Desi Words Speak of the Past

A New Era of New Beginnings Each article in this book is a portion of Indian prehistory in the Ancient Near East. The gate to this ancient world was opened the day to Professor Cyrus H. Gordon offered his congratulations to me (June 1995) for my discovery of Canaanite words in Bengali and traces of that language in other Indian dialects. I did not anticipate the consequences while toying with these newly discovered Desi or Native Indian words and matching them against words of ancient Near Eastern texts. These ancient words have been collected, deciphered, transliterated, and published by many scholars, which took many centuries of hard toil. It was astounding to realize how the Egyptian terms of a fourteenth century BC Amarna letter for particular vessels and ornaments and the name of a common Indian spice would crop up as cognates of Desi words in Bengali.