shiv wrote:
A date earlier than 1500 BC is fatal to not just the bogey of Aryan migration but also to the cooked up story of origin and spread of Indo European languages.
hanumadu wrote:shiv wrote:
A date earlier than 1500 BC is fatal to not just the bogey of Aryan migration but also to the cooked up story of origin and spread of Indo European languages.
Isn't the 1500 BC itself a date agreed reluctantly by AIT proponents after pushing it back from 800 BC because of horse remains found in India from that time?
shiv wrote:What this also means is that the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda existed before Old Persian and Old Persian is not a sister language of Vedic Sanskrit but a daughter language. This is exactly what is indicated by studies of the Zend Avesta I mentioned earlier
QED
The Bakhshali manuscript is now the oldest extant manuscript on Indian mathematics -- it has recently been carbon-dated by the University of Oxford to date to 200-400 AD. That date is much older than previously thought, at least by five centuries, if not more. This now supposedly pushes back the earliest recorded date for the use of zero in a place-value system.
Perhaps however, there is a larger point that is being missed. E.g., as per Wiki, the Bakhshali manuscript "is written in an earlier form of Śāradā script, which was mainly in use from the 8th to the 12th century, in the northwestern part of India, such as Kashmir and neighbouring regions."
To me it seems that now the inferred dates of everything written in the Śāradā script may need to be reexamined. (e.g., Wiki again: "The Śāradā or Sarada or Sharada script is an abugida writing system of the Brahmic family of scripts, developed around the 8th century.") Even with the caveat that Wiki isn't the most reliable source of information, it seems to me that some non-trivial amount of history may need to be re-written.
shiv wrote:Nilesh let me point out something that bugs me in this entire debate. Many of us desi "science types" for whom English is a layer of language added on top of our mother tongue often do not see the manner in which western academia use a web of rhetorical constricts and straw men to obfuscate and take the debate in a direction that is bound to reach a dead end.
.....
The Aryan Invasion Theory is similar. First the straw man concept of Aryan was cooked up -like Green Stone Eater.
As a second step it was claimed that Aryans invaded India (or migrated) bringing language. If you object to the latter and say that there was no evidence of invasion you are by default accepting that "Aryans" existed. And this type of argument has in fact led to the side effect of people not knocking down the straw man while they debate the life story of the straw man.
Trying to rebut AIT but showing that there were no migrations is a mistake and that mistake is being repeated by genetics studies. Migration is not the issue. The Aryan race simply did not and does not exist and could not have migrated.
I think everyone would have understood this easily if they had said "Martian Invasion Theory". If that had been the idea then everyone would have pounced on the "Martian" word and asked wtf are Martians? But what has happened now is that Western academia have moved away from "Aryan" are are saying "language migration". we are still stuck on Aryan. We need to blow down the Aryan (and related Dravidian) straw man and start looking at the core issue of "Language migration"
I think language migration needs to be addressed with the following questions:
"If language was brought by some people from point A to point B, what is the evidence that the language existed in point A?"
Culture is not the same as language. People will be hard put to differentiate the culture of Maharashtra from that of Karnataka. Yet one is "Indo-European language" and the other is "Dravidian language". Finding evidence of culture is does not indicate finding language. For an outside observer the culture of a person from France is no different from someone in Germany.
Linguistics - especially "Philology" or "historical linguistics" which is no different from "phrenology" or voodoo magic has been used to write history and that edifice must be torn down.
Prem wrote:Gyan wrote:As per my High School level understanding, the European view on History seems to be that any Civilzation anywhere in the world could have started only after the end of last ice age ie 10,000 years ago. At that time a portion of Europe was also habitable.But if Civilzation in India started at Ice Age Maximus (not at end) then that would be around 20,000 years ago when practically no part of so called Anatolia was habitable.Now if we lower Sea level by 500m (rather than 500 feet) then it seems one could walk from Horn of Africa to coast of Gujarat. Indian Coast would be almost 100-200km ahead of where it is today. And India would be practically the only place in the world where agriculture could have produced adequate surplus so that a modern large Civilization could have developed. OIT? By the way one would be able to row from West Africa to South America in small boats as some peaks of Mid Atlantic Mountain Range might be islands. Voila one more concumdrum solved.
