William Colenso Found Tamil Bell

In the 1830s, a British missionary named William Colenso visited a Maori village in New Zealand and noticed women boiling potatoes in a heavy “pot” that was actually the crown of a ship’s bell with unfamiliar lettering. Colenso traded for it, and later scholars identified the script as Tamil, a language spoken in India, which made the object’s presence in New Zealand a baffling puzzle. Decades later, researchers revisited the artifact, and newer analysis has suggested the bell was likely cast in 17th- or 18th-century India with no confirmed explanation for how it crossed the ocean.

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