Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth

[member_20317]

Now that you mention Brihaspati ji could it be that the 26 R1A1 cases in sudoor siberia (that Manish ji is talking about) be a burial place.

Also how many times do I need to read your post at 19:53 before i get what it means. Or is it just time for me to give up.

[brihaspati]

Regarding 2012 vs 2009 - yes I do have the bias by training to look at the whole spectrum including the latest available. It struck me that you were not proceeding beyond 2009 in your genetics references. There have been papers hinting at supporting AIT even later than 2009, although the diehard supporters among geneticists for AIT has been decreasing steadily. Some of the strongest Europhiles I know among them, now acknowledge sometimes in private and sometimes tacitly in public that the case for AIT is getting weaker as genetic databases grow.

This is not unnatural in experimentally verifiable sciences - with an older generation of scientists holding on to the ideological milieu they grew up in, but have the basic scientific honesty to acknowledge mistakes or wrong conclusions based on earlier and limited data. Something I do not find in the AIT supporting peer group among linguists.

Shiv ji, one just has to see how Gimbutas was attacked and not only her work, by the linguists for her Anatolian hypothesis - for daring to move the point of origin further to the east away from Euroland.

ManishH ji,
linguists remain dogmatic because every conclusion they draw still start from their axiomatic AIT, point of origin near Euroland, and PIE dogma. They never are prepared to drop those assumptions and start afresh to see how robust their conclusions are to sensitivities in their axioms.

[brihaspati]

Now that you mention Brihaspati ji could it be that the 26 R1A1 cases in sudoor siberia (that Manish ji is talking about) be a burial place.

Also how many times do I need to read your post at 19:53 before i get what it means. Or is it just time for me to give up.

There are some good intro to the technicalities on the web. The genealogy project is a good start for references.

[svinayak]

ManishH ji,
linguists remain dogmatic because every conclusion they draw still start from their axiomatic AIT, point of origin near Euroland, and PIE dogma. They never are prepared to drop those assumptions and start afresh to see how robust their conclusions are to sensitivities in their axioms.

This is the reason why the entire branch of the linguistics is under question.

[ramana]

I use Aryan in purely linguistic and cultural sense. In indian context Aryan are the people who followed Vedic religion and spoke Sanskrit related language. It doesn’t mean they were either White or Superior. As you pointed out our ancestor didn’t use the word racially. Thinking otherwise is projection of European racial mindset. We need to reclaim the word from its racial meaning.

We do not need to reclaim the word "Aryan". It was never invented in India. The inventors can keep it. The word used in the Vedas is arya. Not aryan. Aryan is a name that is heavy with racist connotations and that very racism has been projected on to Indians and has been accepted by Indians. What we can do is reclaim history as known to non racists before this aryan-dravidian bullshit was cooked up and swallowed wholesale by Indians. That is projection of the European mindset.

This is perfect example of Fractal Recursivity.

The heathen accepts the believer's definition of the heathen.

[RajeshA]

I use Aryan in purely linguistic and cultural sense. In indian context Aryan are the people who followed Vedic religion and spoke Sanskrit related language. It doesn’t mean they were either White or Superior. As you pointed out our ancestor didn’t use the word racially. Thinking otherwise is projection of European racial mindset. We need to reclaim the word from its racial meaning.

We do not need to reclaim the word "Aryan". It was never invented in India. The inventors can keep it. The word used in the Vedas is arya. Not aryan. Aryan is a name that is heavy with racist connotations and that very racism has been projected on to Indians and has been accepted by Indians. What we can do is reclaim history as known to non racists before this aryan-dravidian bullshit was cooked up and swallowed wholesale by Indians. That is projection of the European mindset.

I disagree.

Both "Basmati" and any other name derived from it, like "Basmatian" has to remain an Indian copyright. In fact the use of the word "Aryan" for race or linguistic group, should be considered as politically and semantically incorrect, and any non-Indian who uses it, should be barred from traveling to India.

We should exert control over the use and abuse of our culture and language.

[svinayak]

There is no word 'ARYAN' in Indian language. There is word like arya and aryaputra

[Agnimitra]

I agree with RajeshA ji, we have to use the very notoriety that the Euro despot Hitler gave the word Aryan to reinstate its correct meaning. Basically what Hitler came out with was the non-taqiyyah version of what all Euro colonials practiced. We need to use that embarassment against them, drive it in to the hilt. We should point out that the Buddha (highly respected in the West) used the word "Arya-ashtaanga-maarga" (the 8-fold Aryan path) to describe his religion. Can't be anything more antithetical to the Euro pseudo-Aryan Hitler.

[svinayak]

That is correct. Use the western propaganda against Hitler to free 'Aryan' word away from the Hindu civilization.

[RajeshA]

The Indics could lend the word "Anarya" or "Anaryan" or "Wannabe-Aryans" to the West, if they wish to use it to describe the Nazis thus. But "Arya", "Aryan", etc. all should be under Indic copyright.

[brihaspati]

Here is an excerpt from a stalwart. I quoted parts of the article that wants to show why archeology is and should be "negotiable" and is dependent on ideological presumptions. She has done it to counter "Hindu" bias - but people should be able to note that all her arguments are applicable directly to and against the steppenwolfite thesis.

Negotiating Evidence: History,Archaeology and the Indus Civilisation : Sudeshna Guha, Modern Asian Studies39, 2 (2005) pp. 399-426. University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Even a cursory overview of worldwide archaeological practice in the twentieth century (when archaeology was professionalised and institutionalised as a discipline) shows innumerable examples of situations where historical evidence established through archaeology has been used to ratify partisan ideologies. In situations where archaeological enquiry has been conducted through state agencies, one finds instances of fieldwork organised to create a positivist approach towards the excavated material. In such cases, material evidence is usually presented as having been objectively extracted through the employment of precise excavation techniques (cf. Ucko 1995).3 Where archaeological work has been directly organised to meet political ends, as it was in the case of Ayodhya (excavated between March and September 2003), excavation even when undertaken in controlled environment with sophisticated implements has not necessarily
altered the premise of enquiry. The Politics of the Past (Gathercole and Lowenthal 1990), Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Kohl and Fawcett 1995), and Nationalism and Archaeologyin Europe (Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996) are just three edited volumes among the vast collection of literature published since the 1990s that offer comprehensive surveys of instances where archaeology has been systematically used to situate ethnic identities for prehistoric groups, define racial types from excavated artefacts, promote research on ethnogenesis, and impose legendary places on maps of modern states.

Therefore, the selection of archaeology to legitimize the politics of Hindutva has not come as a surprise. For, compared to other disciplines in the humanities, and history in particular, archaeology's investigative techniques, of which many are science-based, can effectively be evoked for cultivating the notion that archaeological methodology is truth-making. However, a growing trend within the community of professional archaeologists in India to present their
evidence as being of a non-negotiable nature, is a new development.4 For example, although expressing his criticism for the events that led to the excavations at Ayodhya in 2003, Dilip Chakrabarti (2003a:580) has offered the view that all those who are suspicious of the Survey's claims are affiliates of the Congress, the political party which was then in opposition to the ruling government.

However, she herself admits of the possibility of political patronage in the footnote on p. 400 -

large scale and intensive excavations are possible only through financial assistance from Central and State Governments, making political patronage more or less mandatory for institutional fieldwork.

She continues :

Chakrabarti'ssupport for undeniable archaeological proof is remarkable as he seems to ignore the polysemic nature of truth, or indeed how facts get privileged as facts.5 His implicit assertion
that archaeological proof is non-negotiable, is at odds from the way material evidence has often been presented in the past by practitioners themselves.
[....]
I shall in this paper draw attention to something obvious, namely the contingency of archaeological evidence. My aim is to highlight how different meanings have been, and can be, attributed to the same set of excavated artifacts, and stress that archaeological representations need to be cautiously used as an instrument of rationalization in the creation of histories. The very definition of an artifact rests on its associations with other objects, as well as contemporary perceptions of what its functional characteristics may be. Therefore, facts can only be established through reasoning, which makes the archaeological method analogical, and not empirical. I also hope to demonstrate that dramatic discoveries through archaeology usually follow earlier scholarly efforts (one cannot dismiss the fact that even Harappa and Mohenjodaro were 'found' and known before they were excavated),8 and artefacts unearthed during such feats acquire the legitimacy of proof only through subsequent interpretations. The veneer of unexpected finds may retain the romance in excavations for those who are students of archaeology and professionals in the subject, but a history created through claims of unexpected finds can only lie about its own genealogy, as magical discoveries seldom establish phenomena that are self-evident. Therefore, even if we accept, as the recent excavators of Ayodhya wished us to, that a Hindu temple did exist under the Babri Masjid and was destroyed in 1528 by Mir Baqi, the Mughal emperor Babur's official, such a 'discovery', contrary to what they and the Hindu organisations deemed to impress us with, does not by itself become proof of Muslim bigotry.9

The interesting bit is here :

The interpretations that are today aggressively offered as evidence for a 'Vedic'1" presence within the Indus Civilization, demonstrate the extent to which ideologies infiltrate definitions for artefacts. The new genre of archaeological evidence challenges their creators' slogans that 'facts of history cannot be altered' (Lal 1998).