I may be wrong but some one said India escaped last ice age that North India was the onleee place left for humanity to survive.
Yayavar wrote:Prem wrote:
I may be wrong but some one said India escaped last ice age that North India was the onleee place left for humanity to survive.
I've found this instructive, and posted it before too http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/
Humanity was present across the globe in the timelines you write.
Gurus can comment on its veracity.
What is astounding is that linguists and ‘orientalists’ who examined the Sanskrit Mitanni treaty documents did not link them with India where Sanskrit was known all over, but instead, claimed that the language had come to Syria with people from from Europe before vanishing completely from Syria and going to India and spreading all over India. Preposterous as this story may sound, there is documentary evidence that this is exactly what was done, and perfectly good explanations as to why this bluff was propagated. I will explain this in some detail, providing the sources.
European linguists and historians set about trying to find “proof” of a mother language that linked Sanskrit to European languages – which were all grouped under the name “Indo-European languages” (changed from the former name “Indo-Aryan languages”) . It turned out that there was no proof of any language available. Sanskrit existed as a language handed down orally, with no written texts and there were no European written texts of adequate antiquity for comparison.
Linguists and historians then started to try and find archaeological links between the proposed European place of origin of Indo European languages and India to fix a route of spread. Europe and Eurasia had archaeological finds but no evidence of language. India had the preserved ancient language but no archaeological links. No direct connection could be made. Then, apparently out of the blue, it was decided that the Vedas represented a “horse culture”. This idea was not sourced from Vedic scholars but from German and English translations of Vedas. To an educated reader these translations read like ludicrous mumbo-jumbo written by half-wits. However – since the Vedas were ancient, it was acceptable to imagine that poems could be the work of primitive humans of lower intelligence. The fact that the laughably faulty translations of the Vedas had more references to cows and fire worship than horses was ignored while declaring the Vedas as part of a “horse worship culture”
Yayavar wrote:^^there is a lot more to the human spread as in the link I posted than what you are sharing.
Even though there was a spread across it passed through the Indian subcontinent due to the ICe Age. The rest of the details are interesting too.
Dipanker wrote:Claim no Guru-hood but a simple Wiki lookup gives us the following map, meaning with the exception upper Arctic, Canada, upper 1/5 of USA, Antarctica, and most of Europe all other parts of the globe look habitable (no ice). First migration to Americas from Siberia across the Bering St. land bridge happened during this period.
Grey area in the map are under ice cover. Antarctic ice cap looks pretty impressive!
Nilesh Oak wrote:
When it comes to linguistics, not only my current knowledge is limited, but also my brain structure which is most unsuitable to learn linguistics. That is precisely the reason while I enjoy the works of (likes of ) Talageri, I treat all the cooking that happens within linguistic field---cognates, and isoglosses, as a 'black box' of engineering and only focus on inputs and outputs. This is purely due to my limitations of linguistics.
I presume you have already consumed all 3 books of Talageri? (1993, 2000, 2008).
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Call it an ancient thousand man march. Early Bronze Age men from the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppe swept into Europe on horseback about 5000 years ago—and may have left most women behind. This mostly male migration may have persisted for several generations, sending men into the arms of European women who interbred with them, and leaving a lasting impact on the genomes of living Europeans.
“It looks like males migrating in war, with horses and wagons,” says lead author and population geneticist Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in Sweden.
