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Less than 10,000 years ago, however, many of these horse-like species became extinct, along with other browsing animals such as mammoths. Climate changes and over-hunting by humans may have been to blame, but no one knows for sure. The only survivors were horses in Asia and several zebras. In North America, however, horses were wiped out.
so it is possible, to come at domestication of horse more in those times here.. however, it would be extremely difficult to say, horses actually were less extinct one one side of the river against the other.
we would have to consider way down south where the living conditions were perfect for these horses. If we can find one horse bone in a domesticated setup below rajasthan, it is enough to prove OoI.
one can't destroy both the past and history. of course, one CAN obfuscate the past and history.
this is stupid imho, to even ask that question.
after eons of subduing our rights to chart our own history, [anything beyond that is not documented is always the past - if one wants to define that way].. the past once proven or documented is history.
now there is science in between that.. and for the past history makers, science was not there... it was just some fool writing in the text book, we took it as history.
Nice article, I can see the lure of taking stock of our history is eroding our traditional base and historical truths that we discover no matter how true, will leave us bereft of our past. We part our ways with a value system that otherwise might have stayed with us. Knowing that say Karna in truth was a tribesman who just gave away his clothes no biggie is different from the stories we grew up with and the ideals we so want to adopt in our lives. Slowly the SDRE will be replaced by a protestant of the article, full of body and lot of worldly knowledge but soul lost to reason in the process of knowing.
1. By all means, Indians should master archaeology, isotope-ratio based dating methods, comparative linguistics, etc. etc.
2. However, Indians should recognize that the Puranas, Epics, Vedas, etc., were not meant to be history.
a. I don't think it was very difficult to invent history - it is not like the steam engine where a lot of things have to come together to make the invention possible.
b. We have to accept that our ancestors (who could invent something like Panini's grammar) did not think that history was necessary for human flourishing. Or else they would have written and preserved histories.
c. Trying to find the germ of historical truth by e.g., making Indra into a powerful chieftain who was later deified, etc., is implicitly agreeing that our ancestors did not know what they were doing, making up stories.
d. We do not really understand how our culture worked (to keep itself going and for the people within it to be flourishing). We would agree that there is some common feeling between say a Telugu-speaker and a Hindi-speaker because of the common heritage of the Ramayana. But how exactly that works? Was the Ramayana written to foster that common feeling, or is it a fortunate side-effect? etc.
e. We try to understand our culture not ab initio but in terms of analogies with the West who have described their own culture (Indra as a Nero-analog still sticks in my throat.) It reflects even in our modern political culture where we encounter descriptions of e.g., BJP as fascists. This is because we do not have a metaphor of our own. As a simple example - it is like explaining Krishna, e.g., "Krishna is a prophet sent to the Hindus" (adopting an Islamic metaphor) or "Krishna was a warrior-saint" (adopting a Christian metaphor). The simple answer to that is Krishna was an avataar, and if you can't map that to a western or Islamic category, that is too bad. We have to understand "avataar" in its own terms, and as a concept, not just as a word to be translated.
f. The Puranas, etc. were not written to record material culture or geography or any such. We may try to infer something about the conditions when the author wrote the particular work - but then our texts also tend to be many layered, and thus difficult to interpret in that way. We need to be constantly aware of that. E.g., Rg Veda does not mention salt, we are told, I doubt that means that salt was unknown or unimportant to the authors. Surely in a hot climate salt cannot be done without. Salt was simply not relevant to whatever the purpose was in writing the hymns.
3. Reiterating 2.d, we need to understand how our culture worked, e.g., how did Ramayana play a role in transmitting culture across time (generations) and geography (e.g., to Thailand). IF we are "people of the Ramayana" how does the Ramayana set up a framework within which we go about in the world? How did it cause people who were outside it to become inside it? It certainly is not by "conversion" where the only conversion metaphors we have are the Christian and Islamic ones. (We remain barely aware of the Buddhist one). Can it continue to entrain people into our cultural framework? etc. etc. If we understand this, that would be a useful understanding of history, not the dry archives of facts gathering dust or alienating us from our roots.
