64 ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF THE TAMILS Sumerian and Proto-Elamite finds. They suggest a common origin for this early picture-writing. This is nothing, more than the Kapelluter which is mentioned in the Silappadikaram as being used on the bundles of merchandise. 16. Memphis the royal capital of the third and fourth Dynasties was raised on the boundary limits of Upper and Lower Egypt. (W. J. Perry, The Growth of Civilization, pp. 97-98. Pelican Books). 17. See the Vedic Index, Part I, pp. 346-9. 18. The Reverend Father Heras' views may be cited. When the Dravidians of India whom we now identify as the original nucleus of the Hamitic race, settled in the land that spreads between the Indus and the Ganges after the Flood, they found there, and specially on the southern shores, a race of negritoes, sub-group of the black race, who have left numberless relics of their past in the shape of prehistoric implements and ethnological characteristics. Their descendants live still in the Andaman Islands of the Bay of Bengal. Very early the Hamitic Dravidian settlers were mixed with the negritoes, and the issue of those unions naturally had very typical physiological features, which are very often discovered to-day among the people of South-India ; short stature, very black complexion (not precisely the darkened one of the Hamites), flat nose, curly hair. When the Aryas entered India round about 1500 B.C. they were struck with such strange features in their opponents, the Dāsas or Dasyus of the Rgveda, and left a brief but vivid description of their despised ugliness in the Rgvedic hymns by saying that they were 'noseless' (New Review, September, 1941). 19. The late Professor P. T. Srinivasa Aiyangar was a warm champion of the theory of cultural and even racial continuity of the people of South India from the earliest times,