By providing a known [how do you know? isnt it your claim that such a knowledge is affected by the interpretative lens, prior ideological views? so is not that knowledge also potentially no knowledge at all in the sens eof a final consensus?] phenomenon with a new name (the Sindhu Saraswati Sabhyata), [same as was done with Kurgan == Indo-Aryan/European] by choosing a set of excavated and explored objects to argue for the presence of a cultural tradition that can supposedly be traced in the Rgveda, [same as in the so-called IE digs connecting them with extant narrative literature] and by liberally translating this Veda to demonstrate that archaeological and literary sources reveal an unbroken genealogy for the Hindu arya, they are establishing a foundational myth."[same goes for steppenwolfites] That these are precisely the techniques commonly employed for altering perspectives in history, they deliberately ignore. [poor poor steppenwolfites! ]In recent years, Indian excavators of Harappan sites have increasingly flaunted their expertise of the Sanskrit language [same as in experts of PIE] and scoured references from the Vedas to identify their finds. For example, the excavator of Dholavira, Ravindra Singh Bisht, proposes that the three major architectural forms he ostensibly found there, the citadel, and the middle and lower towns, could correspond to references in the Rgveda for units of a tripartite settlement system, the parama (highest), madhyama(middle) and avama (base), that according to him alludes to the functional hierarchy of habitations within the Vedicgrama or village (1999: 420)

The skeleton of a horse (Sharma 1992-3), and terracotta objects understood to represent spoked wheels, chariots and armours (Lal 1997), [but horse+chariot+spokedwheel trumps all other pointers to establish steppenwolf homeland! are you saying - finding them is not so important?] and presumably found over the last fifteen years from sites such as Surkotada, Kalibangan, Banawali and Harappa, are being offered to substantiate the argument that the Aryans peopled this civilisation[but same logic as in steppenwolf/Kurganites and AIT hagiographers] (Lal 1997),12 although it is quite clear from sources linguistic and anthropological, that the latter are biologically non-existent (e.g. Thapar 2001;Kennedy 2000).
[This is superb : for she also writes in a footnote that "An example related to the Indus Civilisation can be found in the Correspondence section of Man and Environment (2000: 105-18). The rejoinders to Shereen Ratnagar's article (1998) highlighted her lesser knowledge on matters related to 'present day practices and research goals of modern biological anthropologists ('Kennedyetal. 2000: 105). Yet Ratnagar's own reply shows that in its making, evidence derived through quantitative methods is also influenced by ideological presumptions about the past (2000: 119)." thus by her own admission even these outside-of-archeology sources themselves could be influenced by ideological presumptions!]

For those interested in linguistics - can have a lot of entertainment in how she quotes this from the Pali canon, which shows that she herself is unaware of and perhaps reluctant to apply her own methodology of interpretation, on the usage of the word "arya", and claimed or supposed connections to "brahmanas".

Just one example of how wrong a biological classification for the Aryan can be is the retort for the claims of the Brahmanas, that they were the best varna, in the Pali canon's Majjhima-nikaya-

What do you think about this, Assalayana? Have you heard that among the Greeks (i.e. foreigners in Western Kingdoms) and the Kambojas and other bordering communities there are only two varnas, arya and dasa; [and] having been arya one becomes dasa, and having been dasa one becomes arya? (MII 149).

[svinayak]

Here is an excerpt from a stalwart. I quoted parts of the article that wants to show why archeology is and should be "negotiable" and is dependent on ideological presumptions. She has done it to counter "Hindu" bias - but people should be able to note that all her arguments are applicable directly to and against the steppenwolfite thesis.

Negotiating Evidence: History,Archaeology and the Indus Civilisation : Sudeshna Guha, Modern Asian Studies39, 2 (2005) pp. 399-426. University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

This concept of trying to counter the Hindu bias is due to the western scholarship which makes sure that they show credentials. An entire generation of Indian scholars from 1950s to 1990s have been trained show credentials by being anti Hindu. This went on and evolved into a crony secularism which has been imposed on Indian society by the Indian media which also contain the same folks.

Now they have resorted to even bending the scientific rational enquiry process to show their credential and now appear very foolish. This is the same thing with linguistics. This western trained scholarship on linguistics now cannot stand the scrutiny of the science and logic.
Now claim can be done that entire western scholarship on Indian topics are biased and not reflecting the reality.

For, compared to other disciplines in the humanities, and history in particular, archaeology's investigative techniques, of which many are science-based, can effectively be evoked for cultivating the notion that archaeological methodology is truth-making. However, a growing trend within the community of professional archaeologists in India to present their
evidence as being of a non-negotiable nature, is a new development.

She has given away very important facts that the entire history project is a negotiable narrative and is really not about the reality. Political power gives the negotiating power over the narrative.

[ManishH]

I will post the relevant passage - which was a refutation and defence of his work by one Mahadevan, whose work was supported by another well known linguistic researcher Asko Parpola

Shiv: if you think Witzel, Farmer, Sproat, Mahadevan are representatives of linguist community, you are mistaken.

Only one, Sproat has some formal training in computational linguistics. Witzel is a philologist a very vocal by not so bright one at that; philology is analysis of texts. He is often at a loss to explain some basics of phonetics which he bases his conclusions on.

Have you seen any textbooks to which any of these people have contributions in. Have you seen other linguistics professors using their work to teach their classes ? That is a kind of metric which gives us idea of mainstream linguistic belief.

Do you realize by painting whole of linguistics, archaeologists etc in wide brushes of mutual backstratching, these people do discredit to people like Hock, Deshpande, Fortson, Mallory and a long long list of scholars.

the entire community is open to criticism.

Objection is not to criticism. It's to baseless slander. Give us excerpts which demonstrate dogma from linguistics textbooks. A good representative of an academic discipline are it's textbooks - the stuff that this allegedly "dogmatic" community wants it's students and young minds to read in classes.

Until excerpts are provided, these are baseless.

[ManishH]

All I was repeatedly saying was that my illustration was using order of appearance arguments and I was not dependent on any possible variability in that line of argument.

B-ji : I'm not ignoring any point you make. If I haven't responded to something, assume I agree with you. I'll only quote portions I disagree with.

I've never disagreed with order of appearance of mutations. That is the strength of Platt2012 paper. But there is weaknesses too of Platt2012 that comes from genetics community, not from me. This paper relies on YSTR for aging:

YSTR is not problematic on its own -its just about the number of them that are being used or available for studying.

Which is exactly critical - Busby2011 paper shows that YSTR based age estimates fluctuate wildly with choice of micro-satellite.

And when you hold Platt2012 as the holiest source of truth, do you also agree to this conclusion that the very same paper gives us:

MDS and Barrier analysis have identified a significant affinity
between Pashtun, Tajik, North Indian, and West Indian
populations, creating an Afghan-Indian population structure that
excludes the Hazaras, Uzbeks, and the South Indian Dravidian
speakers

Your reply will tell me a lot about the value of this paper as perceived by you:

1. If you agree with the infallibility of the techniques used in this paper, you must agree to the above conclusion about "exclusion of South Indian Dravidian speakers". Note the quick association in Platt2012 between language and genes. You have termed this association made in Klyosov09 paper "dogmatic" in the past. So how come you are not terming this association in Platt2012 dogmatic ?

2. If you think the techniques used in this paper are not infallible, you must disagree with the "exclusion of South Indian Dravidian speakers". And if the techniques themselves are infallible, it brings us to square one - the paper cannot speak for the entire R1a1 haplogroup.

the "variability" you dote on, is variability in estimates between different research groups and different researches.

That is so very critical, when the question is that of determining the age of mutations.

As data sizes grow these variabilities in estimates of rate will decrease as it happens in all experimental sciences.

Which is exactly what I'm saying, there is no consensus in genetics community yet on the estimates.

It was I who had to quote the 2012 paper, and the paper is freely available.

Please, I've repeatedly pointed sources that disagree with me; something you never do. Eg I brought up the paper on "indigenous brahmins" Sharma09. So allegations of bias are just to sidetrack the conversation.

SNP markers have only recently been accumulating ins ufficient numbers to make sense.

Yes, and the important thing is that the Platt2012 does not take SNP markers at all into account. The Klyosov09 does.

Wait a bit more and I can humbly suggest that ongoing research I am aware of will only jeopardize the AIT/steppenwolf hypotheses even more.

We do need to wait - that's what I've been saying by pointing out the various contradictory results in genetics. The word humbly and ability to predict future don't go very well together.

[ManishH]

Shiv ji, one just has to see how Gimbutas was attacked and not only her work, by the linguists for her Anatolian hypothesis - for daring to move the point of origin further to the east away from Euroland.

Wait a second. This has several inaccuracies in one sentence.

A. Anatolian hypothesis does not belong to Dr. Marija Gimbutas. Gimbutas is known for "Kurgan Hypothesis", which says the indo-europeans originate in the Pontic-Caspian region.

B. Dr. Colin Renfrew is a proponent of Anatolian Hypothesis, which places origin of Indo-Europeans sometimes in Balkans and sometimes in Anatolia (he changed his view twice).

C. Criticism (not attacking) of Dr. Marija Gimbutas is not for "moving homeland away from Euroland". What is criticized is that Dr. Gimbutas called Indo-Europeans of Pontic Caspian region exclusively patriarchal and native inhabitants of Balkan/Greek/Romanian region as exclusively matriarchal.

D. Critics of Dr. Marija Gimbutas do not disagree with her about the broad location of IE homeland being the Pontic Caspian stepe. What they do not agree with is her association of the specific material culture - Kurgan culture as the exclusive IE-speaking culture; and, claims of exclusive patriarchy and matriarchy.

E. From your "east of Euroland" comment, you appear to think that mainstream archaeologists and linguist believe the IE homeland is west of Anatolia. Sorry that is completely wrong portrayal of modern mainstream thinking - which favours the Pontic Caspian steppes.

Please do not attribute hypotheses to researchers before reading their work; or at least the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marija_Gimbutas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis

The Kurgan model of Indo-European origins identifies the Pontic-Caspian steppe as the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) Urheimat, and a variety of late PIE dialects are assumed to have been spoken across the region.

