhai-ka or "elegant language of the gods". It has been the means of transmitting the "profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy" to Tibet. The Sanskrit language created

3360-555: The Ganges - Yamuna . BDS 1.1.2.13-15 considers people from beyond this area as of mixed origin, and hence not worthy of emulation by the Aryans. Some sutras recommend expiatory acts for those who have crossed the boundaries of Aryavarta. Baudhayana Srautasutra recommends this for those who have crossed the boundaries of Aryavarta and ventured into far away places. The Vasistha Dharma Sutra (oldest sutras ca. 500–300 BCE) I.8-9 and 12-13 locates

3480-797: The Hindu mythology as gods and heroes mentioned in the two epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata , lived here. Kanyakubja or modern day Kannauj was a central city of Aryavarta and was used as capital-city from 510 CE to 1197 CE under Maukharis , Harshavardhana , Varmans , Pratiharas and Gahadavala dynasty . The Gurjara-Pratihara king in the tenth century was titled the Maharajadhiraja of Aryavarta . Sanskrit Sanskrit ( / ˈ s æ n s k r ɪ t / ; attributively 𑀲𑀁𑀲𑁆𑀓𑀾𑀢𑀁 , संस्कृत- , saṃskṛta- ; nominally संस्कृतम् , saṃskṛtam , IPA: [ˈsɐ̃skr̩tɐm] )

3600-613: The Indo-European family of languages . It is one of the three earliest ancient documented languages that arose from a common root language now referred to as Proto-Indo-European : Other Indo-European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin ( c. 600 BCE–100 CE, Italic languages ), Gothic (archaic Germanic language , c.  350 CE ), Old Norse ( c. 200 CE and after), Old Avestan ( c.  late 2nd millennium BCE ) and Younger Avestan ( c. 900 BCE). The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in

3720-503: The Mauryans . The Allchins were also pivotal in promoting and facilitating the study of South Asian archaeology in Europe as well as within the Subcontinent. In the 1970s, aware of the fragmented nature of South Asian scholarship across Europe and seeking to broaden the capacity that was at the time possible and available within Britain, the Allchins, together with colleagues from Europe, created

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3840-645: The Regent Street Polytechnic , where he studied architecture for three years followed by conscription into the Royal Corps of Signals . Trained as a Line Mechanic, Raymond was posted to India in 1944. On his return, he embarked on a BA in Hindi and Sanskrit at SOAS University of London , followed by a PhD on the prehistory of Raichur District in Hyderabad under the supervision of Professor K. de B. Codrington at

3960-744: The Rigveda had already evolved in the Vedic period, as evidenced in the later Vedic literature. Gombrich posits that the language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit, while the archaic Vedic Sanskrit had by the Buddha 's time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages. The formalization of the Saṃskṛta language is credited to Pāṇini , along with Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patañjali's work. Panini composed Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight-Chapter Grammar'), which became

4080-532: The Rigveda , a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from the mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax. Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit ,

4200-526: The Rāmāyaṇa , however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language. The hymns of the Rigveda are notably similar to

4320-538: The Saka invasions and rule of northwestern India (2nd c. BC - 4th c. CE), Brahmanism faced a grave threat to its existence. The decline of Brahmanism was overcome by providing new services and incorporating the non-Vedic Indo-Aryan religious heritage of the eastern Ganges plain and local religious traditions, giving rise to the Hindu synthesis . These texts also identify other parts of the Indian subcontinent with specific designations. The Manusmṛti mentions Brahmavarta as

4440-678: The Thar desert in the west and the confluence of the rivers Ganges (Ganga) and Jumna (Yamuna) in the east." The Manusmṛti (dated between 2nd cent. BCE to 3rd cent. CE) (2.22) gives the name to "the tract between the Himalaya and the Vindhya Ranges , from the Eastern Sea ( Bay of Bengal ) to the Western Sea ( Arabian Sea )". The Manava Dharmasastra (ca.150-250 CE) gives aryavarta as stretching from

4560-406: The sandhi rules, both internal and external. Quite many words found in the early Vedic Sanskrit language are never found in late Vedic Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit literature, while some words have different and new meanings in Classical Sanskrit when contextually compared to the early Vedic Sanskrit literature. Arthur Macdonell was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of

