14 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
expect to find in the spot where the two people came in contact, and enlisted architecture to symbolize their commercial union.” [1]
It will not be out of place to note the relation of the Dravidians, the earliest inhabitants of India though by no means aborigines with the people of western Asia. Mr. Gustav Oppert says, “It is established now, beyond any doubt, through the decipherment of the Cunciform inscription, that the Turanian Empires had advanced to a high degree of culture. This civilization, though tainted with strange materialism proved itself nevertheless able to develop to a high degree of perfection certain branches of arts and science. To these Turanians who differed much among each other in idiom belong also to the Dravidians of India of our days, who in those times occupied Ariana and Persia. In Europe, these Turanians appear to be represented by the Esthonians, and in many places of western and central Asia, they formed the substratum of the population, while they supplied in China the ground work of the civilization of the celestial empire.” These Turanians “had founded empires throughout the old world. The home of the Turanians is assumed to have been the country round Lake Aral. Thence they spread over the greatest part of Asia, reigned there paramount for at least
1500 years.” The Egyptians, the Assyrians the Akkadians, the Sumerians, the Phoenicians are all branches of the same Turanian race. “About 250 years after the Egyptian empire had been established i.e. 2500 B. C, and after the Akkadian dynasty had reigned for a long period in Babylon the Aryans invaded Chaldea, and pressing at the same time on the Kannanites of the Persian Gulf and the Dravidians in Persia, drove the former towards the North-west and the latter to the Southeast to India”. The Aryans when they invaded India met with a stubborn resistance from these Dravidians. For “they did not go beyond the frontiers of the Punjab till the fifteenth century before Christ”. [2] Next in importance and chronology
1 “ The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea”, Translated and annotated by W.H. Scoff, p. 66-67.
2 cf. Gustav oppent, “ On the Ancient Commerce of India” in “The Madras Journal of literature and Science” 1878, pp. 189, 90, 91; for parallels between Malbarian and Egyptian customs cf “Primitive Civilizations” by E. J. Simcox Vol. I. pp. 183, 550, 554, 569, 570, 574, Vol. II. p. 473.