All of us have rights to criticize others. But none of us should get attributions wrong. You confidently asserted hypotheses to authors who don't make them; and moreover proceeded to claim knowledge of petty ideological reasons behind mutual criticism - which you term as "attacking".

[shiv]

Objection is not to criticism. It's to baseless slander. Give us excerpts which demonstrate dogma from linguistics textbooks. A good representative of an academic discipline are it's textbooks - the stuff that this allegedly "dogmatic" community wants it's students and young minds to read in classes.

Until excerpts are provided, these are baseless.

Clearly you appear to be on strong ground and any argument I offer would be bullshitting. So let me take the liberty of posting something out of Wikipedia which suggests that Sanskrit has shown gerater influence from the Dravidian languages that the other way round and that Brahui in Shitland (Pakistan for the uninitated) went to Pakistan from central India after 1000 CE.

Something appears to have gone out of India in contrast to all the theories cooked up to say the opposite. What do you make of this passage?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_ ... _Dravidian

Dravidian and Sanskrit have influenced each other in various ways from very early times, hence it is an interesting field for linguistic research.

The Indologist and linguist Zvelebil has remarked that: "... the period of the high water mark of Tamil literature was one in which the two great Sanskrit epics were already completed, but the Sanskrit classical poetry was barely emerging with Aśvaghoṣa." He continues: "No stylistic feature or convention could have been borrowed by the Tamils (though of course there are borrowings of purāṇic stories" (emphasis added).[23]

Zvelebil remarks:

"Though the dominance of Sanskrit was exaggerated in some Brahmanic circles of Tamilnadu, and Tamil was given unduly underestimated by a few Sanskrit-oriented scholars, the Tamil and Sanskrit cultures were not generally in rivalry".

However more recent research has shown that Sanskrit has been influenced in certain more fundamental ways than Dravidian languages have been by it: It is by way of phonology[24] and even more significantly here via grammatical constructs. This has been the case from the earliest language available (ca. 1200 B.C.) of Sanskrit: the Ṛg Vedic speech.

Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical) borrowing, from the Indo-Aryan tongues. On the other hand, Indo-Aryan shows rather large-scale structural borrowing from Dravidian, but relatively few loanwords.[13]

The Ṛg Vedic language has retroflex consonants even though it is well known that the Indo-European family and the Indo-Iranian subfamily to which Sanskrit belongs lack retroflex consonants (ṭ/ḍ, ṇ) with about 88 words in the Ṛg Veda having unconditioned retroflexes (Kuiper 1991, Witzel 1999). Some sample words are: (Iṭanta, Kaṇva,śakaṭī, kevaṭa, puṇya, maṇḍūka) This is cited as a serious evidence of substrate influence from close contact of the Vedic speakers with speakers of a foreign language family rich in retroflex consonants (Kuiper 1991, Witzel 1999). Obviously the Dravidian family would be a serious candidate here (ibid as well as Krishnamurti 2003: p36) since it is rich in retroflex phonemes reconstructible back to the Proto-Dravidian stage [See Subrahmanyam 1983:p40, Zvelebil 1990, Krishnamurti 2003].

A more serious influence on Vedic Sanskrit is the extensive grammatical influence attested by the usage of the quotative marker iti and the occurrence of gerunds of verbs, a grammatical feature not found even in the Avestan language, a sister language of the Vedic Sanskrit. As Krishnamurti states: "Besides, the Ṛg Veda has used the gerund, not found in Avestan, with the same grammatical function as in Dravidian, as a non-finite verb for 'incomplete' action. Ṛg Vedic language also attests the use of iti as a quotative clause complementizer. All these features are not a consequence of simple borrowing but they indicate substratum influence (Kuiper 1991: ch 2)".

The Brahui population of Balochistan has been taken by some as the linguistic equivalent of a relict population, perhaps indicating that Dravidian languages were formerly much more widespread and were supplanted by the incoming Indo-Aryan languages.[25] However it has now been demonstrated that the Brahui could only have migrated to Balochistan from central India after 1000 CE. The absence of any older Iranian (Avestan) loanwords in Brahui supports this hypothesis. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary, Balochi, is a western Iranian language like Kurdish, and moved to the area from the west only around 1000 CE.[26]

Thomason & Kaufman (1988) state that there is strong evidence that Dravidian influenced Indic through "shift", that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages. Elst (1999) claims that the presence of the Brahui language, similarities between Elamite and Harappan script as well as similarities between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian indicate that these languages may have interacted prior to the spread of Indo-Aryans southwards and the resultant intermixing of languages. Erdosy (1995:18) states that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Old Indo-Aryan is that the majority of early Old Indo-Aryan speakers had a Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually abandoned. Even though the innovative traits in Indic could be explained by multiple internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once – it becomes a question of explanatory parsimony; moreover, early Dravidian influence accounts for the several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.[27]

Zvelebil remarks[22]: "Several scholars have demonstrated that pre-Indo-Aryan and pre-Dravidian bilingualism in India provided conditions for the far-reaching influence of Dravidian on the Indo-Aryan tongues in the spheres of phonology (e.g., the retroflex consonants, made with the tongue curled upward toward the palate), syntax (e.g., the frequent use of gerunds, which are nonfinite verb forms of nominal character, as in 'by the falling of the rain'), and vocabulary (a number of Dravidian loanwords apparently appearing in the Rigveda itself)."

[ManishH]

For reference, here's the criticism of Dr. Gimbutas by David Anthony, in his book "Horse, Wheel and Language". Where is "attacking" and where is Anatolian hypothesis here ?

The Pontic~Caspian steppe homeland hypothesis was defended in English most clearly
by Gimbutas 1970, 1977, 1991; and Mallory 1989, updated in Mallory and Mair 2000. Al-
though I agree with Gimbutas's homeland solution, I disagree with her chronology, her sug-
gested causes for the expansion, and her concept of Kurgan-culture migrations, as I explained in
detail in Anthony 1986.

[ManishH]

Sanskrit has shown gerater influence from the Dravidian languages that the other way round

Won't do a comparative quantification; but to summarize : influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is lesser in pre-Paninian literature than later. By the time of peak development of classical Sanskrit poetry, intense exchanges appear between the two language families.

and that Brahui in Shitland (Pakistan for the uninitated) went to Pakistan from central India after 1000 CE.

Yes, Brahui's origin is believed to be near Narmada. See some details this post too:

http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 2#p1283952

These things are well acknowledged by linguists eg. in the book "Ideology and Status of Sanskrit" by J Houben.

Something appears to have gone out of India in contrast to all the theories cooked up to say the opposite

I won't call Brahui/Baluchistan etc. out of india. But yes a lot of mathematics, astronomy, grammar and phonetics knowledge originated in India.

This is the first time I'm coming across Zvelebil's remarks and most of it is in sync with mainstream beliefs. Except the important point of retroflexes, which he mistakenly assumes to be Dravidian in origin. Retroflexes are found in non-IE, non-Dravidian languages of India too. Presence of retroflexes in Rg are no longer held to be a Dravidian influence. So his estimate of influence of Dravidian on Rg needs to be lessened a bit. Esp. this bit:

majority of early Old Indo-Aryan speakers had a Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually abandoned.

and this ...

A more serious influence on Vedic Sanskrit is the extensive grammatical influence attested by the usage of the quotative marker iti and the occurrence of gerunds of verbs,

According to what I know, the -tvī, -tvāya gerund in Rg is mostly limited to a later section - Mandala 10. So evidence is weak that the earliest vedic speakers were bilingual in Dravidian. These gerunds abound in Dravidian, like Kannada māḍavudarinda, noḍuvudarinda etc. But the point about 'iti' is very valid.

Early vedic shows all signs of bilingualism but not Dravidian. The substrate is variously called "Language X". But late vedic texts and Epic/Classical phase of Sanskrit begin to show very significant Dravidian influences.

Bottom line: Mainstream linguistics does not support the idea of violent culture displacing invasion by Aryans (sic) which displaced Dravidians (sic).

[brihaspati]

ManishH ji,
again - the Platt2012 paper was used by me for a single illustration - that based on the cumulative ordering of mutations. "Wildly varying timing" will still not affect the cumulative record implying appearance in order of time. In this case "wildly varying time" is not crucial and SNP's do not overturn the issue. If you are restricting yourself to a single stream - say - R1A1, even if say two different branches evolve with "wildly varying timing" of appearance of the subsequent mutations - to have any effect of your supposed claim of "variable timing", you need to have a fantastic assumption.

That assumption will be that the same group of mutations [in this case the M***] subclade of R1A1 appears in the two branches at two wildly varying different time points. If you do not allow Indians to have gone out to the steppes and nordlands - it means that any descendant further mutation on R1A1 available in Europe and in between that supposed point of origin and India accumulates on the founding European point.

This in turn means that as R1A1 moved towards India, its rate of mutation slowed down [contrary to the variability claim - look at the claims on this based on possible increase in proximity to recombination sites] drastically - and further - exactly the same group of mutations appeared in non-metabolically active sites - or even worse, since you are not allowing Indians without the subclade to go out, that these earlier mutations progressively disappear from R1A1 [not by dilution after admixture since that would dilute the whole R1A1 itself] as they move to India, but not from those remnants of R1A1 dropped back locally on the journey.

"Wildly varying timing" or lack of an SNP' clarification in no way problematizes the fundamental argument in Platt - which I illustrated.

As for the language group arguments - you can do the comparison between the two papers yourself. The 2009 paper makes more of the AIT/PIE assumptions implicit while in the main experimental conclusions of Platt2012, they do not use any of those assumptions implicitly. As I said, geneticists have come on to the field much later than the presence of dogmas established by linguists - and they try to accommodate the pre-existing. But as they accumulate data, the space and importance devoted to AIT/PIE and linguistics as the determining notion gets less and less.