4680-500: The verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- is a compound word consisting of sáṃ ('together, good, well, perfected') and kṛta - ('made, formed, work'). It connotes a work that has been "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred". According to Biderman, the perfection contextually being referred to in the etymological origins of the word is its tonal—rather than semantic—qualities. Sound and oral transmission were highly valued qualities in ancient India, and its sages refined

4800-414: The 13th century, a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared, perhaps in the "fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir" or the "Mongol invasion of 1320" states Pollock. The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century. As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and

4920-521: The 7th century where he established a major center of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong. By the early 1st millennium CE, Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia, parts of the East Asia and the Central Asia. It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions. According to

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5040-557: The Citadel of Anuradhapura in the island's North Central Province following a joint invitation from Dr Roland Silva, director general of archaeology, and Dr Siran Deraniyagala , one of his former students and then archaeological advisor to the Government of Sri Lanka . Raymond invited his former undergraduate and new research student, Robin Coningham, to accept the role of field director, and

5160-425: The Classical Sanskrit language launched ancient Indian speculations about "the nature and function of language", what is the relationship between words and their meanings in the context of a community of speakers, whether this relationship is objective or subjective, discovered or is created, how individuals learn and relate to the world around them through language, and about the limits of language? They speculated on

5280-521: The Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary, but they have also affected Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, "for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo-Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence". Similarly, Ferenc Ruzca states that all the major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be attributed to the constant influence of a Dravidian language with

5400-513: The Dravidian words and forms, without modifying the word order; but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian or English sentence into a non-Indo-Aryan language. Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called vinaiyeccam in Tamil) shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs (originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic). This particularly salient case of

5520-839: The Governing Council of the Society for Afghan Studies and its successor, the Society for South Asian Studies, as well as being associated with the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust, the British Academy's Stein-Arnold Committee and the Advisory Council of the Victoria and Albert Museum . Raymond was appointed a Fellow of the British Academy in 1981 and retired with the title of Emeritus Reader in South Asian archaeology in 1989. In 1951, Bridget met fellow PhD student Raymond Allchin at

5640-469: The Indo-Aryan language underwent rapid linguistic change and morphed into the Vedic Sanskrit language. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit . The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda , a Hindu scripture from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive, if any ever existed, but scholars are generally confident that

5760-507: The Indo-European languages are the Nuristani languages found in the remote Hindu Kush region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas, as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian – both are Iranian languages . Sanskrit belongs to the satem group of the Indo-European languages. Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of

5880-700: The Indus civilisation in western India, following this in 1968 with excavations at the site of Malvan with Bridget and Dr J. P. Joshi, of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Returning to fieldwork in the North West Frontier Province in the Bannu Basin , Raymond and Bridget worked collaboratively between 1977 and 1979, working at Lewan and Tarakai Qila with Professor F. A. Durrani and Professor Farid Khan of Peshawar University, Mr Robert Knox of

6000-621: The Institute of Archaeology and they married in March of that year. Travelling to India for the first time with Raymond in 1951, Bridget steadily but firmly established herself as the most prominent South Asian Prehistorian in the UK. A pioneering female field-archaeologist in South Asia at a time when there were none, Bridget's research interests and publications were to stretch across South Asia from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka. Like Raymond, Bridget's family also had

6120-521: The Muslim rule in the form of Sultanates, and later the Mughal Empire . Sheldon Pollock characterises the decline of Sanskrit as a long-term "cultural, social, and political change". He dismisses the idea that Sanskrit declined due to "struggle with barbarous invaders", and emphasises factors such as the increasing attractiveness of vernacular language for literary expression. With the fall of Kashmir around

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6240-489: The Muslim rulers. Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire , reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting their socio-linguistic identity. After Islamic rule disintegrated in South Asia and the colonial rule era began, Sanskrit re-emerged but in the form of a "ghostly existence" in regions such as Bengal. This decline was the result of "political institutions and civic ethos" that did not support

