Pre-Vedic religion in South Asia runs from the Mesolithic rock art of Bhīmbetka (Bhimbetka), c. 10,000 years ago, through the farming village of Mehrgarh (from c. 7000 BCE or earlier on the conventional dating, c. 5200 BCE on a 2025 redating) to the eve of the Indus cities c. 3300 BCE. Long before any Indo-Aryan speaker reached the subcontinent, people here were farming barley, herding humped cattle, burying their dead with goods, painting rock shelters, and burning enormous mounds of cattle dung in what look like repeated communal rites.[1][2]
They left no texts, so nothing about their beliefs can be read directly. But they left two things that matter enormously for this history: a population (the primary source of modern South Asian ancestry is a mixture of local hunter-gatherers and Iranian-related people already here, not later arrivals[3]) and a substrate of language and practice visible as loanwords in Sanskrit and as whole categories of Hindu religion that have no Vedic origin at all. Village goddesses, serpent worship, sacred trees, buffalo sacrifice, ritual bathing: none of this comes from the Rigveda.
This chapter is about where it plausibly does come from, and about being honest that “plausibly” is as far as the evidence goes. With no texts at all, it is the least secure material in the series, and its confidence tags run correspondingly low.
Timeline
Pre-Vedic South Asia runs from Bhīmbetka’s Mesolithic rock shelters, c. 10,000 BP, through the farming village of Mehrgarh to the start of the Early Harappan phase c. 3300 BCE. The full Hinduism timeline carries the story on to the present.
Mehrgarh’s absolute dates are in flux. The rows below give the conventional chronology; a 2025 study that dated tooth enamel directly would move the start of farming at Mehrgarh some two thousand years later and compress the Neolithic into a few centuries (see below).[4] Because the drilled molars come from Mehrgarh’s early farming-village burials, the redating moves them too: on either chronology the dentistry belongs to the farming village and does not precede it.
| Date | Event | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| c. 10,000+ BP | Bhīmbetka rock shelters in continuous use; Mesolithic painting begins[5] | Consensus |
| c. 7000 BCE or earlier (conventional); c. 5200–4700 BCE (2025 redating) | Mehrgarh Period I: barley and wheat farming, Balochistan. The redating is a single study, from a direct method[4] | Contested |
| c. 7000–5500 BCE (conventional) | Drilled human molars at Mehrgarh, the earliest known dentistry. Moves later with Period I if the 2025 redating holds[6][7] | Majority |
| c. 6000 BCE (conventional) | Independent local domestication of zebu cattle (Bos indicus)[1][8] | Majority |
| c. 5500 BCE (conventional); not before c. 4500 BCE (2025 redating) | Pottery at Mehrgarh; copper working begins[9][4] | Contested (date) |
| c. 3500–2600 BCE | Mehrgarh periods IV–VII; terracotta figurines proliferate, female forms dominant[9][10] | Consensus |
| c. 3000–1200 BCE | Southern Neolithic ashmounds of the Deccan; cattle-pen burning[11][12][2] | Consensus |
| c. 3000–1500 BCE | Burzahom, Kashmir: pit-dwellings, dog-with-human burials[1] | Consensus |
| c. 3300 BCE | Early Harappan phase begins[10] | Consensus |
| c. 2600 BCE | Mehrgarh largely abandoned as nearby Nausharo grows[9] | Majority |
Where pre-Vedic religion is found
Pre-Vedic religion is found in three separate worlds: the northwest around Mehrgarh, the cattle-centred Neolithic of the Deccan, and the foraging and farming cultures of central India and the Ganga plain.
Three separate worlds, not one:
- The northwest. Mehrgarh on the Kachi plain at the foot of the Bolan Pass, the corridor between Iran and the Indus. This is where farming enters and where the Harappan civilization’s direct ancestry lies.
- The Deccan. Karnataka and Andhra: Budihal, Sanganakallu, Kudatini, Utnur. A cattle-centred Neolithic largely independent of the north.[2]
- Central India and the Ganga plain. Bhīmbetka’s rock shelters; Mesolithic cemeteries at Damdama and Mahadaha with elaborate burials. Foraging populations persisting alongside farming.[1]
The evidence
Pre-Vedic South Asians farmed barley and wheat, domesticated zebu locally, buried their dead with grave goods and burned cattle dung on a vast scale; they are the primary source of modern South Asian ancestry.