You seem to have an urge to somehow to paint genetics conclusions as contradictory - which is not really the case. You seem to look in at different aspects of genetics, and somehow clump them together to claim contradiction. Variability is a big drum with you - but you do not seem to grasp the nature of this supposed "variability", its origins, manifestation or relevance for paleodna analysis. There seems to be a lot of confusion about so-called selection pressure affecting order of appearance of mutations etc, which I explored in my post on lactose-persistence+AIT+endogamy+diversity.

In simple terms - the variability if any will be sort of internally generated - they may vary across positions within the genome, [such as proximity to recombinant loci or others] but if they are metabolically inactive - they are unlikely to differ in the rate of their changes from one human to another. That is subseq A at location M, may be 1000 changes/year, and subseq B at location N may be 1 change/year, but this will remain true across human subgroups - especially if the sites are metabolically inactive.

If rates change over generations - they are likely to affect all cohort descendants - again, more so if the changes happen at metabolically inactive sites, since so-called selection pressures are unlikely to wipe them away - even if they are now separated by space and endogamy. If you say that merely the number of generations is directly proportional to rate of changes starting from a common point - if R1A1 is the common origin of both Europeans and Indians - that increase in rates would affect both Europeans and Indians equally.

Unfortunately you seem to be taking the variability arguments twisted to impose variability that simply is not relevant or outright illogical for the point-of-origin arguments that we are having.

As for Gimbutas - yes I should not have used "Anatolia", which is more of Renfrew than Gimbutas. [But in some of her work she has considered wider contiguous zone of origin for which she herself simply took Kurgan as an archeological supportive site]. Error acknowledged. But criticism of Gimbutas was also about shifting the origins of later European culture further east towards Kurgan. I will post about this separately.

[ramana]

I was going to post this in teh book review thread but decided this is the right thread for its review dripping in Aryan and Dravidian undertones!!!!

Tamarind City

Author: Bishwanath Ghosh

Publisher: Tranquebar

Price: Rs 295


The book tells the story of the city since its humble beginning at Fort St George, says Anuradha Dutt

There may be many takers for Chennai, formerly Madras, after reading this book. Tamarind City, journalist Bishwanath Ghosh’s account of Chennai, where he has lived and worked for a decade, carries the intriguing catch line: “Where modern India began”. For those accustomed to assuming that it began in Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata — rather, the imperial Calcutta, capital of the British Raj till Delhi replaced it in 1911 — discovery of the roots of empire and modern India at Fort St George, set up between 1640 and 1644 by East India Company’ functionaries, led by Francis Day and Andrew Cogan, comes as a surprise. Other surprises await the reader, with Madras growing up around the fort. The settlement he has in mind dates from colonial times but the area was certainly the locus of successive Indic kingdoms over millennia.

The writer, however, concerns himself with modern Chennai and its birth. He dwells on early empire builders, who came to Madras: Robert Clive (before he set eyes on Bengal), Elihu Yale (founder of America’s Yale University), Duke of Wellington Arthur Wellesley, Lord Edward Clive (son of the Robert Clive), Richard Wellesley (Governor General of Bengal), Lt Gen George Harris (who led the war against Tipu Sultan), Warren Hastings (first Governor General of India), Lord William Bentinck, among others. The settlements of Madraspattinam and Chennapattinam were merged by the colonisers after they took control of the area in the mid-17th century. The precedence accorded to Madras over India’s other three major cities — Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi — is on the basis of a disputable premise: “When Cogan and Day dropped anchor, the birth of Calcutta was still a century away. Bombay was merely a group of islands under Portuguese control, while Delhi had only just become the capital city of a medieval-era empire.”

There are other cities with eventful past. Delhi, for instance, had its origins in the Pandavs’ Indraprastha, and was as the focal point of successive Hindu and Muslim kingdoms. Delhi and Agra alternated as the Mughal capital. But, clearly, it is Madras that absorbs the author, being for him the place where tamarind trees abound, generously shedding their fruit, to be used to flavour the ubiquitous sambar and other delectable food. Tamarind aptly defines Chennai for Ghosh.

{Book is about Madras na?}

Having glossed over history, the author seems to get the present right. And there are good reasons for this as he found professional success there, friends, comfort, his first car and all things endearing. After moving from one English daily to another, till he reached his current job with a Chennai-based national newspaper, and getting married, he has the luxury of looking back at his teething years in an alien place. The process of acclimatisation becomes a stratagem to explore Chennai from Murugesan Street, where he first moved into a rented accommodation with the help of a Tamil filmmaker. He travels through other old streets and roads, rival temple villages of the Vaishnava Triplicane and Shaiva Mylapore, swanky new MNC complexes and residential neighbourhoods that have extended the city’s borders to satellite villages, Marina beach (quite unlike other popular beaches because the dress code remains conservative even if vendors of sex ply their trade), and back to Murugesan Street, where the writer still lives in the same flat in a building that has had illustrious residents. Tradition and change amicably co-exist, with Brahmins, who chose to stay back after being marginalised by the Dravidian self-respect movement, still conspicuous in intellectual life, arts and Carnatic music. The Iyengar-Iyer feud over social precedence is an amusing interlude.

It has indeed been a long socio-political journey for Tamil Nadu from the time Brahmins supposedly imposed Aryan fetishes on a relatively casteless native milieu (if ‘eminent’ historians are to be believed) to the present when caste survives without any extreme manifestation. For, Dravidians and Aryans really worship the same gods even if the original catalyst for the self-respect movement was the icon Ramaswami Naicker’s rejection of God and Aryan ethos after he was denied entry to a Brahmin-run dharamshala in Varanasi. As Periyar, ‘great one’, he proceeded to change the very dynamics of politics in the State by identifying it with Dravidian pride. Since 1967, power has alternated between the DMK, founded on September 19, 1949, and the breakaway ADMK, both espousing Tamil identity. Ghosh also traces the close link between the film industry and politics, with both parties navigating the two.

Then, there is the whole gamut of Madras exotica: Smells, tastes, sights; flowers in temples and women’s braids; saris; women’s expertise at drawing kolam; palmists, astrologers, foreign women, who believe they lived in the city in their previous births. And smut, with a transgender prostitute recounting his life story. There is Mackay’s Garden, Little Bengal; Subbiah Muthiah’s Madras, the chronicler commanding the city’s respect; and, Uncle Damodaran’s history of Murugesan Street. The richness of 10 years, spent in the city, is vividly brought to life.

I thought I was alone till I saw the comment by a reader!

+1 #1 Sudeep 2012-05-20 09:50
This is a strange review by someone who seems to somtimes forget what the book is about while reviewing.

The reviewer mentions that precedence accorded to Madras ... is on the basis of a disputable premise, and then forgets to state why it is disputable.

She further talks about Delhi's origin from Mahabharata daya, forgetting this is about 'Modern' India. Why not go back to the rig Veda then?

It is indeed interesting that the reviewer needs to point out that Madras 'absorbs the author', given that the book is on Madras.

Obviously, the reviewer has not kept abreast of history, and still seems to believes in the Aryan invasion theory, which has been debunked long back.

[tyroneshoes]

Hi, I am still a novice in this field, but has Kazanas' work been discussed before?

Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:

[Theo_Fidel]

BTW the Anatolian connection is WRT R1b. This is completely separate from the R1a1a argument. This is the genetics of western Europe. Per the AIT these people are less pure as they are not part of the IEP flow. One is at a loss of words.

Oddly India has some very old R1b tribes as well.

[brihaspati]

Yes Kazanas has been discussed on the forum before. Here is a wealth of files from his work.
http://www.omilosmeleton.gr/en/indology_en.asp

Just a brief caution : Kazanas is not against PIE, but he is against the so-called standard/mainstream linguistic reconstruction of PIE.

Indo-Aryan
8. Having held and taught for more than 18 years, but without investigating, the received doctrine that the IE branches dispersed from the South Russian or Pontic Steppe (as per Mallory 1997, 1989; Gimbutas 1985, 1970; and others), and that the IAs had entered Saptasindhu c1500, I began to examine these mainstream notions thoroughly and c1997 abandoned them. I decided that no evidence of any kind supported them; on the contrary, the evidence showed that by 1500 the IAs were wholly indigenous and that the elusive IE homeland was very probably Saptasindhu and the adjacent area – the Land of Seven Rivers in what is today N-W India and Pakistan; this area could well have extended as far northwest as the Steppe.
Apart from the (recent) genetic studies, which at that time were not so well-known nor so secure (see §19, below) the decisive evidence for me now is the antiquity of Sanskrit indicated by its inner coherence and its preservation of apparently original PIE linguistic features (like the dhātu, five families of phonemes, etc) and cultural elements (e.g. §4). The Vedic language as seen in the RV alone, despite much obvious attrition and several innovations, has preserved many more features from the putative PIE language and wider culture. This was due to its well attested and incomparable system of oral tradition (papers One, Three and Kazanas 2004b) which preserved the ancient texts fairly intact (RV, AV, etc) and continued even into the 20th c. An oral tradition of this kind cannot be maintained by a people on the move for decades if not centuries over many thousands of miles, as the AIT proposes. Such a tradition could be preserved only by a sedentary people where the older generation would have the necessary leisure to pass the communal lore to the younger one7.

This is from 'Indo-European Linguistics and Indo-Aryan Indigenism' by N. Kazanas
The essay Indo-European Linguistics and Indo-Aryan Indigenism is included in the book Indo-Aryan Origins and other Vedic Issues written by N. Kazanas, ed. Aditya Prakashan, Dec 2009, N. Delhi. and downloadable from the site above.

