Maski’s Secret: A Lost Civilisation Beneath Ashoka’s Name

Beneath the basalt skin of Mallikarjuna Hill in northern Karnataka, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of an ancient settlement that has stirred a quiet pride among Kannadigas eager to reclaim a deeper inheritance. Maski is where a minor edict of Ashoka, inscribed in the third century BCE, had first revealed the emperor’s name in stone—“Devanampriya Ashoka”, Beloved of the Gods. Discovered in 1915, the inscription etched Mauryan political identity into the Deccan’s granite.

Now, besides the famous script, something older has been found. In a series of recent excavations led by researchers from Stanford University, McGill, and Shiv Nadar University, archaeologists have uncovered a settlement that predates Ashoka by nearly two millennia. Unearthed just below the Anjaneya Swamy Temple, across a culturally layered terrain, are fragments of daily life dating back to around 2200 to 1400 BCE, the Neolithic-Chalcolithic period. The find includes microlithic tools, ceramic shards, and traces of early agrarian life, all bearing testimony to a settled, organised community that existed long before the subcontinent’s imperial narratives took form.

In the context of South Indian archaeology, this is significant. Until now, Maski’s historical identity began with empire. Now, its deeper past has surfaced. Unlike Indus Valley sites in the north, which have long captivated the national imagination despite the undeciphered script, many southern settlements including Maski speak only through material culture. There are no tablets here, no pictographs, just the detritus of human dwelling: domestic pottery, stone tools, habitation layers, and long-quiet hearths.

Excavations led by Hemanth Kadambi (Shiv Nadar University), along with collaborators like Carla Bauer, have long studied the Raichur Doab, a fertile swathe of land between the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers. Previous fieldwork at nearby sites like Hallur and Tekkalakota established the region’s importance to the southern Neolithic tradition. But Maski pushes that understanding further, revealing continuous or recurrent occupation from Neolithic into early Iron Age and later Mauryan periods.

The findings suggest a transition from mobile pastoralism to settled agriculture, with possible evidence of structures, waste pits, and mortuary activity. While specific reports on faunal remains and architectural patterns are awaited, the regional pattern of other Karnataka Neolithic sites allows for cautious interpretation: these were people who planted, domesticated, shaped tools, and buried their dead with symbolic care.

In recent decades, southern archaeological discoveries have often been absorbed—sometimes too quickly—into the Dravidian antiquity debate. The term “Dravidian”, first coined as a linguistic family in the 19th century, has since expanded into a cultural and political identity, particularly in Tamil Nadu, where the Dravidian movement invokes an unbroken civilisational past to contest north Indian majoritarian histories.

Yet the Maski find does not confirm the presence of early Dravidian languages. However, as scholars like Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola have argued, the material continuities across South India—burial typologies, ceramic traditions, and settlement forms—point to cultural trajectories distinct from Vedic or Indo-Aryan norms. Mahadevan spent much of his later career studying Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions and their possible links to Indus iconography, hoping to establish deeper roots for Dravidian script traditions.

In that sense, Maski is not evidence of Dravidian language, but it is evidence of pre-Sanskritic southern civilisation, a lived, layered, agrarian presence whose antiquity complicates India’s historical centre of gravity. The edict at Maski marked a turning point in Indian epigraphy, offering the first definitive proof that Ashoka was the author of the subcontinent’s earliest imperial inscriptions. But what emerges now is not a pyramid of power crowned by emperors, but a broad sediment of habitation—quiet lives laid down one over the other. Archaeologist Ravi Korisettar, whose earlier work at Hallur and Budihal helped establish the cultural geography of Karnataka’s Neolithic period, has long advocated for viewing these sites not as footnotes to later empires, but as autonomous worlds of thought and survival.

In a country where antiquity is often equated with legitimacy, Maski reminds us that age is not the same as origin, and origin is not the same as ownership. The people who lived here 4,000 years ago are not necessarily ancestors of modern-day linguistic groups. Today, Maski is a modest village in Lingsugur taluk that is largely unaware of its inheritance. What remains is not a monument, but a memory etched in soil: a civilisation that endured without asking to be remembered.

archaeologistsKarnatakaKing AshokaLost CivilisationMallikarjuna HillMaskiscript