Fascinating read!!! Confusing...yeah maybe :) but fascinating and very informative. I think we're all a big mumbo-jumbo of various ethnicities...is this not what it comes down to? Read on...



The following taken from asnic.utexas.edu



What was the language of the Indus Valley, present-day Pakistan, in the pre-Islamic period? Did this region have one language or many? Did it have one language family or many?



"Contrary to the popular myth in Pakistan, the Aryans did not roll down the northern mountains like a tidal wave carrying all the Dravidians before them. According to some scholars they came in at least two major waves in Pakistan as well as small trickles. The first wave came 'around 2000 B.C, and the second some six centuries later'. After the second wave, when they became dominant, their language too spread over northern India. It is this language, or rather a number of dialects, which we call Old Indo Aryan for convenience. The language of the first wave, which remained confined to the Pamir mountains of Pakistan, is identified as Dardic while the second one may be called Indic.



Sanskrit became the elitist language of the Indus Valley from about 1000 B.C and remained in use in some domain or the other, generally religion and the state, till the Muslim conquest when Persian took its place.



Language was sacred and change was seen as corruption. But all living languages change and the spoken languages of the people, the Prakrits, changed all the time. This threat was countered by making grammatical rules which would petrify language. The most well known of this set of rules was made by the great grammarian Panini who was born at 'Salatura' which is about twelve miles from Jahangira near the Attock bridge in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. In those days this village was part of Gandhara which, according to Panini, comprised 'the valley of the Kabul river, with its frontier outpost at Takshasila'. Panini's grammar contains about 4000 rules which were memorized and orally transmitted 'for a couple of hundred years' and was not written down at all. So sacred was the language of the religious texts, Sanskrit, that the grammar itself acquired a central and almost sacrosanct place in the education system of the Indus Valley Aryans.



This was hardly surprising because the Gandhara region was ruled by the Persians some time in the sixth century B.C. This is evidenced in the inscriptions of Darius in which 'clear mention has been made of Hi (n) du, that is, the Punjab territory, as a part of the realm'. Further evidence comes from the discovery of an Armaic-Greek inscription of Asoka, the great Buddhist ruler of around 250 B.C., a few miles west of present-day Kandahar in April 1957. Carratelli, writing on this discovery remarks:



... the region had been an old Iranian province and it is logical to assume that the tradition of the Achaeminian state language was maintained. Satrapal offices must have survived during Macedonian domination (when Greek was added) and continued their use of Armaic when the Mauryas took over. The importance of Armaic for administration purposes in the former Iranian provinces is borne out by the Taxila and the Pul-i-Durunteh inscriptions.



Armaic 'came to the fore' at 'the time of the Assyrian empire and became the principal means of communication in the Persian empire'. It was a kind of lingua franca in Gandhara and Bactria (part of present-day Afghanistan). King Ashoka (spelled as Asoka by other writers) used it presumably because the people of Kandahar at that time understood Armaic. However, as Gankovsky points out, the common peoples' language did not become Persianized. Even so the script in which their Prakrit was written came from the Persian empire: it was Kharoshthi.



This script, like other Middle Eastern scripts, was written from right to left. By the third century B.C. the Mauryan kings (ruled c. 317-180 B.C.), of whom Ashoka was so illustrious an example, were losing their grip over the northern part of the subcontinent. The Greek kings of Bactria now seized the Western provinces of the Mauryas and by 180 B.C. the Greek language came to be used in some domains such as coins. King Menander (d. 130 B.C) inherited 'western Punjab and Gandhara up to the Indus, with its capital at Taxila'. Under him 'Pushkalawati -- present-day Charsadda near Peshawar -- began its period of prominence as a Greek centre'. Since the coins of these Greek kings bear Kharoshthi -- and sometimes Brahmi -- inscriptions, it is evident that this script was never suppressed. Similarly, the local languages continued to be used. However, Greek too found a place of prominence and came to be used at least in the elitist domains. According to Woodcock:



For at least a century and a half, in fact, Greek remained not only the commercial but also the patrician lingua franca of the Kabul valley and of Gandhara at least as far as Taxila. Merchants and kings learnt it as a matter of course, as is shown by the experiences of Appolonius of Tyana when he journeyed to Taxila in 44 A.D.



By the middle of the first century B.C., Greek rule in Gandhara had come to an end except for an enclave around Peshawar. The Sakas, who were from Central Asia and spoke an Iranian tongue, came to rule Gandhara by 32 B.C. Later they left their original language and became strong supporters of Sanskrit. They did not, however, stop the use of Kharoshthi or the Greek language altogether. In fact 'the local Saka ruler of Ujjain' sent a letter to Augustus Ceasar in 24 B.C. in Greek. The Saka kings also inscribed Greek legends, as well as Kharoshthi ones, on their coins. It is also reported that 'the women of Surastra continued to use the Greek form of greetings' for quite some time..."