[brihaspati]

Atri/Pranav ji have quoted earlier from Kazanas.

The same paper I quoted from above also deals with linguistics [the ubiquitious labeovelars and laryngeals], the eternal "horse+chariot+spoked-wheel", etc.

[svinayak]

The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), an unattested but now reconstructed prehistoric language. Knowledge of them comes chiefly from the linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics. Linguistic reconstruction is fraught with significant uncertainties and room for speculation, and PIE speakers cannot be assumed to have been a single, identifiable people or tribe. Rather, they were a group of loosely related populations ancestral to the later, still partially prehistoric, Bronze Age Indo-Europeans. The Proto-Indo-Europeans in this sense likely lived during the Copper Age, or roughly the 5th to 4th millennia BC. Mainstream scholarship places them in the general region of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Some scholars would extend the time depth of PIE or Pre-PIE to the Neolithic or even the last glacial maximum, and suggest alternative location hypotheses. By the mid-2nd millennium BC offshoots of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had reached Anatolia, the Aegean, Northern India, and likely Western Europe. MUSIC - Prince of Persia - Trouble in the Barracks

http://wn.com/Pontic_steppe

Highly speculative imagination

[svinayak]

More questions

http://armchairprehistory.com/2010/08/2 ... st-slaves/

Indo-European slavery

There are a number of homelands suggested for the original speakers of Proto Indo-European (the ancestor of most European and many Asian languages). Strangely, two of them sit on either side of the frontier I’m discussing here.

Marija Gimbutas, followed more recently and carefully by David Anthony, argued for the Pontic steppe as a homeland for the Indo-European language family. Their suggested dates were in the late fifth to early fourth millennium BC, at the end of the period I’m discussing.

Igor D’iakonov argued for Balkan homeland for the Proto Indo-Europeans, followed in 2003 by Colin Renfrew in a modification of his Anatolian homeland theory. The dates suggested here were the sixth to fifth millennium, the beginning of the period I’m discussing.

If slavery really was being practised during the period then either theory paints the proposed Proto Indo-Europeans in less than a good light. If the Proto Indo-Europeans were the steppe pastoralists then they were probably involved in rounding up slaves for sale. If the Proto Indo-Europeans were Old European then they were probably involved in buying them.

So if either of the homeland theories is right (and that’s a big ‘if’) then perhaps linguists should be looking rather more carefully for a PIE linguistic root meaning ‘slave’.

[svinayak]

http://historical-linguistics.co.cc/map ... tions.html

Massive imagination

Proto-Dardic
Lexicostatistically, Dardic can be viewed as the most archaic core of Indo-Aryan languages with the most phonological and lexical differentiation. One of the Dardic subgroups seems to have given rise to the Indo-Aryan Prakrits, but the exact details of this process are unknown and unlcear. Essentially, the question of dating Proto-Dardic is connected to the emergence of Indo-Aryan languages in India, which can roughly be dated to 1700 BC.

Parpola (1999) identifies "Proto-Dardic" with "Proto-Rigvedic", suggesting that the Dards are the linguistic descendants of the bearers of proto-Rigvedic culture ca. 1700 BC, pointing to features in certain Dardic dialects that continue peculiarities of Rigvedic Sanskrit, such as the gerund in -tvi [wiki].

Proto-Indo-Aryan (with Dardic exluded)
Late Proto-Indo-Aryan can be dated to the period between 1900-1200 BC. This dating is consistent with the period of the slow decline of the Harappa (by 1600 BC), Mohenjo-Daro (by 1900 BC), and BMAC (c. 1700 BC) civilizations, which indicates that certain migration processes could have taken place in that area around that time, though it is not obvious whether there was an Indo-Aryan military invasion into the Indus Valley civilaztion, or its disappearance was due to climatic changes.


A regional cultural discontinuity occurred during the second millennium BCE and many Indus Valley cities were abandoned during this period, while many new settlements began to appear in Gujarat and East Punjab and other settlements such as in the western Bahawalpur region increased in size. Shaffer & Lichtenstein (in Erdosy 1995:139) stated that: "This shift by Harappan and, perhaps, other Indus Valley cultural mosaic groups, is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populations in South Asia before the first half of the first millennium B.C.." This could have been caused by ecological factors, such as the drying up of the Ghaggar-Hakra River and increased aridity in Rajasthan and other places. The Indus River also began to flow east and floodings occurred [Flam (1981, 1991) and Mackay (1938, 1943)] [wiki].
The Cemetery H culture in Pumjab (1900-1300 BC) [including cremation in urns unlike the Indus civilization where bodies were buried in wooden coffins, the sun or star motifs, the rice as main crop, the use of mud bricks for building, etc] and the Gandhara grave culture in Pakistan (1800 BC- 600 BC) [including inhumations, horse burials, etc.] seem to mark the earliest archaeological presence of the Vedic Aryans on the Indian subcontinent.

Vedic Sanskrit is often (glottochronologically, or rather just by the rule of thumb (?)) assigned to about 1000-1200 BC. The oldest Indo-Aryan kingdoms are known to be well-established by about 700 BC.




Proto-Indo-European in general
The relatively late historical appearance of individual Proto-Indo-European branches — no earlier than 2000 BC in most cases — leads to the conclusion that PIE (except for Proto-Anatolian) could have still existed as a single unity, or a group of closely related dialects somewhere circa 3000-3500 BC. The currrent glottochronological analysis rather suggests that the Proto-Indo-European split occurred circa 4000 BC (without Proto-Anantolian) or circa 5500 BC (with Proto-Anatolian included).

[ManishH]

In this case "wildly varying time" is not crucial and SNP's do not overturn the issue.

B-ji: It's not me raising the issue of reliable SNP markers. The issue comes from professional geneticists themselves. Platt2012 has taken a lot of diversity data from Underhill09, which itself emphasizes the need for reliable SNP markers:

The highest STR diversity of R1a1a*(xM458) chromosomes are observed
outside Europe, in particular in South Asia (Figure 1, Supplementary Table S4),
but given the lack of informative SNP markers the ultimate source area of
haplogroup R1a dispersals remains yet to be refined.

Since SNP marker issue of Underhill09 is not addressed in Platt2012, I'd read this conclusion made by latter with a lot of skepticism ...

R1a1a-M17 diversity declines toward the Pontic-Caspian steppe where the
mid-Holocene R1a1a7-M458 sublineage is dominant [46]. R1a1a7-M458 was
absent in Afghanistan, suggesting that R1a1a-M17 does not support, as
previously thought [47], expansions from the Pontic Steppe [3], bringing the
Indo-European languages to Central Asia and India.

Another thing to note is that M458 does not "dominate" Pontic-Caspian steppe as claimed by Platt2012. M458 frequency is highest in Poland-Belarus as shown by this figure in Underhill09.

Without addressing issues raised by the parent paper and in absence of corroborating data from ancient DNA (how long has the higher diversity R1a1-M17 clade been present on Indian subcontinent), my view is that the question is still open.

Thanks for the patient explanation of variability in mutation rates. Based on your explanation, I agree I overestimated the effect of variability on geographic origin of the upstream mutation.

[ManishH]

http://www.omilosmeleton.gr/en/indology_en.asp

Sanskrit indicated by its inner coherence and its preservation of apparently original PIE linguistic features (like the dhātu, five families of phonemes, etc) and cultural elements (e.g. §4).

This Kazanas' statement is mere handwaving. I'd just like to ask those who have studied Kazanas's brand of linguistics - if Sanskrit has the "best preservation of dhātu", kindly break these Sanskrit words into their dhātu's based on works of Sanskrit etymology:

1. śatam (hundred)
2. śraddhā (faith)

Sanskrit does have some very old phonemes. But a lot are missing which he neglects to mention.

The Vedic language as seen in the RV alone, despite much obvious attrition and several innovations, has preserved many more features from the putative PIE language and wider culture. This was due to its well attested and incomparable system of oral tradition

He's not aware of metrical anomalies in Rg which point to several instances where original disyllabic sounds were lost and became unisyllabic. If he has bothered to actually listen to samhita pāṭha, he would have noticed the hiatus.

which preserved the ancient texts fairly intact (RV, AV, etc) and continued even into the 20th c. An oral tradition of this kind cannot be maintained by a people on the move for decades if not centuries over many thousands of miles, as the AIT proposes.

Yes, techniques of oral preservation - including permutational recitations (jaṭāpāṭha, ghanapāṭha) were developed; but these techniques were much later than the composition of Rg. If they were older, than at least some of the hypothetical migrants would have remembered the oral tradition.

Such a tradition could be preserved only by a sedentary people where the older generation would have the necessary leisure to pass the communal lore to the younger one7.[/b]

Sedentarism is not the only social condition that creates leisure. Occupational specialization is another factor.

The truth is that there is no one daughter in IE family that can be held to have the "best preservation".

And I do apologize if above comes across as demeaning to Sanskrit. I've also pointed these things plainly Greek/Iranian etc. chauvinists - who all claim "best preservation" for their branch.

[brihaspati]

ManishH ji,
UnderHill's caution is based on a general observation of "diversity" gradients in R1A1 based on YSTR. All that they are saying is that the gradient indicates a possible point of origin/appearance in the general vicinity of South Asia - if we are trying to find the more likely origin between the two of the steppes/East EU/SE EU etc and India. To pinpoint a location SNP's would help.

However what Platt has done, is look at essentially what is a further subdivision or addition of a qualifier - and which does rule out a wholesale R1A1 migration from the west to the east - where it supposedly never was before. A further SNP fine tuning will not go against this negation of migration direction, but will help restrict further the point of origin of R1A1 based on this subclade within the general vicinity of Afghanistan. It could be a "little" to the west, or a little to the North, but it could equally go a little to the east or south. The diversity argument that indicates the general vicinity of the subcontinent as origins - combined with these "refinements" - would move the centre of gravity more likely towards the east and south compared to the north or west.

