Around five kilometers from the little hamlet of Varandarapilly in Thrissur district, situated in the shadows of the Western Ghats, on a hill called Muniyattukunnu, is an ancient, man-made structure called muniyara.¹ The muniyara is characterized by a few upright stones on which is placed a horizontal stone slab.² The site is believed by archeologists to be a stone dolmen, a burial tomb around 3000 years old.³ Yet, because the words muni and ara in modern Malayalam mean respectively, ‘sage’ and ‘closet,’ the popular conception of this burial site is as a place where monks meditated or lived.⁴
Perhaps they did shelter there, but it is inconceivable that they could have erected the structure without help from others, for the stone slabs used in the construction are massive. No single human being could have built the structure by themselves. It was clearly a group effort. If it took that much effort, why not build a traditional hut for cover rather than these complicated, almost ritualistic looking structures? It seems logical to conclude that perhaps these structures existed as such before the monks took shelter under them. Perhaps they really were ancient megalithic burial sites thousands of years older than the monks.
The evidence for this conclusion rests in linguistic evolution. Corresponding to Malayalam muniyara in sound and supporting the archeological interpretation of this structure was one of the many ancient Egyptian words for ‘tomb’: mene-here.⁵ Considering that old Malayalam derived from ancient Egyptian, couldn’t it be possible that the word changed slightly in pronunciation but entirely in meaning when monks entered Kerala’s cultural landscape and took refuge under these stone slabs, so that what once meant a tomb came to be identified as a shelter for monks?
Notes
[1] Only one such structure remains here. Other similar structures can be found in nearby Kallayi Forest, around 6 kilometers north-west of Muniyara, and other parts of Kerala.
[2] Similar structures can be found all over the world, in fact, and date to prehistoric Neolithic times in some instances. “Dolmen,” Encyclopedia Brittanica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/dolmen.
[3] S. Suresh, S. Rajesh and A.P. Pradeepkumar, 2018, “History and Development of Devikulam High Range, Idukki District, Kerala,” Heritage: Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies in Archaeology, vol. 6: 697–711.
[4] Hermann Gundert, 1872, A Malayalam and English Dictionary (Mangalore: C. Stolz), 52, 834. Suresh, “History and Development,” 700.
[5] The Egyptian word mene-here was a compound word formed from mene, meaning ‘enduring’ (or menne meaning ‘granite sarcophagus’) and here pronounced with individual vowels sounded out, meaning ‘[rock] tomb’. The h sound changed into ya in Malayalam or was dropped. Indeed, a historical biographical Egyptian inscription dating to the third quarter of 6th century BCE refers to the mene-here ‘enduring rock tomb,’ suggesting evidence of its use by ancient Egyptians.