6360-488: The Saṃskṛta language, both in its vocabulary and grammar, to the classical languages of Europe. In The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World , Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms (with the addition of Old English for further comparison): The correspondences suggest some common root, and historical links between some of

6480-616: The South India, such as the great Vijayanagara Empire , so did Sanskrit. There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit, mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar . Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language and scripts found in Persia and Arabia, and the Indians linguistically adapted to this Persianization to gain employment with

6600-447: The Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg-veda "hardly presents any dialectical diversity", states Louis Renou – an Indologist known for his scholarship of the Sanskrit literature and the Ṛg-veda in particular. According to Renou, this implies that the Vedic Sanskrit language had a "set linguistic pattern" by the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Beyond the Ṛg-veda, the ancient literature in Vedic Sanskrit that has survived into

6720-451: The Vedic Sanskrit's bahulam framework, to respect liberty and creativity so that individual writers separated by geography or time would have the choice to express facts and their views in their own way, where tradition followed competitive forms of the Sanskrit language. The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature, are negligible when compared to

6840-407: The alphabet, the structure of words, and its exacting grammar into a "collection of sounds, a kind of sublime musical mold" as an integral language they called Saṃskṛta . From the late Vedic period onwards, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted an "exceptionally large amount of linguistic, philosophical and religious literature" in India. Sound

6960-408: The archaeologists Bridget Allchin and Raymond Allchin , believe the term Brahmavarta to be synonymous with Aryavarta. Madhyadesa extended from the upper reaches of the Ganges and the Yamuna to the confluence of the two rivers at Prayaga , and was the region where, during the time of the Mahajanapadas , the Kuru Kingdom and Pañcāla existed. The entire region is considered sacred in

7080-456: The best-preserved ash mounds. In a single season, he cut through metres of cinder and ash and discovered that the mounds were contained by series of post-holes, demarking superimposed circular stockades . He again dated this site-type to the Neolithic of South India and to the fourth millennium BC on account of the associated polished stone axes. He interpreted the stockades at Utnur as annual cattle camps, whose accumulations of dung were burnt at

7200-440: The capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages such as Ardhamagadhi . A section of European scholars state that Sanskrit was never a spoken language. However, evidences shows that Sanskrit was a spoken language, essential for oral tradition that preserved the vast number of Sanskrit manuscripts from ancient India. The textual evidence in the works of Yaksa, Panini, and Patanajali affirms that Classical Sanskrit in their era

7320-414: The close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages , vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages , and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna. The pre-history of Indo-Aryan languages which preceded Vedic Sanskrit is unclear and various hypotheses place it over a fairly wide limit. According to Thomas Burrow, based on

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7440-449: The collections of its founders. The Trust also organised funds to facilitate Indian and Pakistani visiting fellowships, which included highly distinguished scholars including Dilip Chakrabari, Ravi Korisettar, K. Krishnan, V. N. Misra , Lolita Nehru, K. Paddaya, Gautam Sengupta and Vasant Shinde. The legacy of the Allchins, and the Trust that they helped found, continues to support the promotion of South Asian scholarship. In December 2013,

7560-559: The context of a speech or language, is found in verses 5.28.17–19 of the Ramayana . Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit, vernacular colloquial dialects ( Prakrits ) continued to evolve. Sanskrit co-existed with numerous other Prakrit languages of ancient India. The Prakrit languages of India also have ancient roots and some Sanskrit scholars have called these Apabhramsa , literally 'spoiled'. The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo-European languages but which are found in

7680-489: The crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. As in this period the Indo-Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent, this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India (the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadeśa) who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit. Extant manuscripts in Sanskrit number over 30 million, one hundred times those in Greek and Latin combined, constituting

7800-418: The detailed and sophisticated treatise then transmitted it through his students. Modern scholarship generally accepts that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as Lipi ('script') and lipikara ('scribe') in section 3.2 of the Aṣṭādhyāyī . The Classical Sanskrit language formalized by Pāṇini, states Renou, is "not an impoverished language", rather it is "a controlled and