But SNP's will not overturn the direction of migration exactly in the opposite - drastically. The clarification will not land up in steppes.

[shiv]

Sedentarism is not the only social condition that creates leisure. Occupational specialization is another factor.

What leisure creating occupational specialization occurs in the absence of sedentarism?

[brihaspati]

After ManishH ji's comment about Kazanas interpretation of Sanskrit, I guess Kazanas's arguments [in the referred paper] need to be quoted in full for debate.

I was not of course the first to come up with such a view.On the strength of Sanskrit many European scholars in the early 19th c. thought India was the original homeland (Mallory 1973:26-9). Even after scholars rejected India in the later 19th c and began to adduce different urheimats from the Baltic to the Balkans rewriting Indian (proto-)history, there was a succession of Indian scholars, mainly, who maintained the indigenist view in one or other form: Rao 1880; Shri Aurobindo 1914; Dhar 1930; A. Das 1971 et al. Indeed, in recent years also many publications advocated indigenism: Sethna 1992; Elst 1993, 1999; Talageri 1993, 2000; Frawley 1994 and with Rajaram 1997; Feuerstein et al 1995; and others. In fact, more and more scholars in the West have re-examined the issue and rejected the mainstream view advocating instead a movement Out of India into Europe: Schildman 1994, 1998; Elst 1999; Friedrich 2003, 2004; Danino 2007. Here we must add the fact that since 1984 there is full consensus among archaeologist specialists in the area that the ISC has unbroken continuity (Lal & Gupta 1984; Allchin 1997; Kenoyer 1999; Shaffer & Lichtenstein 1999; McIntosh 2002; Possehl 2003). Thus the mainstream strident cries of warning about “fundamentalists, nationalists, revisionists” in India and their colleagues in the West (Witzel 2003; Huld 2002; Kuzmina 2002) are seen to be either hollow slogans or echoes of those slogans; for neither the indigenist scholars mentioned above nor the archaeologists specializing in the ISC and insisting on its unbroken continuity down to the 6th century belong to this (non-existent) band of bogies. I benefited from all of them.

Nonetheless, the AIT persists. Several linguistic arguments have been adduced to prop up this fanciful theory one of them being the (loan-)words in the RV language which were allegedly borrowed from other languages met by the IAs on their way to and at Saptasindhu. A closely

[footnote : In a private communication, Nov 2004, Mallory mentioned the Jews who wandered much and long and preserved their traditions of the Old Testament. If we take the Hebrew traditional orthodox view (which is by no means accepted generally), the Judaic people had literacy certainly since the time of Moses (c1300-1100?) and most probably since their stay in Ur of the Chaldees c1700-1600 (Genesis 11), since the Mesopotamians had literacy for more than a millennium earlier. So we can’t say that the Jews maintained an oral tradition during their long travels. Then, the Jews mention constantly the (mis-)adventures they had and the different people they met on their travels. If we assume that the IAs had their oral tradition even as (according to the AIT) they travelled from the Steppe to Saptasindhu, what was it they were transmitting? The Vedic texts were composed (it is universally agreed) in India. So what were they transmitting before?... Why is there not one mention in the Vedic texts of dangers, mishaps and alien people met on the way – as we find in the Judaic texts? There is no such mention for the simple reason that, unlike the Jews, the IAs did not migrate. See discussion in paper Three.]

related argument is the alleged common Indo-Iranian period during this journey to Saptasindhu8. Good examples of a combination of these two arguments are found in M.Witzel 2001, 2005 and F. Kuiper 1991. R.S. Sharma too makes the exaggerated claim that Vedic is “a mixture of Munda and Dravidian words with the Indo-Aryan language” (2004: 142) which is linguistically an absurd statement. But that 4% of the Rigvedic vocabulary might consist of loanwords (as these controversial studies claim), or even 6% or more, surely should not be surprising since the IAs did not live in a vacuum and there must have been peoples with different languages around them. However, this pet linguistic subject of Witzel’s has been attacked by R.P. Das (1995 general critique), by Krishnamurti (2003: 37-8 mainly against Dravidian cognations) and paper One9. Recently even (non-indigenist) H.H. Hock questioned all supposed borrowings finding them unconvincing (2005: 286) – and he happens to be a most eminent comparativist. In any case, no amount of arguing along these lines gives of itself any actual dates even approximately and the direction of movement can more reasonably be the reverse. There is B. Sergent who, although not at all an indigenist, argued in favour of a movement from Central Asia north-westward (1997). Also, Johanna Nichols, an eminent Indo- European linguist, found on purely linguistic grounds that “the locus of the IE spread was ... somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria” (1997: 113) – which is only a stone’s throw away from Saptasindhu. Linguists will continue to disagree violently among themselves about the original locus (from the Baltic to the Balkans and to Bactria), about the direction of the movement and about the date: some give a late period somewhere c 3000, others an early one, in the 7th millennium (Misra 1992) – and all these disagreements on exactly the same linguistic data! I ignore all such linguistic arguments and conclusions since they are so contradictory. I ignore also the results from the reappearence in Gray & Atkinson (2003) of the discredited method of glottochronology. The situation is in no way improved by claims that “I am right’ and allegations that “the others are wrong”. We must bear in mind also that all such arguments involve “reconstructed” proto-languages which are sheer conjectural affairs and therefore inadmissible in any impartial court of law.

[brihaspati]

Continued from Kazanas
10. Horses and chariots

One of the best known comparative linguists of our times, Hans Hock, pointed out repeatedly (1999, 1996) that several dialects spoken in N-W India travelled north- westward at different times in the Common Era, the most notable one being that of the Gypsies in the early centuries CE (see also Fraser 1995). Hock stated that Indoaryan indigenism and even the Out of India Theory could theoretically be possible, provided the distribution of the IE isoglosses was accepted and the Vedic language was seen to be a devolved form of Proto-Indo- European – facts which I certainly accept fully. But he opted for the mainstream doctrine (=the AIT out of the Pontic Steppe) because of the archaeological evidence of horses and chariots arriving in Saptasidhu in bulk after 1700 BCE (1999:13). Thus he supports the spread of the Kurgan culture (as do also Allchin B. and R., Gimbutas, Kuzmina, Mallory, Parpola, Witzel et al), even though the cranio-skeletal evidence for this diffusion is very limited according to J. Day (2001). Hock also mentions that it is simpler to have one movement into India rather than many out of it to account for the diversity and chronologies of the spread of the various IE branches. But this is rather self-contradictory since, as he wrote (1996, 1999), the Indoaryan language left India north-westwards three times in the Common Era and generated new dialects and the Gypsies did reach the north-west extremity of Europe into England; so Indoaryan could have done the same in the misty past BCE. Besides, the ancient IAs could, in the Out of India scenario, have left in a sizeable mass, stayed in a location in Baluchistan/Afghanistan (or even the Steppe) for some time, then, successively, in groups, moved away in diverse directions. We need not make a problem out of this rather simple affair. (But I have argued in other papers that we must not preclude the possibility of a broad IE continuum from the Kurgan steppe down to Saptasindhu at a very early period from which, within which and into which occurred various undetermined movements.)

On the matter of horses and chariots, Hock was misinformed, I like to think. The evidence of horses and chariots proves the very opposite if examined with a modicum of attention. As one authority put it, “the horse was widely domesticated and used in India during the third millennium BCE over most of the areas covered by the Indus-Sarasvati [or Harappan] Civilization” (Pande 1999: 344; the square brackets original). I myself collected much evidence for horse-finds in different ISC (=Indus-Sarasvati Civilization/Culture) sites in a papers of 2003, §10 (pp 196-7): thus one may further consult Kochhar (2000 pp 186, 192), Chakrabarti (1999), Lal (1997), Sharma (1996 p 17), Thomas et al (1995), Dhavalikar (1995: 116-7), Allchin & Joshi (1995: 95), Rao (1991) and, necessarily, Sharma (1980: 110ff). M. Danino’s paper ‘The horse and the Aryan Debate’ is a more recent addition to this literature (2006c). These publications show abundantly that the true horse, Equus ferus and Equus cabalus, was present in its wild state in India from c 17000 and there is much evidence now for the domesticated horse in the Mature Harappan period. Moreover there are several terracota figurines of this animal from different ISC sites as reported by Lal (2002) and Tharpar & Mughal (1994).

As for the chariot, S. Piggott established the presence of a sophisticated type of vehicle with “one or two pairs of wheels with their axles... from the Rhine to the Indus by around 3000” (1992: 18).

Archaeological evidence does not consist only of the actual remains of buildings, weapons, tools, chariots etc. Pictures, reliefs, toys and figurines of these things are also evidence. Many years ago H. K. Sankalia had pointed out that the six-spoked wheel appears on seals and signs of the alphabet (1974: 363). S. R. Rao found at Lothal “terracotta wheels ... with diagonal lines suggesting spokes” (1973: 124). This representational practice seems to have been widespread, for S. Piggott mentions similarly marked wheels found in the Karpathian Basin from the Earlier Bronze Age (1983: 91-92). In his recent study, Lal presents four terracotta wheels (from Mature Harappan sites Banawali, Kalibangan, Rakhigarhi) with spokes painted on (2002:74, Figs 3.28ff). The Harappans had the technology for making spoke-wheels (Kazanas 1999:33; Basham 1954:21).