There are no texts. Everything here is inferred from excavation, from comparative linguistics, and from working backwards from later practice, so the confidence tags run lower than anywhere else in this series.
| Dimension | What we can say | Evidence | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subsistence | Barley-first agriculture, with wheat; herding of cattle, sheep, goat | Mehrgarh Period I carbonized grain and faunal assemblages[1] | Consensus |
| Cattle | Zebu was domesticated locally, not imported | Bos indicus mtDNA lineages distinct from Near Eastern taurine cattle, most diverse in the Indus region; wild zebu bones at Mehrgarh preceding domesticates[8][1] | Majority |
| Technology | Ground stone, then pottery, then copper; cotton on a copper bead | Mehrgarh stratigraphy; Moulherat et al. 2002.[13] Absolute dates all shift later under the 2025 redating[4] | Contested (dates) |
| Death | Deliberate burial with grave goods; animals interred with humans | Mehrgarh burials with young goats; Burzahom dog-and-human burials[14][1] | Consensus |
| Ritual (Deccan) | Repeated, large-scale burning of cattle dung over centuries | Ashmounds up to 10 m high, vitrified dung, at ~20 sites[11][12][15] | Consensus that it happened; Contested what it meant |
| Imagery | Human figurines, overwhelmingly female, present from the Neolithic levels and abundant by c. 3000 BCE | Mehrgarh periods V–VII terracottas; male figurines appear only late[9][10] | Consensus on the objects; Contested on function |
| Genetics | Populations of this kind are the primary source of modern South Asian ancestry | Narasimhan et al. 2019; “Ancient Ancestral South Indian” plus an Iranian-related component from a pre-farming lineage. No Mehrgarh genome has been published; the evidence is Harappan-period[3][16] | Consensus |
| Language | At least two, probably three, non-Indo-European families were here first | Dravidian and Munda distributions; unetymologizable substrate vocabulary in Sanskrit[17][18] | Majority |
Mehrgarh, the ashmounds and Bhimbetka up close
Mehrgarh shows the unbroken local sequence that the Indus civilization grew out of, the Deccan ashmounds give the clearest ritual signal, and Bhīmbetka shows image-making continuing across many thousands of years.
Mehrgarh: the deep root
Excavated from 1974 by Jean-François Jarrige, Mehrgarh runs almost unbroken down to c. 2600 BCE, which makes it the single most important site for understanding what the Indus civilization grew out of.[9]
A large caveat, new since 2025. Mutin et al. (Scientific Reports 15: 11345) radiocarbon-dated tooth enamel from 23 Neolithic burials and found that the aceramic cemetery “started between 5200 and 4900 BCE and lasted for a period of between two and five centuries”, against a previous chronology with “an early beginning around 8000 BCE” and “a much longer duration of three millennia.” That puts Period I at roughly 5200–4700 cal BCE, about two thousand years later than the conventional c. 7000 BCE start; the title calls it “a late appearance of farming life in the Indus Valley.” The authors also put pottery in Pakistan “not before the mid-fifth millennium BCE.” If it holds, every absolute date on this page moves, and the Neolithic here is far shorter than the standard account. It is a single study and not yet absorbed by the field.[4] Contested, but from a direct dating method, and likely to stick
It also sharpens a disagreement about who the first farmers were. Mutin et al. read the late date as farming arriving through “a late diffusion of farmers into this region.” Shinde et al., from the one Harappan genome, argued the opposite: its Iranian-related ancestry split off before farming began on the Iranian plateau, so the two regions’ farmers descend from “different groups of hunter-gatherers who began farming without being connected by substantial movement of people.” Without ancient DNA from Mehrgarh itself, neither reading is settled.[4][16] Contested
Whatever its absolute date, Period I is aceramic: mud-brick houses, storage compartments, barley and wheat, and burials laid on their sides with beads and sometimes with the bodies of young goats.[9][14]
Two findings deserve attention because they reset expectations about how sophisticated this world was:
- Dentistry. “Eleven drilled molar crowns from nine adults,” with concentric striations showing a bow-drill. Coppa et al., Nature 440 (2006), date the graveyard to 7,500–9,000 years ago, i.e. c. 5500–7000 BCE on the conventional chronology; the drilling was done on living people, and four of the drilled teeth show decay linked to the hole, which suggests treatment.[7][6]
- Cotton. Mineralized cotton fibres on a copper bead: the earliest evidence for cotton in the Old World.[13] (Not “anywhere”: cotton from the Ñanchoc valley in northern Peru is of comparable antiquity.)[19]