7920-418: The differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. Louis Renou published in 1956, in French, a more extensive discussion of the similarities, the differences and the evolution of the Vedic Sanskrit within the Vedic period and then to the Classical Sanskrit along with his views on the history. This work has been translated by Jagbans Balbir. The earliest known use of the word Saṃskṛta (Sanskrit), in

8040-409: The distant major ancient languages of the world. The Indo-Aryan migrations theory explains the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages by proposing that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in South Asia from a region of common origin, somewhere north-west of the Indus region , during the early 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes

8160-427: The early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture , and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies. Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in

8280-413: The eastern to the western seas, reflecting the growing sphere of influence of the Brahmanical ideology. The post-Vedic period of the Second Urbanisation saw a decline of Brahmanism. With the growth of cities, which threatened the income and patronage of the rural Brahmins; the rise of Buddhism; and the Indian campaign of Alexander the Great (327-325 BCE), the rise of the Maurya Empire (322-185 BCE), and

8400-522: The end of each grazing season, thus creating a regular sequence of ash and cinder. He later developed these ideas into a narrative which bound together Hindu ritual tradition and contemporary pastoral practice with the archaeological findings, suggesting that the regular burning of the stockades was not a calamity or the result of raiding but part of an annual fire rite, perhaps surviving today as Holi, Divali or Pongal . On moving to Cambridge in 1959, Raymond turned his attention to Pakistan and worked at

8520-404: The first Annual Allchin Symposium, named in their honour, was held at the Trust. Established to commemorate their work and outstanding contribution to the development of South Asian studies in the UK, the Symposium brings together established lecturers, post-doctoral researchers and PhD students working in South Asian Archaeology, History and the History of Art and Architecture, providing a forum for

8640-543: The first language of the respective speakers. The Sanskrit language brought Indo-Aryan speaking people together, particularly its elite scholars. Some of these scholars of Indian history regionally produced vernacularized Sanskrit to reach wider audiences, as evidenced by texts discovered in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Once the audience became familiar with the easier to understand vernacularized version of Sanskrit, those interested could graduate from colloquial Sanskrit to

8760-412: The foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedānga . The Aṣṭādhyāyī was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest that has survived in full, and the culmination of a long grammatical tradition that Fortson says, is "one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world". Pāṇini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of the Sanskrit language before him, as well as

8880-537: The gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and Nasatya found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature. O Bṛhaspati, when in giving names they first set forth the beginning of Language, Their most excellent and spotless secret was laid bare through love, When the wise ones formed Language with their mind, purifying it like grain with a winnowing fan, Then friends knew friendships – an auspicious mark placed on their language. — Rigveda 10.71.1–4 Translated by Roger Woodard The Vedic Sanskrit found in

9000-431: The historic Sanskrit literary culture and the failure of new Sanskrit literature to assimilate into the changing cultural and political environment. Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead ". After the 12th century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with

9120-423: The importance of alcohol for man-kind . . . it is surprising that comparatively little is known of its early history,'12 and concluding that 'it may well be that the art of distillation was India’s gift to the world!" Raymond then shifted his focus back to India and undertook an archaeological reconnaissance of the coast of Gujarat in 1967 focused on investigating the presence or absence of sites associated with

9240-478: The intense change that must have occurred in the pre-Vedic period between the Proto-Indo-Aryan language and Vedic Sanskrit. The noticeable differences between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit include the much-expanded grammar and grammatical categories as well as the differences in the accent, the semantics and the syntax. There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end, as well as

9360-432: The largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press. — Foreword of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics (2009), Gérard Huet, Amba Kulkarni and Peter Scharf Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts, as well as poetry, music, drama , scientific , technical and others. It

9480-412: The linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language. Pāṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon. This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta-rules, some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced. Despite differences in the analysis from that of modern linguistics, Pāṇini's work has been found valuable and

9600-454: The literary works. The Indian tradition, states Winternitz , has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times. Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana , the Mahabharata ,

9720-501: The modern age include the Samaveda , Yajurveda , Atharvaveda , along with the embedded and layered Vedic texts such as the Brahmanas , Aranyakas , and the early Upanishads . These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern, northern, and eastern Indian subcontinent. According to Michael Witzel, Vedic Sanskrit was a spoken language of