Finally, it was A. Parpola, an inveterate adherent of the AIT, who identified the figure on Harappan seal No 3357 as representing simplistically a man with outstretched arms standing on two six-spoked wheels (of a chariot) realizing that this was “a later invention of the Aryans’ (1969: 24). The later notion that it is a potter on two wheels is obviously far-fetched and, in any case, the wheel is spoked (Sethna 1992)! L. S. Rao has recently presented many more finds of models of terracotta toy wheels with spokes from Harappan locations in Puratattva, vol 36 (pp 59-66), 2006.

11. The question of course is whether there were spoked wheels before 3000 since the RV uses the word ara which is usually translated as 'spoke' (1.32.15; 5.58.5; etc). We don't know. Some Indian scholars approach the issue strategically and say that Rigvedic hymns with ara are later intrusions from the second millennium when the spoked wheel was quite common. This is possible of course, since we know that some hymns are later interpolations. However, there could have been spoked wheels as we know them even at c3200 and before. But then again, ara need not mean 'spoke'. It could mean a section of the (solid) wheel. After all, different IE branches have a different stem for spoke (Gk aktis, kn$m$; L radius; Gmc speca/speihha, etc) which suggests that spokes were developed after the dispersal (in the 6th or 8th millennium, or whichever). So ara could well have meant something other than spoke and only later acquired the meaning of 'spoke', as we know it now. The spoked wheel poses, in fact, no problem for dating the RV. There are other more clearcut types of evidence which are examined below.
The usual objection is that there are no chariot remains from that period. Here, there is the double assumption that RV chariots are necessarily like near-eastern ones of, say, 1500, or the Androvo c1900, and that there should be remains. But why assume that the RV chariots are like the near-eastern ones? The only real-life vehicle in a race that we know is in 10.102 and this is pulled by oxen not horses while 1.123.1 alludes to a ‘broad chariot’ p&th*E ratha; ! Elsewhere in the RV the chariot ratha is described as being brhat ‘tall, big’ (6.61.13), also vari.Fha...vandhura ‘widest... seated’ (6.47.9), trivandhura ‘three seated’ (1.41.2; 118.2; 7.71.4; 8.22.5; etc) and once even a.Favandhura ‘eight-seated’ (10.53.7)! These are all rathas and hardly like the near-eastern battle-chariots. Then again, there are no remains of chariots in India from 1500 or 1000 or 700. So, on the strict AIT thinking, we should say no chariots were brought in by the alleged IE entrants either.

[member_20317]

First this:

Yes, techniques of oral preservation - including permutational recitations (jaṭāpāṭha, ghanapāṭha) were developed; but these techniques were much later than the composition of Rg. If they were older, than at least some of the hypothetical migrants would have remembered the oral tradition.

Then this:

Kazanas –
[footnote : In a private communication, Nov 2004, Mallory mentioned the Jews who wandered much and long and preserved their traditions of the Old Testament. If we take the Hebrew traditional orthodox view (which is by no means accepted generally), the Judaic people had literacy certainly since the time of Moses (c1300-1100?) and most probably since their stay in Ur of the Chaldees c1700-1600 (Genesis 11), since the Mesopotamians had literacy for more than a millennium earlier. So we can’t say that the Jews maintained an oral tradition during their long travels. Then, the Jews mention constantly the (mis-)adventures they had and the different people they met on their travels. If we assume that the IAs had their oral tradition even as (according to the AIT) they travelled from the Steppe to Saptasindhu, what was it they were transmitting? The Vedic texts were composed (it is universally agreed) in India. So what were they transmitting before?... Why is there not one mention in the Vedic texts of dangers, mishaps and alien people met on the way – as we find in the Judaic texts?]

Kazanas - There is no such mention for the simple reason that, unlike the Jews, the IAs did not migrate. See discussion in paper Three.

[svinayak]

Lot of such things are glossed over.

The Vedic texts were composed (it is universally agreed) in India. So what were they transmitting before?

According to lingistics this fact is negotiable as an when it is convenient to do so to support other theories and hypothesis.
This was alright during the colonial period when Indians were not part of the debate. Now after 1947 there were enough Indians to keep this going on to helping the western research.

But with genetic science advancing the big lie cannot be sustained. The colonial narrative and migration theories have to be revised.

[brihaspati]

I am skipping the portions in Kazanas's article where he picks up different issues to try and show that RV is pre-Harappan. I am going straight to Saraswati and Sanskrit - the issues of hottest debate so far on the forum.

17. The Sarasvat/ river furnishes useful literary and archaeological evidence for dating the RV. It is a mighty river extolled in all Books of the RV except the fourth. It is naditam, ambitam, devitam ‘best river, best mother, best goddess’ (2.41.16); it is swollen and fed by three or more rivers pinvam#n# sindhubhi; (6.52.6); it is endless, swift moving, roaring, most dear among her sister rivers; together with her divine aspect, it nourishes the Indoaryan tribes (6.61.8-13). In 7.95.2 the river is said to flow pure in her course “from the mountains to the ocean” giribhya; aa samudraat. Then 7.96.2 and 10.177 pray to the rivergoddess for sustenance and good fortune while 10.64.9 calls upon her (and Sarayu and Indus) as “great” and “nourishing”. Clearly then, we have here, even in the late Bk 10, a great river flowing from the Himalayas to the ocean in the south, fed and swollen by other rivers and sustaining the tribes of the IAs on its banks – not a river known in the past or in some other region, or a river now considerably shrunk (Witzel 2001)11.

Some scholars claim that here samudra does not mean ‘ocean’ but confluence and especially the place where a tributary flowed into the Indus (e.g. Klaus 1989 and Witzel 2001). The last point can be discarded since there is not the slightest hint elsewhere that the Sarasvati flowed into the Indus – in which case the Indus and not Saraswati would have been lauded as the best river (2.41.16) We can also aver with full certitude (as the Vedic Index does under Samudra) that the rig-vedic people knew the ocean (see paper Five, above; also Prabhakar 1994).

The meaning ‘terminal lake(s)’ adopted by Witzel is entirely fanciful. In his Dictionary M. Mayrhofer gives for samudra only ‘confluence’ and ‘ocean/sea’ (1996 EWA). And the Vedic poet would certainly have used (not aa samudraat but) aa sarobhya; ‘to the terminal lakes’ maintaining his – # – – cadence. This phrase would then have indicated clearly the alleged fanciful etymological connection of the name Saras-vati ‘she who has (terminal) lakes’. The name means rather ‘she who has swirls and currents’, since the primary sense of sr (>saras) is ‘movement’ (gatau) or ‘flowing, leaping, rushing’.

Please, consider also that the Vedic -s- is inherited from PIE, according to all IEnists,
whereas Avestan –h- is a devolved, not PIE, sound. Vedic sr has many primary and secondary
cognates like sara, sarit etc. Now Avestan has no cognates for sr and its products, and the Avestan noun for lake is vairi-, while var- is ‘rain(-water)’ = S vari(?). The stem hara- (cognate with Vedic saras) occurs only in the river name Haraxvaiti. Consequently, it is the Iranians that moved away from the Indoaryans as, indeed, is shown by their memory of having lived in a location they called Haptah"ndu = Saptasindhu. The root s& has cognates in other IE branches, Gk hial-, Latin sal-, Toch sal- etc as is shown by Rix 1998. Now, it would be ludicrous to claim that the IAs left the common Indo-Iranian habitat, as per the AIT, moved into Saptasindhu and turning the HaraLvaiti name into Sarasvat! gave it to a river there to remember their past while they proceeded to generate the root sr and its derivatives to accord with other IE languages.

Occam’s razor, which here is conveniently ignored by AIT adherents, commands the opposite: that the Iranians moved away, lost the root s& and the name Sarasvat/ in its devolved form Haraxvaiti was given to a river in their new habitat. This, together with the fact that, like Greek, Avestan has no obvious system of roots and derivatives (as Sanskrit has), should be enough to question if not refute various IEnists’ claims that Avestan retains older forms of nouns and verbs and that therefore the Indoaryans were with the Iranians in Iran in the common Indo-Iranian period – before moving to Saptasindhu. One should also note that these linguists rely entirely on linguistic facts amenable to a reverse interpretation and ignore other aspects – literary, mythological, archaeological and genetic (for which see §19).

The river Sarasvat/ in Saptasindhu is thought to have dried up almost completely by 1900 (Allchins 1997: 117; Rao 1991: 77-79). In previous years it had lost tributaries to the Indus in the West and the Ganges in the East. Is there any evidence that it flowed down to the Indian (or Arabian) ocean at any earlier period?

G. Possehl examined (1998) all the palaeoenvironmental and geological data relevant to the Sarasvat/ river and concluded that the river could have flowed down to the ocean only before 3200 at the very latest and, more probably, before 3800! He re-stated his finds in his study of 2002 (pp 8-9). P-H. Francfort has been just as certain of a date 3600-3800 in his survey of 1992.
All this helps us place the passages ascribing the grandeur of river Sarasvat/ at a date before 3200 at least. (For more recent scientific investigations through satellite showing the course of the old Sarasvat/ reaching the ocean see Sharma J.R. et al 2006.)

[Theo_Fidel]

Is there any evidence the rig-veda was a multi-generational project? Many religious texts were put down over centuries with much added as experience was gained. It is a modern western tradition to 'freeze' religious texts. Esp. since first council of nicaea.

[brihaspati]

PIE from Kazanas : continued -

Now, let me take a simple example as starting point. Although I often use Rix’s Lexikon der indogermanische verben... (e.g. §17, below), I cannot but agree with A.!Marcantonio’s critique of his methodology in taking often only 2 similar stems which, indeed, may be loans or may be devolutes of one stem in two closely related branches, e.g. Baltic and Slavic or Germanic. The examples I gave earlier (§3,b) all have three or more cognations and encompass eastern and western branches. So, to start with, many stems may not be Proto-Indo-European and all such reconstructions are obviously pointless and utterly misleading.