What it means for religion. Directly, very little. Grave goods imply some belief about the dead, and nothing more specific can be honestly claimed. Indirectly, a great deal: the continuity Mehrgarh → Early Harappan → Mature Harappan is unbroken and local. The Indus civilization was not founded by newcomers, and whatever religious life it had was the descendant of this.[10][1] Consensus
The Deccan ashmounds: the clearest ritual signal
Across Karnataka and Andhra, some twenty Neolithic sites carry mounds of burnt cattle dung, some ten metres high, built up by repeated firing over centuries. At Budihal and Utnur, excavation shows cattle pens whose accumulated dung was burned again and again, sometimes to the point of vitrification.[11]
Why it looks ritual rather than practical. The scale far exceeds waste disposal; the burning is periodic rather than continuous; the mounds are sited prominently; and they persist across generations at fixed places. F. R. Allchin’s reading was seasonal cattle festivals, possibly involving driving cattle through smoke or fire.[12] Later work often preferred prosaic explanations, treating the mounds as markers of pastoralism or as the result of accidental or sanitary burning of pens; Nicole Boivin has argued from their landscape setting for a return to a ritual reading.[15] Contested
The tempting inference, and the brake on it. It is very attractive to draw a line from ashmound cattle-festivals to the sanctity of the cow, to go-pūjā, to bonfire festivals like Pongal and Holi. The line is plausible and unproven. Even Boivin, defending a ritual reading, argues only for continuity in material symbols such as dung and ash, “though not their associated meanings.”[15] Long centuries separate the ashmounds from any text describing such a practice, with no intervening evidence. This series marks that as Speculative and does not build on it.
Bhimbetka: continuity of image
Over 700 rock shelters in the Vindhyas, roughly 400 painted, with images from the Mesolithic (c. 10,000 BP) through the historic period.[5] Later layers include horse riders and figures that some identify as recognizable deities.[20] The shelters’ significance here is simply continuity: the same places were used for image-making across many thousands of years, spanning the arrival of farming, of the Harappans, and of Sanskrit.
The language substrate beneath Sanskrit
Retroflex consonants and unetymologizable vocabulary in Sanskrit are the strongest evidence for a pre-Vedic world, though Lubotsky argues many such words were borrowed in Central Asia before entry into South Asia.
This is the strongest evidence for a pre-Vedic religious world, because language preserves what archaeology cannot.
Retroflex consonants. Sanskrit has a series of retroflex sounds (ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh, ṇ, ṣ) made with the tongue curled back. No other Indo-European branch has an inherited, phonemically contrastive retroflex series reconstructible to its proto-stage. (Retroflexes do occur elsewhere in the family (Pashto and other eastern Iranian languages, Nuristani, and secondarily in Swedish and Polish), but they are secondary developments, and the Iranian cases sit inside the same contact zone.) Every Dravidian language has them. The standard explanation is substrate influence: Indo-Aryan speakers acquired the sound system of speakers who shifted to their language. Some argue for internal development instead.[17] Majority
Unexplained vocabulary. Colin Masica’s study of a corpus of Hindi plant and agricultural terms found roughly a third with no derivable etymology: not Indo-European, not Dravidian, not Munda.[18] Witzel documents similar unetymologizable words already inside the Rigveda itself, concentrated in exactly the semantic fields you would expect a migrant population to borrow: local plants, local animals, agriculture, and ritual objects. F. B. J. Kuiper had earlier catalogued hundreds of such non-Indo-Aryan words in the Rigveda.[21] The implication is a lost language family, what Witzel calls “Para-Munda”, spoken in the northwest and now entirely gone.[17] Majority
Named language families. Dravidian, now concentrated in the south but with Brahui surviving in Balochistan; and Munda (Austroasiatic), in eastern and central India. Neither is Indo-European, and both were here first.[22][17]
The main alternative, which changes the conclusion. Alexander Lubotsky (“The Indo-Iranian Substratum,” 2001) observes that a large share of these unetymologizable words are shared by Indo-Aryan and Iranian, which would mean they were borrowed in Central Asia, from the BMAC population, before entry into South Asia; those words at least would then be no evidence of a lost South Asian language. This is a well-regarded position, and for the shared words it reverses the inference.[23] Contested
What plausibly survives into Hinduism
Village goddesses, serpent worship and sacred trees plausibly descend from a pre-Vedic substrate rather than the Vedas; ritual bathing is contested, and the buffalo-demon motif and the cow’s special status are speculative.