9840-429: The more advanced Classical Sanskrit. Rituals and the rites-of-passage ceremonies have been and continue to be the other occasions where a wide spectrum of people hear Sanskrit, and occasionally join in to speak some Sanskrit words such as namah . Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini , around the fourth century BCE. Its position in the cultures of Greater India

9960-401: The most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century. Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia. It is unclear whether Pāṇini himself wrote his treatise or he orally created

10080-593: The most archaic poems of the Iranian and Greek language families, the Gathas of old Avestan and Iliad of Homer . As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity, rigour and fidelity, as a single text without variant readings, its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European . Sanskrit does not have an attested native script: from around

10200-427: The most influential British partnerships in the post-Independence study of South Asian archaeology. Producing a large body of scholarship ranging from archaeological excavations, ethnoarchaeology as well as epigraphy and linguistics, the Allchins made their work and that of others accessible through a series of sole, joint and edited publications. Seminal works include The Birth of Indian Civilisation (1968), which

10320-583: The numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language. Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas since ancient times; it is widely taught today at the secondary school level. The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 during East India Company rule . Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants . In Sanskrit,

10440-403: The oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they are ceremonial literature, where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition. However some scholars have suggested that the original Ṛg-veda differed in some fundamental ways in phonology compared to the sole surviving version available to us. In particular that retroflex consonants did not exist as

10560-431: The other." Reinöhl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil, with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi, whereas the same relationship is not found for non-Indo-Aryan languages, for example, Persian or English: A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali or Hindi equivalents for

10680-414: The possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once one knows to look for it, can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit". The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and

10800-542: The presentation and discussion of current research. Amongst other collections, the Ancient India and Iran Trust also houses the Allchin archive, comprising the photographic slide collection of both Allchins and the meticulous work diaries which Raymond kept during each of his field seasons, offering great potential to scholars of South Asian archaeology. As well as undertaking almost forty years of field investigations, Raymond

10920-439: The previous 1,500 years when "great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination" marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit, states Pollock. Scholars maintain that the Sanskrit language did not die, but rather only declined. Jurgen Hanneder disagrees with Pollock, finding his arguments elegant but "often arbitrary". According to Hanneder, a decline or regional absence of creative and innovative literature constitutes

11040-480: The problems of interpretation and misunderstanding. The purifying structure of the Sanskrit language removes these imperfections. The early Sanskrit grammarian Daṇḍin states, for example, that much in the Prakrit languages is etymologically rooted in Sanskrit, but involves "loss of sounds" and corruptions that result from a "disregard of the grammar". Daṇḍin acknowledged that there are words and confusing structures in Prakrit that thrive independent of Sanskrit. This view

11160-584: The promotion of popular or scholarly interest in South and Central Asia, the Allchins, along with Professor Sir Harold Bailey , Professor Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw and Dr Jan van Lohuizen , founded the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge in 1978. The Trust aimed to support and provide a focal point where scholars and members of the public with interests in the cultures of these geographic regions could meet and use its unique library, substantially composed of

11280-555: The region between the Sarasvati and the Drishadvati in northwest India . The text defines the area as the place where the "good" people are born, the twice-born who adhere to the Vedic dharma, in contrast to the mleccha s, who live outside the Aryan territory and Vedic traditions. The precise location and size of the region has been the subject of academic uncertainty. Some scholars, such as

11400-596: The regional Prakrit languages, which makes it likely that the interaction, the sharing of words and ideas began early in the Indian history. As the Indian thought diversified and challenged earlier beliefs of Hinduism, particularly in the form of Buddhism and Jainism , the Prakrit languages such as Pali in Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times. However, states Paul Dundas , these ancient Prakrit languages had "roughly

11520-545: The relationship between various Indo-European languages, the origin of all these languages may possibly be in what is now Central or Eastern Europe, while the Indo-Iranian group possibly arose in Central Russia. The Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches separated quite early. It is the Indo-Aryan branch that moved into eastern Iran and then south into South Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Once in ancient India,