4. To reiterate what Balu wrote in the "Do Indians need history or the past?" we are in the danger of reducing our texts to mixtures of superstition, exaggerations & boasts & lies about the past, and very poorly written history. We then cling on to it out of inertia and out of the "freedom of religion" which is the freedom to believe in any irrational things. This will not appeal to the next generation - and the continuity of a culture depends precisely on transmitting it to the next generation.
If we take however, these works to contain implicitly and sometimes explicitly, reciples for people and society to flourish, they continue to be relevant, and of continuing interest.
1. Where did Hannibal's elephants come from? http://andreaskluth.org/2008/08/14/abou ... elephants/
While this c. 200 BC, and our horse issue is from circa 2000 BC, let us not underestimate the ability of the ancients to transport large mammals through large distances for their own purposes.
2. Iron chariots in the Bible (please read it through). It even led to an archaeological expedition in 1921 to attempt to find these iron chariots. We should not engage in similar follies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_chariots
I think any argument of determining either past or history needs a scientific basis now. For that matter, AIT can be asked to prove scientifically correct., to be re-certified part of history.
I don't understand that logic. Could someone please explain what is this "OR" condition, and what is the message I am missing here?
I agree. I once committed the folly of calling narration as hyperbole. It falls under the category of 4. I can't pass on what I don't appreciate or what I think is nothing but an exaggeration. Vedic composers are not bards nor are they poets. What appears to be hyperbole, might be a reference to something else which I might never understand. What it took thousands of years can be lost because of collective ignorance passed off as scholarship.
RajeshA wrote:
[*] Many who propose OIT, can live with the 4000 BCE date as well.[/list]
RajeshA ji
It is not a question of what one can live with. It is more of a question of how much narrower a time period band can be obtained. Currently, if one takes into account the published accounts from both sides, the band is between 5000 BCE (Subhash Kak) and 1400 BCE (Hans Hock). It is not enough to say we split the difference and go with 3200 BCE.
IMHO, the problem with OIT camp is that they want to constantly push it back further on some flimsy and not unambiguous evidence. I agree that this is a reactionary behavior to counter people such as Prof. Witzel and based on the hope that the AIT camp will be willing to live with a later date. But things don't work that way (or at least I think they shouldn't and hope they don't) as far as scientific discovery goes, would they?
Politics is a different matter and the first stone was cast by the AIT camp by terming each and every scholar who comes up with an alternative hypothesis that talks of an earlier date. as a "Hindu exetremsit" or some such. That should stop otherwise people will not take them seriously. In the interest of discovery of truth, I hope they realize the fate of their theories if they continue on this path of acrimony and chose to alter their behavior.
SaiK wrote:did we get more information further from ASI's dwaraka deep sea findings further on? are they still diving to find any remains or the mission is over?
SaiK ji
There is no consensus on Dwaraka. One camp says it is a city and the other natural formations.
Regards
An excellent post, but I have a quibble. Discovering our past through scientific means is probably one of the most important tasks we need to carry out. Otherwise, everything is open to revision.
Folks I would not concentrate on dissing the egregious Witzel. I find that Witzel is being disowned by the community while his other works and opinions live on.
How much of the Rig Veda do you want to believe? Could it be all cooked up by a hallucinating bunch of people? It does not seem likely, although I cannot prove that they were not hallucinating. So when they talk about horses and gods, horses and sacrifices, horses as gifts it means they had horses. Unless they were bluffing, the lack of horse bones is not proof that they did not have horses.
The horse case is being used, like I said, as a crutch to hold up more than one theory. It is not just the Aryan invasion theory but I suspect the more recently cooked up history and origins of "Indo-European" languages depends heavily on the dating of the Rig Veda to about 1200 BC. That is why the community of experts are willing to "give ground" on the absence of an invasion, but need to cling on to the horse excuse. The horse is tied up too closely with theories of language origins.
