In a previous article Thara and Tharavad, I suggested that sailors from pharaonic Egypt may have colonized Kerala in the ancient past. In The Nomarch and the Nadvazhi, Kings without a Crown, Pazhassi, and other articles, I showed that ancient Egyptian culture, in terms of governing structures, economic systems, social customs, and religious traditions took root in Kerala, probably through some sort of Egyptian hegemony. In Soldiers on-call, I derived that the last pharaonic Egyptian viceroy probably left around 1900 BCE. Was Kerala actually populated that long ago? Perhaps neighboring Tamil Nadu may have the answer.
Kerala was long eclipsed in medieval history by the effulgence of the neighboring Chola kingdom of Tamil Nadu. Tamil Nadu has always had a culture distinct from Kerala, while similar to other parts of south India. Indeed, it is Kerala that has always stood starkly apart from all its neighbors in dress, matrilineal family ways, temple governance, economy, and administration since very ancient times. Despite Kerala’s distinctiveness, Malayalam was, and still is, believed to be an offshoot of Tamil. Kerala’s temples are believed to have derived from Tamil Nadu. In my past articles, I have shown that both these theories may be incomplete. As I wrote in Words, Malayalam, despite being influenced by Tamil, likely has its own separate source. In Pazhassi, I showed that Kerala’s temple culture stands on its own, more than likely influencing Tamil Nadu rather than the other way around. In this article, I propose a possible etymology for the word thamizh derived from ancient Egyptian.
According to Indologist David Shulman, the word thamizh does not have an accepted etymological source. Medieval lexicons associate thamizh with coolness and sweetness, both poetic figurative descriptions of a rich language. T. Burrow’s Dravidian Etymological Dictionary merely lists the meaning of the word as ‘Tamil language’ and ‘Tamil country.’ By at least one interpretation, thamizh means ‘the excellent [resounding] process,’ ‘the proper [process of] speaking,’ which sound “far-fetched” as Shulman admits, like all other suggestions. At any rate, it is a word that applies equally to the language and to the people who speak the language.
In 1937, an accepted hypothesis for the presence of the thamizh in south India, as expounded by Padmanabha Menon, was that they migrated by sea from the ancient port of Patala on the Indus delta around 2000–1500 BCE. Modern scholarship agrees that early second millennium BCE was a period of political instability and upheaval in the Indus delta, which led to the disintegration of societies settled in that region. For reasons unknown, trade abruptly shifted from there to other parts of India during that time.
It is possible that a group left Patala and navigated south by sea, as thamizh folklore claims. Bolstering this hypothesis is the Brahui language, with strong links to Tamil, that was spoken in a small region near the Indus delta. Another evidence comes from the history of stone beadmaking in the region. In the very ancient past (ca. 7000 — 2500 BCE), the Indus delta and nearby regions were thriving trade centers of stone beadmaking. When the Indus valley civilization collapsed around 2000 BCE, a part of this trade became focused near Lothal, around the Narmada basin in southern Gujarat. A less well-known, but more vigorous trade center of stone beadmaking emerged in the southern part of India, around Arikamedu, on the eastern seaboard in present day Tamil Nadu. It is believed that this culture of stone beadmaking was brought to the region by horse-riding, non-agrarian, immigrant craftsmen early in the second millennium BCE, possibly from the Indus delta.
In their search for a new homeland, the immigrants surprisingly ignored the southwestern coast of India, going around the cape to settle on the virgin coast along the eastern flank of the Sahyadri mountains. They flourished where they settled and evolved into a mighty kingdom with advanced sea navigation. Their high degree of material prosperity, their highly cultivated thamizh language with a wealth of literary and intellectual works entirely independent of Sanskrit, and their extraordinary commercial enterprise placed them among the advanced nations of antiquity.
Yet, this ancient kingdom, although rich and populous, was so secluded from the rest of India that its affairs remained hidden from the eyes of European scholars. Thus, its history previous to the year 800 CE has almost wholly vanished. Despite the lack of information, what is certain is that these people set their eyes eastward, not westward. They went on to dominate vast swathes of Southeast Asia — Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Bali, among other regions — but they did not turn around to cross the Sahyadri or go around the cape and attempt to conquer the settlement on the southwestern coast of India until much later in their history.
Why did these people who had emigrated south from a town on the western coast of India not settle down along the southwestern coast, but skirt it entirely to live along the southeastern coast on the other side of the mountains? Probably because the southwestern coast was already populated when they reached it. If so, Kerala was already colonized by 2000–1500 BCE, suggesting that pharaonic Egyptian settlers had already arrived at the shores of Malabar and established a working colony many years beforehand, corroborating the timeline established in Soldiers on-call.
This conclusion is also bolstered by a separate linguistic route. Traveling by boat, the immigrant visitors could not have arrived on the shores of Kerala from any cardinal direction other than the west, for Kerala is open to the sea only along its western frontier. The people of Kerala, who still spoke their native tongue untouched by Sanskrit in those days, must have called the visitors from the west thmHi, a name by which the ancient Egyptians called certain foreigners who lived west of Egypt around 2300 -2100 BCE, whose “longstanding presence in Egyptian cultural awareness made them the most familiar of the westerners to the Egyptians, perhaps even synonymous with western regions,” according to Taylor Woodcock. In modern scholarship, the thmHi are dubbed into one generic label called ‘Libyan,’ derived from the ancient Egyptian name for one of several groups, the Libu.
The Egyptian hieroglyph word for these non-natives from western regions reads 𓍘𓅓𓎛𓇋, with a pestle hieroglyph 𓍘 at the beginning and a consonantal voiceless pharyngeal fricative 𓎛 (twisted rope hieroglyph) at the end. The pestle hieroglyph is pronounced [th] or [ch] according to Gardiner’s Sign-List; incidentally, this consonantal correspondence [th]:[ch] is carried over into Malayalam too, in old words like thitt ‘document,’ which was also chitt. As I mentioned in my previous article, The Florist, the twisted rope hieroglyph is the Egyptian sound [H], which became Dravidian [zh] in certain Malayalam words. Thus, Egyptian thmHi would have been thamazhi or thamizh in old Malayalam. Indeed, the latter is the name by which the people of Kerala call their culturally distinct compatriots in Tamil Nadu even today.
Let me end with this nugget to ponder: We need no name, no label, to know ourselves as “I,” each self identical to the other. Yet, we become known, we create our separate identities, we forge our distinct uniqueness, we build our differences through the names given to us by others.
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