State plainly: this is the least secure material in this series, because it argues backwards from later practice to an unrecorded origin. It is included because omitting it produces a worse distortion: a history in which Hinduism descends purely from the Vedas, which is clearly false.
| Later Hindu element | Why it looks non-Vedic | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| Village goddesses (grāmadevatā): Māriamman, Śītalā, Yellamma; disease-goddesses, buffalo sacrifice, non-brahmin priesthood | The Rigveda has goddesses (Uṣas, Aditi, Vāc) but no Great Goddess cult. These cults are structurally unlike Vedic religion: local, almost always female, blood-offering, served by non-brahmin pujaris[24][25][26] | Majority |
| Nāga (serpent) worship | Absent from early Vedic; serpents are the enemy there (Vṛtra, Ahi). Serpent veneration is pan-Indian, deeply localized, and heavily represented in later folk practice[27][28] | Majority |
| Sacred trees, the pipal above all | Pipal imagery is prominent on Harappan seals, including a horned figure standing inside a pipal[28] | Majority |
| Ritual bathing as purification | The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro; the later tīrtha system’s density in non-Vedic regions[29][10] | Contested |
| Buffalo-demon motif (later Mahiṣāsura) | Buffalo sacrifice is the signature offering of village goddess cults; the Vedic sacrificial animal is the goat, horse, or cow[25][28] | Speculative |
| The cow’s special status | Not Vedic in its later form: Indra boasts of the bulls cooked for him, and cattle were sacrificed and eaten. The Rigveda does call the cow aghnyā, “not to be killed,” which some read as early sanctity; Jha reads it as marking the milch cow’s value. A Neolithic cattle-cult substrate is one candidate explanation for how the cow later became inviolable[30][31][12] | Speculative |
The honest summary: Hinduism is a braid, and this is one of its strands. The Vedic strand is documented in extraordinary detail because it was preserved by a literate priesthood obsessed with exactness. The substrate strand is nearly invisible for exactly the opposite reason, and its invisibility in the record is not evidence of its unimportance in people’s lives.
Debates
The open debates about pre-Vedic religion are whether it can be described at all, whether the female figurines are goddesses, whether Dravidian is related to Elamite, and whether it was the Indus language.
Did the Neolithic here have “religion” we can describe?
No, not in any detail. Burials with goods, figurines, and ritual-looking burning are the entire dossier, and each admits mundane readings. Anyone offering a confident reconstruction of Neolithic South Asian belief is extrapolating.[1] Consensus among archaeologists
Are the female figurines goddesses?
The “Mother Goddess” reading goes back to Marshall[32] and early-20th-century assumptions about universal fertility cults. Alternatives: toys, votives, portraits, apotropaic objects, or objects used and discarded in domestic ritual. The figurines’ find contexts (often in refuse, not shrines) argue against a purely cultic reading.[10] Contested
Is Dravidian related to Elamite?
The Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis (McAlpin) would tie the Dravidian family to southwestern Iran and the spread of farming.[33] It has real support and real critics, among them Bhadriraju Krishnamurti; it is not established.[22][28] Contested
Was Dravidian the language of the Indus civilization?
Parpola’s case rests on his Dravidian readings of the seals,[34] on Brahui’s survival in Balochistan, and on Dravidian loanwords in the Rigveda. Others argue for Para-Munda or an unrelated lost family. Undecidable while the script is unread.[28][17] Contested
Further reading
Show further reading (7 works)
- Jean-François Jarrige et al., Mehrgarh: Field Reports 1974–1985.
