12 OKHAMANDAL MARINE ZOOLOGY PART II 



settled aboriginal population, split into many states and tribes vastly differing in civili- 

 sation. Many tribes, particularly those living in the mountains and dense forests and 

 less accessible districts, were in the lowest possible stage, naked savages living on fruits 

 and small game and maintaining a precarious defence against wild beasts by means 

 of rude stone weapons and cudgels. In the south, especially in the maritime districts, 

 a high civilisation developed at a comparatively early date and when the Aryan invaders 

 were fighting their way into the Punjab against wild and semi-savage tribes, in appearance 

 and customs probably much like the Santals 50 years ago, the men of the south were 

 then or shortly later engaged in commercial relations with Babylon and the coastal 

 districts of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea ; partly through the stimulation received 

 from this intercourse with these seats of ancient civilisation and partly from indigenous 

 effort these southern Dravidians were evolving a language unsurpassed for its richness 

 and flexibility and its power to express with perfect felicity the highest flights of imagina- 

 tion which poets and philosophers can reach, together with a material civilisation of no 

 mean order. It is to these coastal Dravidians settled in the prosperous sea -ports situated 

 on the western shore of the Gulf of Mannar or to men of the same race living on the 

 Kathiawar coast that the first use of the chank must be traced. Both localities were 

 the seats of pearl fisheries and the centres whence much oversea traffic flowed coastwise 

 to Persia, Egypt and the adjacent Semitic lands. The chank and the pearl-oyster are 

 usually associated in Indian waters, the chank on the sandy patches interspersed with 

 the rocky patches which form the habitat of the pearl-oyster ; pearl fishers often 

 bring chanks ashore and thus the beauty of their snowy white porcelain-like massive 

 shells would early become familiar to the merchants gathered from many lands to 

 purchase pearls. 



The word itself, in its chief forms of chanku or sanJcu in Tamil and sankha in Sanscrit, 

 appears to be of Aryan origin ; the Indian names are all obviously variants of one root 

 and this is identifiable with the Greek kongche (KOJ^) and the Latin concha, both 

 meaning a shell. It is probable that when the Aryans swarmed into India they applied 

 their generic name for shells to the great white conch so conspicuous an object in the 

 hands of their enemies, and so it is that, just as Christians in calling their scriptures by 

 the Greek word for book (Biblos) imply thereby that it is " The Book " pre-eminent 

 and supreme, so the Aryans appear to have similarly lauded the chank as " The Shell " 

 and considered no qualifying term necessary. To them it was the shell of shells the 

 one shell above all others worthy of honour and even of worship. In the oldest Tamil 

 literature the word is found in its present-day form but almost as often the shell is 

 termed valai ; the latter is probably the original Tamil or Dravidian name, a term 

 which has now come to be displaced by one derived from the Sanscrit sankha. 



We may infer that when these ancient poems were written the Brahmans had 

 already acquired great influence and were engaged in forcing Aryan forms and Sanscrit 

 terms into the language of the Tamil country by virtue of their religious and literary 