I think it is perfectly logical and well known that the more ancient the society or event the less likely that material evidence like organic matter will survive. The absence of horse bones supports an earlier origin for the Rig Veda. But if you notice, the dates for the Rig veda have been gradually moved from "very ancient" to about 1900 BC, to 1500 and it is now (as per Shri Anthony's book) 1200 BC. Later origin of the Rig veda makes it easier for lingusists to support hypotheses about languages.
If you have early Sanskrit (now called proto-Indic) from 1200 BC and Greek from around the same time, you create rules for making them sister languages and then postulate a mother proto language. This theory would get badly upset if the Rig Veda were dated back to 4000 BC. The horse argument is the only "solid" argument there is from the linguistic view point. Everything else about the language of the Rig Veda (related to geography, astronomy and culture) puts the date of the Rig veda at some other time.
If it does turn out, hypothetically that the Rig Veda is indeed 5000+ years old and could well hold the proto language of the Indo-European area, it would cause a few careers/reputations to come crashing down. I am not interested in bringing careers or reputaations down. I am only interested in finding out why obvious lacunae in current hypotheses are being accepted and passed off as true by wildly incredible stories about the date and origin of the Rig veda.
SaiK wrote:did we get more information further from ASI's dwaraka deep sea findings further on? are they still diving to find any remains or the mission is over?
SaiK ji
There is no consensus on Dwaraka. One camp says it is a city and the other natural formations.
Regards
matrimc ji
any links for the arguments that says it is natural formations?
they should perhaps use underwater lidar tech to map the area.
Last edited by SaiK on 22 Jun 2012 07:07, edited 1 time in total.
^^^ shiv ji I think they are praying hard that no horse evidence dating earlier than 2000 BC shows up. Any thing if found, they have the trump card anyway to stick up: 1. they are not Caballus bones. 2. if that doesnt stick, say they are not found in the stratified layers 3. if that doesn't stick say the bones are that of an ass 4. if that doesnt stick say someone put them there.
we sound like losers complaining and calling foul every time when the above is repeated. And I guess they are really enjoying with sadistic pleasure that we are writhing in pain and there is nothing much you can do, because they hold the trump card. In Telugu there is a proverb:
Adige vadiki cheppe vadu lokuva. (The questioner looks down on the answerer), may be we should reverse the roles and ask them to prove there indeed are no horse remains in India hence their PIE is right on the money.
Natural formations? brick on brick neatly lined up? the entire city formations in neat rectangles? and what about those tools that they found? remnants of fish bones?
Tigers as a species historically ranged across Eurasia from the Sunda Islands, west through the Indian subcontinent to the Indus river and north along the Pacific seaboard to 60° NL and a wide swath of central Asia from the Russian Far East to eastern Turkey [1], [2]. This wide distribution was primarily influenced by environmental changes associated with Pleistocene glaciation events [3]. Commonly known as the Caspian tiger on the basis of its type locality (N. Persia), the historic range of Panthera tigris virgata also included Trans-Caucasia and Eastern Anatolia, with the greatest population densities in the riverine tugai forest systems of Central Asia [1], [2], [4]. During the Middle Ages Caspian tigers were resident across the steppes of Ukraine and southern Russia [4]. Between 1920 and 1970, tiger populations throughout Central Asia declined and disappeared for reasons common to tigers elsewhere: hunting, conversion of their limited habitat to cultivation with a concomitant decline in prey, and conflict with livestock [1], [4]–[6]. The Caspian tiger became extinct in February of 1970 when the last survivor was shot in Hakkari province, Turkey [1], [7].
In Baluchistan the lion, tiger, leopard and wolf are occasionally met, the jackal, wild dog, fox, wild goat and ass more frequently. - Asia, with ethnological appendix, Augustus Henry Keane, 1886, found on books.google.com
It is impossible that anyone migrating into India from any direction except the sea should not be aware of the tiger.