- A. Coppa et al., “Early Neolithic tradition of dentistry,” Nature 440 (2006).
- F. R. Allchin, Neolithic Cattle-Keepers of South India (1963): the ashmound study.
- Colin Masica, “Aryan and Non-Aryan Elements in North Indian Agriculture,” in Aryan and Non-Aryan in India (1979).
- Michael Witzel, “Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan,” Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 5 (1999).
- Asko Parpola, The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization (Oxford, 2015).
- Narasimhan et al., Science 365 (2019).
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Robin Coningham & Ruth Young The Archaeology of South Asia: From the Indus to Asoka. Cambridge University Press, 2015. The standard synthesis for §§1–6.
- ^ a b c Dorian Q. Fuller "Agricultural Origins and Frontiers in South Asia: A Working Synthesis". Journal of World Prehistory 20: 1–86, 2006. doi The archaeobotanical synthesis of early farming across South Asia, including the Southern Neolithic of the Deccan.
- ^ a b Vagheesh M. Narasimhan et al. "The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia". Science 365, 2019. doi Over 500 ancient genomes. The steppe-ancestry signal, and its limits.
- ^ a b c d e f Benjamin Mutin, Antoine Zazzo, Luca Bondioli, Alfredo Coppa et al. "New radiocarbon dates of human tooth enamel reveal a late appearance of farming life in the Indus Valley". Scientific Reports 15: 11345, 2025. doi Tooth enamel from 23 Neolithic burials: the aceramic cemetery began c. 5200–4900 BCE and lasted two to five centuries, against a conventional start c. 7000–8000 BCE. Single study; not yet absorbed by the field.
- ^ a b Bhīmbetka rock shelters — Madhya Pradesh. c. 10,000 BP onward. Over 700 shelters, some 400 painted, in use from the Mesolithic through the historic period. The significance is continuity: the same places used for image-making across many thousands of years. about
- ^ a b Mehrgarh drilled molars — Mehrgarh. c. 7000–5500 BCE (conventional); later on the 2025 redating. Eleven bow-drilled teeth from nine adults — the earliest known dentistry, on living patients. about
- ^ a b A. Coppa et al. "Palaeontology: Early Neolithic tradition of dentistry". Nature 440: 755–756, 2006. doi Eleven drilled molar crowns from nine adults, drilled in life, from a Mehrgarh graveyard dated 7,500–9,000 years ago on the conventional chronology.
- ^ a b Shanyuan Chen, Bang-Zhong Lin, Mumtaz Baig, Bikash Mitra et al. "Zebu Cattle Are an Exclusive Legacy of the South Asia Neolithic". Molecular Biology and Evolution 27: 1–6, 2010. doi 844 mitochondrial sequences: zebu diversity peaks in the Indian subcontinent, with the Indus region the most probable centre of domestication.
- ^ a b c d e f Jean-François Jarrige et al. Mehrgarh: Field Reports 1974–1985. Department of Culture and Tourism, Govt. of Sindh, 1995. The excavation reports underlying everything said about the site — now in tension with the 2025 redating.
- ^ a b c d e f Jonathan Mark Kenoyer Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. Oxford University Press, 1998. full text The standard accessible account by an excavator.
- ^ a b c Deccan ashmounds — Budihal, Utnur, Kudatini. c. 3000–1200 BCE. Cattle-dung mounds up to 10 m, burned repeatedly over centuries — the clearest ritual signal in the South Asian Neolithic.
- ^ a b c d F. R. Allchin Neolithic Cattle-Keepers of South India. Cambridge University Press, 1963. full text The ashmound study.
- ^ a b Christophe Moulherat, Margareta Tengberg, Jérôme-F. Haquet & Benoît Mille "First Evidence of Cotton at Neolithic Mehrgarh, Pakistan". Journal of Archaeological Science 29: 1393–1401, 2002. doi The mineralized fibres on a copper bead — earliest cotton in the Old World.
- ^ a b Monique Lechevallier, Richard H. Meadow & Gonzague Quivron "Dépôts d'animaux dans les sépultures néolithiques de Mehrgarh, Pakistan". Paléorient 8: 99–106, 1982. doi The animal deposits, chiefly young goats, placed in Mehrgarh's Neolithic graves.