Linguistic changes (vocabulary, accidence, spelling etc) are not subject to universal laws. The way English has changed from 1100 CE is quite different from the way French or Greek changed, even though some aspects are general and common (loss of inflexion, increasing use of auxiliaries etc). Now, while certain general phenomena have some regularity and invariability and thus may be said to approximate the nature of “law” within documented and defined periods of changes in any one language or in relationships within a group of languages (like the IE), nonetheless all such phenomena have exceptions and, in any case, are specific to the particular period of the language or group of languages under examination. Marcantonio (2005) rightly criticizes many aspects of these so-called “laws”5. The changes in Vedic, Greek, Germanic and other languages differ enormously among themselves: eg the various forms of ‘be/become’
as in S !bh* (>bhava-), Gk phuomai, L fui, C buith, Gmc be- etc. Then again, Gk plosive ph became a fricative f as is the Italic f. How or why did the original initial consonant – whatever it was – change into these sounds? Linguists don’t know. One comes across various hypotheses but there is no sure knowledge – because there is no documentation. The changes occurred in particular, if not precisely determined places, periods and peoples and stopped there. If linguists don’t know how or why these changes occurred, then they most assuredly cannot know from existing material what the original forms were. It may be legitimate to make guesses and postulate certain forms (for the sake of convenience). But to proceed then to regard these entirely hypothetical forms as factual and use them in further comparisons with other hypothetical forms or build upon them structures and employ them as arguments in discussions about historical events seems to me wholly unacceptable.

6b. Consider a different example. In Greece, in the late 1970’s an Act of Parliament imposed reforms in the spelling, accent and accidence of Modern Greek. Nobody could have predicted these changes 100 years earlier just as nobody could have predicted at c900 CE the changes in English that would come with the Norman Conquest or later, after Chaucer. All such changes have no regularity, constancy or universality and are of the nature of accident – not law – due to social factors. If we can have no reliable predictions about future developments we can have no reliable reconstructions of forms in past periods before documentation: so also most emphatically Hock 1991. Reconstructions are futile, wasteful exercises.

Another obvious inconsistency is the reconstruction of three dorsals which are thought by many to be unnecessary (Szemerényi 1996; Sihler 1995; Lehman 1993; Speirs 1978) and one of which, the labio-velar family, is unpronounceable! How on earth can anyone pronounce as one unitary sound kw or gwh which contain both a guttural/velar and a labial element? One simply can’t, however neat it looks on paper. To state that labio-velars exist in Latin (and other languages) is an assertion of no value. Certainly, we have L qu-a-(lis/ etc) and in English qua-(lity) and Italian quando etc. But in every case we have three separate, successive sounds: velar q (pronounced k), a glide vowel -u- and a vowel; in no case do we have a single, unitary consonant. In fact, the phonemes qu- do not differ from L cu-(lpo). If it is claimed that L qu is pronounced q-v- then, again we have two distinct sounds – the velar q/k and the labial semivowel -v-. Sanskrit also has kva, dva, 1va etc: these can be pronounced only as separate successive sounds not as a single one. Attempts at describing how these hypothetical phonemes are pronounced (e.g. Clackson 2007: 49-51) are theoretical and of no practical value. Please, try yourselves! Also to pronounce the monstrosity *dhgwhec ‘to perish’! (For other unpronounceable examples see, for instance, Watkins 2000, 2001; Clackson 2007.)

[footnote : 5 She points out that, e.g., there are 36 sound-rules governing consonantal differences between Latin and Germanic but only 34 attested parallels to support them. Marcantonio is, however, much too rigid in laying down her four criteria for scientifically determining genuine correspondences. Her 2nd criterion – that “a given sound in language A can correspond with only one sound in language B, or perhaps two (similar) alternatives in language B” contains an assumption which is untrue, the assumption that languages change uniformly. Changes in different languages are neither uniform nor parallel, as she herself points out (Marcantonio & Brady 2005), and therefore one can’t rely on such strict correspondences. Ultimately one must rely on “naked eye” as she puts it, or “impressionistic” perceptions. If some regular sound-correspondences can be established, all well and good; but they should not be taken as absolute and exclusive of other alternatives. Thus Gk theos ‘god’ could well = L deus, S deva, and S dvaar ‘door’ could well = Gk thura, Gmc dawr/tor etc. Marcantonio cites also S napaat ‘offspring’, Gk nepodes ‘children, offspring’, L nepos ‘nephew’ and Gmc nefo ‘nephew, relative’ and takes exception to the sound d in Gk nepodes (pl with unattested sing) observing that it should – according to the specific “law”– be t. Well, as I said, the changes were not uniform and one must rely on one’s discrimination, not “laws” nor statistics, though both are often useful.]

A final point about laryngeals, which are wholly unattested except in Hittite (a language whose IE character is much decayed, being smothered by other neighbours rich in laryngeals). Let us consider the example of H2 (or h2 or .2). This appears in PIE *dhugH2ter ‘daughter’ (Fortson 2004: 204): appears as a in Gk thugater, but as i in S duhitar. However, Av duABar (Hale 2004: 748) or duxtar (Fortson, 204) has neither a nor i. So what was the form in Proto-Indo-Iranian?... Not known. Old Avestan has pta for ‘father’ but later patar and pitar (Mayerhofer KEWA, vol 2, 277); this is S pitr, Gk pater and L pater (Fortson, 23, 276) all allegedly from PIE *pH2ter. But, again, what was the from in Proto-Indo-Iranian?...Unknown. First of all consider that unlike S (which has many cognates from duh), Av duABar and Gk thugater stand isolated without related stems in their languages. Then, as M. Hale observed, the i was not an invariable feature of Proto-Indo- Iranian (2004: 748). The cognates for ‘father’ expose yet another inconsistency. L has also Ju[s]pitar with i as well as pater in the selfsame phonetic environment and B. Fortson offers no explanation at all (2004: 23, 33, 253, 261; also Marspitar 276, 406). A further difficulty sprouts out from S pitr. We mentioned already that Av has pta, pitar and patar, despite the selfsame phonetic environment. But according to IEnists S should have *phit&! Because according to the IE “reconstruction”-system, the laryngeal H2 becomes i in S but also aspirates the previous consonants. Thus PIE *stH2to > S sthita ‘one who has stood’ and PIE *pletH2- > S prathiman ‘width’. However, pitr has no aspirate ph! Those disparate phenomena show most flagrantly that these IE “reconstructions” and “phonetic laws” are anything but satisfactory.

[Sanku]

Is there any evidence the rig-veda was a multi-generational project? Many religious texts were put down over centuries with much added as experience was gained. It is a modern western tradition to 'freeze' religious texts. Esp. since first council of nicaea.

I understand that they have been composed by Seer's which are known (through other texts) as not being in the same generation?

[svinayak]

Is there any evidence the rig-veda was a multi-generational project? Many religious texts were put down over centuries with much added as experience was gained. It is a modern western tradition to 'freeze' religious texts. Esp. since first council of nicaea.

Check this book for detailed analysis
http://voiceofdharma.org/books/rig/

THE RIGVEDA

A Historical Analysis

SHRIKANT G. TALAGERI

The Chronology of the Rigveda

The first step in any historical analysis of the Rigveda is the establishment of the internal chronology of the text.

The Rigveda consists of ten MaNDalas or Books. And, excepting likely interpolations, these MaNDalas represent different epochs of history. The arrangement of these MaNDalas in their chronological order is the first step towards an understanding of Rigvedic history. Regarding the chronology of these MaNDalas, only two facts are generally recognised:

1. The six Family MaNDalas II-VII form the oldest core of the Rigveda.

2. The two serially last MaNDalas of the Rigveda, IX and X, are also the chronologically last MaNDalas in that order.
However, the absolute chronology of the text is ultimately bound to be a vital factor in our understanding of Vedic history; and, while we leave the subject for the present to other scholars, it will be pertinent to note here that our analysis of the internal chronology of the Rigveda does shed some light on an aspect which is important to any study of absolute chronology: namely, the duration of the period of composition of the Rigveda.

It is clear that the Rigveda was not composed in one sitting, or in a series of sittings, by a conference of RSis: the text is clearly the result of many centuries of composition. The question is: just how many centuries?

The Western scholars measure the periods of the various MaNDalas in terms of decades, while some Indian scholars go to the other extreme and measure them in terms of millenniums and decamillenniums.

Amore rational, but still conservative, estimate would be as follows:

1. There should be, at a very conservative estimate, a minimum of at least six centuries between the completion of the first nine MaNDalas of the Rigveda and the completion of the tenth.

2. The period of the Late MaNDalas and upa-maNDalas (V, VIII, IX, and the corresponding parts of MaNDala I) should together comprise a minimum of three to four centuries.

3. The period of the Middle MaNDalas and upa-maNDalas (IV, II, and the corresponding parts of MaNDala I) and the gap which must have separated them from the period of the Late MaNDalas, should likewise comprise a minimum of another three to four centuries.

4. The period of MaNDalas III and VII and the early upa-maNDalas of MaNDala I, beginning around the period of SudAs, should comprise at least two centuries.

5. The period of MaNDala VI, from its beginnings in the remote past and covering its period of composition right upto the time of SudAs, must again cover a menimum of at least six centuries.

Thus, by a conservative estimate, the total period of composition of the Rigveda must have covered a period of at least two millenniums.

Incidentally, on all the charts shown by us so far, we have depicted all the MaNDalas on a uniform scale. A more realistic depiction would be as follows:

http://voiceofdharma.org/books/rig/ch3.htm