Unless something really unusual happened, namely, the range of a major mammal **increased** in the last 4000 years, it is impossible that anyone from the purported PIE homelands did not live near tigers.
Last edited by A_Gupta on 22 Jun 2012 07:21, edited 1 time in total.
SaiK wrote:
any links for the arguments that says it is natural formations?
they should perhaps use underwater lidar tech to map the area.
SaiK ji and Venug ji
I don't have a ready reference but sure read it on the net when I started at wikipedia first.
The way it happened was that I was quite thrilled after reading the news of the drowned city Dwaraka. The arguments for and against are both quite convincing. One needs to excavate to get to the bottom (pun intended) of the matter, I suppose.
Regards
Added later: When I read the news, I thought they have some incontrovertible proof like that of IVC. But looking at the videos, it is not like that at all and hence there is a dissenting POV.
Last edited by Vayutuvan on 22 Jun 2012 08:25, edited 1 time in total.
Folks, here is one reason why linguists, of all people, have the strongest motivation to ignore all other evidence about the Rig Veda and hold on to horse bones as the sole crutch. Read the bolded part
From Shri Anthony's 'Horse, Wheel and Language" chapter 1, page 5
In fact, a substantial vocabulary list has
been reconstructed for one of the languages spoken about five thousand
years ago. That language is the ancestor of modern English as well as
many other modern and ancient languages. All the languages that are
descended from this same mother tongue belong to one family, that of the
Indo-European languages. Today Indo-European languages are spoken
by about three billion people-more than speak the languages of any
other language family. The vocabulary of the mother tongue, called "Proto-
Indo-European", has been studied for about two hundred years, and in
those two centuries fierce disagreements have continued about almost
every aspect of Indo-European studies...
<snip>
...But today Indo-European linguists are improving their methods and making new discov-
eries. They have reconstructed the basic forms and meanings of thousands
of words from the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary-itself an astonish-
ing feat. Those words can be analyzed to describe the thoughts, values,
concerns, family relations, and religious beliefs of the people who spoke
them. But first we have to figure out where and when they lived. If we can
combine the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with a specific set of ar-
chaeological remains, it might be possible to move beyond the usuallimi-
tations of archaeological knowledge and achieve a much richer knowledge
of these particular ancestors.
Linguistics theory, where people can cook up things imagining that it is "harmless" unlike nuclear physics is limited by archaeology. It happens that the lack of date of the Rig Veda and the association with horses can be matched to the horse and chariot remains of central Asia. That is why the horse acquires over-riding importance over and above everything else. And because those central Asian archaeological remains have been dated, the Rig Veda gets a new date secondarily.
Linguists have alerady cooked up a "proto-Indo-European". They have cooked up a history and identity for the people of Europe and America. A little fudging about the dating of Rig veda is a small price to pay in order to make the cooked up history of language true.
So wake up and smell the coffee folks. it is no longer about the "Aryan Invasion Theory" - that is passe. It is now about linguistic identity and a more subtle "linguistic influence theory". In terms of subtlety and cleverness in pushing EXACTLY the same 200 years old theory, PIE is to AIT what F-22 is to Tipu Sultan rockets.
Aryan Invasion Theory has now been discarded. It is just "Influence" theory that is the same old theory couched in new terms.
shiv wrote:Folks I would not concentrate on dissing the egregious Witzel. I find that Witzel is being disowned by the community while his other works and opinions live on.
That is only a temporary relief. There will be other Witzels in future for sure.
venug wrote:^^^ shiv ji I think they are praying hard that no horse evidence dating earlier than 2000 BC shows up.