- ^ a b c Nicole Boivin "Landscape and Cosmology in the South Indian Neolithic: New Perspectives on the Deccan Ashmounds". Cambridge Archaeological Journal 14: 235–257, 2004. doi Reviews the prosaic readings of the ashmounds (pastoral waste, accidental or sanitary fires) and argues for a ritual one; allows continuity of dung and ash as symbols, not of their meanings.
- ^ a b Vasant Shinde et al. "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers". Cell 179, 2019. doi The single sequenced Rakhigarhi individual.
- ^ a b c d e Michael Witzel "Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan". Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 5, 1999. The case for a lost pre-Indo-Aryan language family in the northwest.
- ^ a b Colin P. Masica "Aryan and Non-Aryan Elements in North Indian Agriculture". in Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, 1979. The unetymologizable-vocabulary argument.
- ^ Tom D. Dillehay, Jack Rossen, Thomas C. Andres & David E. Williams "Preceramic Adoption of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru". Science 316: 1890–1893, 2007. doi Directly dated early cotton from the Ñanchoc valley, Peru: why Mehrgarh's cotton is the Old World's earliest, not the world's.
- ^ Yashodhar Mathpal Prehistoric Rock Paintings of Bhimbetka, Central India. Abhinav Publications, New Delhi, 1984. The standard survey and stylistic sequence of the Bhīmbetka paintings, from Mesolithic hunting scenes to historic-period riders and deities.
- ^ F. B. J. Kuiper Aryans in the Rigveda. Rodopi, 1991. full text On the non-Aryan element inside the text.
- ^ a b Bhadriraju Krishnamurti The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge University Press, 2003. The standard reference on the Dravidian family, its distribution and prehistory; sceptical of Elamo-Dravidian.
- ^ Alexander Lubotsky "The Indo-Iranian Substratum". Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 242, 2001. The main alternative to Witzel's "Language X": the unexplained vocabulary is shared with Iranian, so borrowed in Central Asia before entry into South Asia.
- ^ David Kinsley Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. University of California Press, 1986. full text The standard survey of Hindu goddesses, from the minor goddesses of the Vedas to the Great Goddess and the village goddesses.
- ^ a b Henry Whitehead The Village Gods of South India. Association Press / Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1921. full text A missionary bishop's ethnography: village deities almost exclusively female, buffalo and other animal sacrifice, non-brahmin pujaris. Its Aryan-versus-Dravidian framing is dated; the observations remain valuable.
- ^ Gavin Flood An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press, 1996. open library The standard university textbook, and the most balanced single overview.
- ^ RV 1.32.1 — Rigveda. c. 1400 BCE. Vedic Sanskrit. Indra slays the serpent Vṛtra and releases the waters — the defining act of Rigvedic religion. read the text
- ^ a b c d e Asko Parpola The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization. Oxford University Press, 2015. full text The fullest statement of the Dravidian-Indus case. Argued, not established.
- ^ The Great Bath — Mohenjo-daro. c. 2500 BCE. A monumental waterproofed tank. Ritual purity or civic amenity — nothing marks it as sacred. about
- ^ RV 10.86.14 — Rigveda (Vṛṣākapi hymn). c. 1100 BCE. Vedic Sanskrit. Indra says that fifteen and twenty bulls are cooked for him and that he eats their fat: the plainest Rigvedic evidence that cattle were sacrificed and eaten. read the text
- ^ D. N. Jha The Myth of the Holy Cow. Verso, 2002. Assembles the textual evidence for beef-eating in early India; politically contested in India.
- ^ John Marshall Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization. Arthur Probsthain, 3 vols., 1931. full text The excavation report that named the "Paśupati" seal, the "Priest-King" and the "Mother Goddess" — labels the field has been arguing with ever since.
- ^ David W. McAlpin Proto-Elamo-Dravidian: The Evidence and Its Implications. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 71, pt. 3, 1981. doi The fullest statement of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis.
- ^ Asko Parpola Deciphering the Indus Script. Cambridge University Press, 1994. full text The fullest Dravidian reading of the script.