11640-524: The responsibility to guide the development of Lumbini , the birthplace of the Buddha, following the 1967 visit to the site by U Thant , the UN Secretary General, who wished to see the site transformed from what Raymond called 'little more than a neglected field' to a site worthy of 'a collection of monuments of great importance'. Tasked with assisting in the planning of a sacred garden, pilgrim village and

11760-467: The results from excavations between 1989 and 1993, refuted many long held assumptions. Excavating a ten-metre deep cultural sequence stretching from the ninth century BC to the tenth century AD. it provided evidence of urbanism in the fourth century BC but also confirmed Deraniyagala's early claim of evidence of the earliest Early Brahmi script anywhere in South Asia, demonstrating its use to facilitate trade before being later adopted as an imperial tool by

11880-558: The role of language, the ontological status of painting word-images through sound, and the need for rules so that it can serve as a means for a community of speakers, separated by geography or time, to share and understand profound ideas from each other. These speculations became particularly important to the Mīmāṃsā and the Nyaya schools of Hindu philosophy, and later to Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, states Frits Staal —a scholar of Linguistics with

12000-541: The same institution. On completing his PhD, Raymond was appointed Lecturer in Indian archaeology at SOAS in 1954. He left SOAS in 1959 for the post of Lectureship in Indian Studies at Cambridge. Raymond died in Cambridge on 4 June 2010. He and his wife Bridget had two children, Sushila and William. Raymond was an active field archaeologist throughout his career and his first introduction to South Asian fieldwork

12120-491: The same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin". The Indian tradition states that the Buddha and the Mahavira preferred the Prakrit language so that everyone could understand it. However, scholars such as Dundas have questioned this hypothesis. They state that there is no evidence for this and whatever evidence is available suggests that by the start of the common era, hardly anybody other than learned monks had

12240-461: The scale armour from the cap of a cataphract , based on observations from Gandharan sculpture , excavation reports, textual sources and contemporary examples from Rajput . He also suggested that a number of globular vessels, that Sir John Marshall had interpreted for distillation of water at Sirkap , Taxila, were actually alcohol stills . Basing this hypothesis on ethnographic analogy, Vedic references and Rajput texts he stated that "Considering

12360-551: The semi-nomadic Aryans . The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo-European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the " Mitanni Treaty" between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people, carved into a rock, in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey. Parts of this treaty, such as the names of the Mitanni princes and technical terms related to horse training, for reasons not understood, are in early forms of Vedic Sanskrit. The treaty also invokes

12480-467: The site of Shaikhan Dheri between 1963 and 1964. Working with Professor A. H. Dani of Peshawar University , Raymond and Bridget supervised the processing of antiquities and pottery drawing during the first season. Although only on site for one season, Raymond later produced research on artefacts from Shaikhan Dheri. He suggested that a number of small iron plates pierced with small holes around their edges, some of which had rusted together, formed part of

12600-594: The social structures such as the role of the poet and the priests, the patronage economy, the phrasal equations, and some of the poetic metres. While there are similarities, state Jamison and Brereton, there are also differences between Vedic Sanskrit, the Old Avestan, and the Mycenaean Greek literature. For example, unlike the Sanskrit similes in the Ṛg-veda, the Old Avestan Gathas lack simile entirely, and it

12720-641: The turn of the 1st-millennium CE, it has been written in various Brahmic scripts , and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari . Sanskrit's status, function, and place in India's cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India 's Eighth Schedule languages . However, despite attempts at revival, there are no first-language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but

12840-457: The variants in the usage of Sanskrit in different regions of India. The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Āpiśali, Kaśyapa , Gārgya, Gālava, Cakravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja , Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka and Sphoṭāyana. In the Aṣṭādhyāyī , language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians. Pāṇini's grammar, according to Renou and Filliozat, is a classic that defines

12960-600: The various sources, as the influence of the Brahmanical ideology spread eastwards in post-Vedic times. The Baudhayana Dharmasutra (BDS) 1.1.2.10 (perhaps compiled in the 8th to 6th centuries BCE) declares that Āryāvarta is the land that lies west of Kālakavana, east of Adarsana, south of the Himalayas and north of the Vindhyas, but in BDS 1.1.2.11 Āryāvarta is confined to the doab of