No it has gone beyond that. In the last 20-30 years linguistic theory has been used to compare two languages and speculate on some earlier language. If you have two related languages and a known older language, you can "calculate" how each group of the two new languages changed the pronunciation starting from the old one. You can create "rules" based on this. Once you make up these rules and freeze them as being absolutely correct and accurate (which they are not), you can take two older languages and use the same rules to cook up an even older language. Then you can use two or more of your own cooked up languages to cook up an even older proto language. This is how 'Proto Indo-European" has been cooked up. But this requires proof. PIE has no proof. It is all conjecture, based on very weak grounds in my view, but that is a different issue.
The community of modern linguists has found a convenient scapegoat in the Aryan Invasion theory, Rig veda and horse. The logic is exactly the same as the invasion theory minus the invasion part.
"North Indians may not have migrated from outside, but their language came from outside. That language came from a place that had horses. We have found horses in central Asia. We think the language about horses in the Rig Veda exactly matches what has been found in central Asia. Therefore language came to India from Central Asia. And we have already cooked up a language to fit our theory. It is called PIE"
Out of India, or any suggestion of anything like "Out of India", would be a body blow to this community who are already ready and waiting with a previously cooked up, non existent language to grab any archaeology that fits, which they can display as "proof".
Babar hunted tiger and rhino in Nowshera near Peshawar.
[Source: Notes on the Ancient Geography of Gandhara, A. Hargreaves Foucher, 1915.
The reference he gives is as follows: "Song-yun draws a most pleasing picture of the environs - now so very barren of Shahbaz-garhi [Beal, Buddhist Records I, p. XCVII and CII). "There is nothing so beautiful as the gardens of Peshawar in the spring", says Baber (loc. lund. II p. 77) and elsewhere he tells us of thick jungles between Makaam and the Indus (ibid p. 52) or round about Peshawar (ibid p. 135) where he hunted the rhinoceros and also the tiger near Nowshera (ibid p. 77)".
One should consider anything beyond 5000BCE, means will face stiff resistance from the western culture.. as it is widely believed (their past and history problems, but projected as normally history) that genesis/creation does not say anything beyond that time frame. so, anything less than 5000BCE (:older than:) means one has to dhoti shiver even if one has scientific evidence.
Scholars
noticed more than a hundred years ago that the oldest well-documented
Indo-European languages-Imperial Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, and the
most ancient form of Sanskrit, or Old Indic-were spoken by militaristic
societies that seemed to erupt into the ancient world driving chariots
pulled by swift horses. Maybe Indo-European speakers invented the char-
iot. Maybe they were the first to domesticate horses. Could this explain
the initial spread of the Indo-European languages? For about a thousand
years, between 1700 and 700 BCE, chariots were the favored weapons of
pharaohs and kings throughout the ancient world, from Greece to China.
Large numbers of chariots, in the dozens or even hundreds, are mentioned
in palace inventories of military equipment, in descriptions of battles, and
in proud boasts of loot taken in warfare. After 800 BCE chariots were
gradually abandoned as they became vulnerable to a new kind of warfare
conducted by disciplined troops of mounted archers, the earliest cavalry. If
Indo-European speakers were the first to have chariots, this could explain
their early expansion; if they were the first to domesticate horses, then this
could explain the central role horses played as symbols of strength and
power in the rituals of the Old Indic Aryans, Greeks, Hittites, and other
Indo-European speakers
Does the Rig Veda describe a "militaristic society". I thought they were pastoral?
This man is taking the old and worn conclusions of the Aryan Invasion theory of "militaristic Aryans spreading" and trying to connect that with language spread. Rig Veda and archaeological horse finds in central Asia are tools to sell his ideas.
Last edited by shiv on 22 Jun 2012 09:15, edited 1 time in total.
this is off-the-horse question: Anthony's book says indra is a borrowed non-PIE word. Do you dispute that?
ashish avare: Actually Lubotsky's paper says that which Anthony's book quotes verbatim. Since Lubotsky hasn't expanded on why he thinks it is phonetically irregular, I do have doubts over his claim.
ManishH wrote:
Based on ephedra, he may be right about 'soma' but Indra goes back to the root 'ind' for moisture or drop - it's related to the belief that Indra freed the waters.
