M.K. Stalin, the chief minister of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, proudly announced that the Iron Age began in Tamil Nadu 5,300 years ago, referencing the recent dating of iron implements found in the state to 3345 BCE. This has placed India’s Iron Age among the earliest in the world.
However, Stalin added a political angle to the discovery, turning what could have been a simple statement of archaeological fact into a battle between North and South India. He played up the fact that the dating of iron in Tamil Nadu implied that South India had entered the Iron Age before North India and the contemporaneous Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), which was still in the Copper Age.
Stalin is, no doubt, influenced by the Dravidian ideology, which his party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) holds to. The ideology asserts the unique civilization and characteristics of the Dravidian peoples of southern India. Tamil is a Dravidian language, and a member of that family with the oldest literary history.
Smelting iron is certainly a great accomplishment, doubly so because it was accomplished five millennia ago. The technology necessary to smelt iron can evidence an advanced civilization because the melting point of iron — 1,538 degrees Celsius (2,800 degrees Fahrenheit) — requires the ability to construct a furnace that can reach extremely high temperatures. Iron is also harder and more suitable for agriculture and warfare than bronze or other common metals and alloys.
Nonetheless, one gets the impression that the government of Tamil Nadu is trying to make a point of this to rub in the faces of North Indians, or indeed, any other people in the world, by asserting the superiority of Tamil civilization. Stalin has lately upped the battle between South and North India by ramping up the rhetoric on the danger of the perceived “imposition” of Hindi on Tamils and the demographic danger of North Indian population growth on the issue of delimitation — the process through which parliamentary seats are allocated to states on the basis of population — for his state.
Tamil Nadu Finance Secretary Udhayachandran offered this historically inaccurate statement in ThePrint, an online Indian magazine: “A civilization develops only when they get to use the iron. It all starts from the iron. They start making weapons, they start making other objects which would eventually lead them to farming and then the civilization thrives. So, in that aspect it is important.”
Actually, farming long predates metalworking and emerged in the Neolithic (New Stone Age) over 12,000 years ago. Weapons can be and were made of bronze before they were made of iron. The warriors in the Greek epic, the Iliad, fought with gleaming bronze swords and spears. Some civilizations, such as the majority of Bantu cultures of Africa, developed iron working but not writing. There were also people, like those on Easter Island, who had writing but worked mainly in stone.
The idea that the type of material that a culture uses represents a higher stage of civilization — first stone, then bronze (which sometimes developed from an intermediate copper stage), and finally iron — is fundamentally flawed. This idea, known as the three-age system, was developed by European archeologists to explain findings in the Mediterranean and Middle East, where civilizations used bronze for centuries before adopting iron around 3,000 years ago. It is based on the idea that it takes more knowledge and technology to smelt iron than working with bronze or stone. This is not incorrect, but it obstructs the larger picture of civilizational development.
This schema, however, has little application elsewhere. For example, in the Americas, civilizations never smelted iron, while in much of Africa, people transitioned from using stone directly to smelting iron. Even in the Middle East, civilizations made iron implements during the so-called Bronze Age, although iron did not become common until late, which may have been a function of where iron deposits were found.
Writing in ThePrint magazine, archaeologist Disha Ahluwalia suggested that “the traditional Three Age system — Stone, Bronze, and Iron — just might not be the right lens for understanding the subcontinent’s past” because the development of these materials did not follow a generally linear pattern of development. Ahluwalia noted that large quantities of bronze and iron have been found together at ancient sites, demonstrating simultaneous usage of both metals.
Rather than framing recent archeological discoveries in Tamil Nadu as part of a clash of civilizations, the big takeaway is that the Indian subcontinent as a whole featured several complex and well-developed cultures millennia before previously believed. New discoveries keep on pushing the antiquity of advanced cultures back. If increased archaeological effort has unveiled older evidence of iron and writing in Tamil Nadu, might not similar work elsewhere in India also yield similar discoveries? Prior to the recent discoveries in Tamil Nadu, iron was identified at sites in Uttar Pradesh — outside of the Indus Valley Civilization — dating to around 1800 BCE, which had also pushed back the Iron Age in India.
Iron smelting dating to 5,300 years ago has been discovered in Tamil Nadu. Who smelted it, what languages did they speak, and what cultural group were they a part of? Were they the ancestors of the present-day Tamils or another people? After all, there is evidence that the Dravidian family itself is 4,500 years old, younger than the iron that was discovered in Tamil Nadu. Ancient history — and archeology in particular — is like a mystery or puzzle that must be slowly discerned as more data and evidence come to light. This requires hard work and a scientific process, whether by trained archaeologists, linguists following the methods of linguistics, or the new field of archaeogenetics that can determine the origins of an ancient population based on ancient DNA. It is difficult to ascertain what language an ancient population spoke if there is no deciphered written evidence. There is no place for politics or personal preferences in this quest for truth.
On one hand, Stalin is doing archeology a disservice by politicizing what should be a neutral quest for truth and knowledge. On the other hand, even if some of the recent discoveries in Tamil Nadu are being exaggerated or politicized, it is heartening to see a prominent politician in India promote archeology — as opposed to the uninformed speculation on WhatsApp that often passes for history today — and incentivize research.
Stalin recently announced a $1 million prize for deciphering the hitherto unread Indus Valley Script. It seems likely that he hopes that a decipherment will prove that the script recorded a Dravidian language ancestral to Tamil. Who can know for sure until it is deciphered? Nonetheless, the prize is a good initiative that could spur research. A similar prize, the Vesuvius Challenge, yielded a positive result, as the winners of that prize developed a method to read the charred scrolls buried in Pompeii, Italy, after that ancient town was buried in a volcanic eruption in 79 CE. Even the politicization of the discovery may do some good by spurring more debate and discussion about archaeology in India, inspiring more work elsewhere. At its best, competitive archeology among the different states of India could lead to more discoveries and a revolution in how Indian history is understood.
There is definitely one thing that the Tamil Nadu chief minister is right about: ancient Indian history includes much more than just the Indus Valley Civilization and what went on in northwest India 5,000 years ago.