13080-564: The vernacular Prakrits. Many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits. The cities of Varanasi , Paithan , Pune and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era. According to Lamotte , Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication. It was, states Lamotte, an ideal instrument for presenting ideas, and as knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied, so did its spread and influence. Sanskrit

13200-796: The Āryāvarta to the east of the disappearance of the Sarasvati River in the desert, to the west of the Kālakavana, to the north of the Pariyatra Mountains and the Vindhya Range and to the south of the Himalayas. Patanjali 's Mahābhāṣya (mid-2nd century BCE) defines Āryāvarta like the Vashistha Dharmasutra . According to Bronkhost, he "situates it essentially in the Ganges plan, between

13320-497: The Ṛg-veda is distinctly more archaic than other Vedic texts, and in many respects, the Rigvedic language is notably more similar to those found in the archaic texts of Old Avestan Zoroastrian Gathas and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . According to Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton – Indologists known for their translation of the Ṛg-veda – the Vedic Sanskrit literature "clearly inherited" from Indo-Iranian and Indo-European times

13440-408: Was a spoken language ( bhasha ) used by the cultured and educated. Some sutras expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit. Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit, not in the vernacular language of that region. According to Sanskrit linguist professor Madhav Deshpande, Sanskrit

13560-427: Was a spoken language in a colloquial form by the mid-1st millennium BCE which coexisted with a more formal, grammatically correct form of literary Sanskrit. This, states Deshpande, is true for modern languages where colloquial incorrect approximations and dialects of a language are spoken and understood, along with more "refined, sophisticated and grammatically accurate" forms of the same language being found in

13680-472: Was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture, arts, and profound ideas. Pollock disagrees with Lamotte, but concurs that Sanskrit's influence grew into what he terms a "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" over a region that included all of South Asia and much of southeast Asia. The Sanskrit language cosmopolis thrived beyond India between 300 and 1300 CE. Today, it is believed that Kashmiri is the closest language to Sanskrit. Reinöhl mentions that not only have

13800-520: Was also motivated by the need to record and protect heritage in the face of the pressures of increasing population and development in South Asia. Raymond was also one of the pioneers for the protection of heritage sites within their cultural landscape, as illustrated by his work for the UN with the Japanese Planner and Architect, K. Matsushita, in 1969. Raymond and Matsushita had been contracted by UNDP with

13920-722: Was also the language of some of the oldest surviving, authoritative and much followed philosophical works of Jainism such as the Tattvartha Sutra by Umaswati . The Sanskrit language has been one of the major means for the transmission of knowledge and ideas in Asian history. Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE, carried by the influential Buddhist pilgrim Faxian who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE. Xuanzang , another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, learnt Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in

14040-602: Was in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan in 1951. Here, under the direction of Codrington, he studied the standing remains of Shahr-e-Zohak . Later that year, in the company of Bridget, he began his PhD research in Raichur District . Raymond's selected research topic, the Neolithic of Peninsular India , was one of the areas of South Asian archaeology most poorly understood and was a neglected area of research when compared to

14160-454: Was later superseded by their books The Rise of Indian Civilisation in India and Pakistan (1982) and The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (1995). Raymond Allchin was born in Harrow, London on 9 July 1923, son of Frank Macdonald Allchin, a doctor, and Louise Maude. His brother was Donald Allchin , an Anglican priest and theologian. Raymond was educated at Westminster and enrolled at

14280-498: Was pivotal to negotiating the return of an archaeological team to Charsadda after a gap of thirty years. Jointly directed by his former students, Professor Robin Coningham and Professor Ihsan Ali of Peshawar University, excavations between 1993 and 1997 confirmed Raymond's hypothesis of a much earlier date for initial settlement at c.1300 BC. In 1989 and at the age of 67, Raymond initiated his last major field project in Sri Lanka at

14400-442: Was visualized as "pervading all creation", another representation of the world itself; the "mysterious magnum" of Hindu thought. The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound, and the common thread that wove all ideas and inspirations together became the quest for what the ancient Indians believed to be a perfect language, the "phonocentric episteme" of Sanskrit. Sanskrit as

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