Could you please provide the source for this info? I looked up for root ind here:
Not the PIE root, but Sanskrit root. A PIE reconstruction has been proposed by linking 'danu' to 'indu' but it doesn't find wide agreement. Neither do I agree with that - Sanskrit has never metathesized (exchange position of syllables) of PIE roots except for Thorn Clusters.
ManishH wrote:
ashish avare: Actually Lubotsky's paper says that which Anthony's book quotes verbatim. Since Lubotsky hasn't expanded on why he thinks it is phonetically irregular, I do have doubts over his claim.
This is what Anthony says just before he quotes Lubotsky
Lubotsky suggested that Old Indic developed as a vanguard language
south ofIndo-lranian, closer to the source of the loans. The archaeological
evidence supports Lubotsky's suggestion.
venug wrote:
we sound like losers complaining and calling foul every time when the above is repeated.
Venu-garu: Everyone has a right to dispute established theories. There is no need to think one sounds like a "loser". A cursory look at the history of Indo-European studies shows established theories have been overturned by new evidence.
If properly dated horse remains are found, no one is so dishonest as to claim "someone put them there". Eg. the date of Iron Age in India was long considered to be 1,200 BC. But recent findings have put them back to 1,700 BC. See "The origins of iron-working in India:
new evidence from the Central Ganga Plain and the Eastern Vindhyas", Rakesh Tewari
ManishH wrote:
ashish avare: Actually Lubotsky's paper says that which Anthony's book quotes verbatim. Since Lubotsky hasn't expanded on why he thinks it is phonetically irregular, I do have doubts over his claim.
This is what Anthony says just before he quotes Lubotsky
Lubotsky suggested that Old Indic developed as a vanguard language
south ofIndo-lranian, closer to the source of the loans. The archaeological
evidence supports Lubotsky's suggestion.
That's a mere qualitative statement which I'll take with a pinch of salt. This is an unsolved problem. Anthony's book is not only source "Truth". Eg. consider these facts which can make India, not Bactria/Margiana the region of Indo-Iranian Unity:
Linguistic
1. Bricks were known in Harappa too.
2. Ephedra was widely used around Oxus - eg. Tocharian mummies of Urumqi had them.
3. Camels are found in Thar desert too.
Archaelogical:
1. Andronovo pottery trail ends in Bactria/Margiana - nothing southwards
Northern Iran and Eastern Caspian can be the region of Indo-Iranian unity too because of earliest Grey ware pottery is found near Zagros mountains.
In this regard, Anthony has not rigorously evaluated evidence that counters Lubotsky's theory. Not that Anthony is dishonest, but that's not his area of expertise, and he relies on un-corroborated evidence.
His area of expertise is Steppe (Samara valley) and especially equestrian archaeology - where his work shines due to rigour.
Anthony is by no means dishonest. He takes pains to write disclaimers when he is heading into controversial territory. And he writes well, better than many others. But the problem with all written works is selective use of passages by people who might have other agendas.
The horse bone evidence question has morphed from earlier being proof of the "Aryans being invaders" to the modern day hypothesis "Indo-Europeans" being carriers of language. All the earlier timelines and assumptions from 200 years ago are retained minus the politically sensitive race part. The "militarism", the victories etc are all retained
This is the problem. If the horse argument was dropped, there is nothing to stop the Rig Veda from being dated to a much earlier period. And dating it to a much earlier period will require re-dating or revision of all assumptions about 'Proto-Indo-European" languages.
Last edited by shiv on 22 Jun 2012 09:49, edited 1 time in total.
shiv wrote:
Does the Rig Veda describe a "militaristic society". I thought they were pastoral?
I would ask - militaristic yes, but compared to what.
What is your view on this? I have personally never related to the Rig Veda as something militaristic because Rig Vedic hymns are part of my identity and form part of day to day ritual in my life and I would like to know what is meant by "militarism" in the Rig Veda?