Europeans are the descendants of at least three major migrations of prehistoric people. First, a group of hunter-gatherers arrived in Europe about 37,000 years ago. Then, farmers began migrating from Anatolia (a region including present-day Turkey) into Europe 9000 years ago, but they initially didn’t intermingle much with the local hunter-gatherers because they brought their own families with them. Finally, 5000 to 4800 years ago, nomadic herders known as the Yamnaya swept into Europe. They were an early Bronze Age culture that came from the grasslands, or steppes, of modern-day Russia and Ukraine, bringing with them metallurgy and animal herding skills and, possibly, Proto-Indo-European, the mysterious ancestral tongue from which all of today’s 400 Indo-European languages spring. They immediately interbred with local Europeans, who were descendants of both the farmers and hunter-gatherers. Within a few hundred years, the Yamnaya contributed to at least half of central Europeans’ genetic ancestry.
CTH 284 consists of four well preserved tablets or a total of 1080 lines. The text is notable for its Mitanni (Indo-Aryan) loanwords, e.g. the numeral compounds aiga-, tera-, panza-, satta-, nāwa-wartanna ("one, three, five, seven, nine intervals",[11] virtually Vedic eka-, tri-, pañca- sapta-, nava-vartana. Kikkuli apparently was faced with some difficulty getting specific Mitannian concepts across in the Hittite language, for he frequently gives a term such as “Intervals” in his own language (somewhat similar to Vedic Sanskrit), and then states, “this means…” and explained it in Hittite.
csaurabh wrote:Something which really bugs me about the AIT: According to it, the Aryans were a group of Sanskrit ( or 'Proto-Indo-European' ) speakers that came from Caucasus mountains region and brought their language and culture to the lands of Europe, Greece, Syria, Iran, India, etc.
But only in India do historians assume an "Aryan invasion" , caste , etc. No one is talking about an Aryan invasion of Germany, Aryan invasion of Russia, Aryan invasion of Iran, etc. So do they really believe in the AIT?
shiv wrote:There were no Aryans so the Aryans could not have "brought language to India"
.sudarshan wrote:shiv wrote:There were no Aryans so the Aryans could not have "brought language to India"
This statement is the key. There is no such thing as an "Aryan race." In one of my books (unpublished of course) I came up with a new theory of my own, called the "Gentleman Invasion Theory." In English literature, we can see multiple references to the word "Gentleman" to describe a man of manners, culture, refinement, chivalry, etc. We also see references to the "Plebians" of the British Isles. So my theory was that there was an original race of Gentlemen, who invaded the British Isles and displaced the earlier Plebian culture. The Gentlemen were the ones who brought culture and refinement (such as it was) to Britain, after massacring the Plebians (though not fully, of course, some Plebian stock still survived in Britain).
This was a tongue-in-cheek theory to illustrate just how stupid this notion of an "Aryan race" was, cooked up as it was from faulty understanding of the word "Arya" in the Vedas and other Indian literature.
shiv wrote:All across the western world historians, linguists and others will fight tooth and nail against all people Indians or non Indians who show presence of Vedas before 1500 BC because it will, mark my words, revolutionize all India-European language spread theories. Thousands of papers and books will have to be discarded - so don't hold your breath.
Gus wrote:shiv wrote:All across the western world historians, linguists and others will fight tooth and nail against all people Indians or non Indians who show presence of Vedas before 1500 BC because it will, mark my words, revolutionize all India-European language spread theories. Thousands of papers and books will have to be discarded - so don't hold your breath.
Not to mention the Dravidian parties in TN - who still rely on this theory to project TN as a special rebel state that needs its guardians against big bad aryans of naarth.
There the Danish team excavated an ostrich egg, a shell ladle of Indian manufacture, and pottery similar to that found in what is today Pakistan. These discoveries attest to a vibrant mercantile business run by Mesopotamians themselves, rather than Dilmunite middlemen. The most telling artifacts were four cylinder seals of the type used by scribes to identify Mesopotamian traders and their goods during the end of the third millennium b.c. These seals, found within the building, demonstrate the port’s importance during this first era of global trade. “This is not just a fishing village,” says team director Flemming Hojlund. Instead, the team’s work suggests that Mesopotamians, far from being passive consumers of foreign goods brought by distant seafarers, were active participants in the sea trade.
Alexander, being impressed with the current report that Semiramis had effected her escape from India with about twenty men and Cyrus with about seven, was ambitious, though aware of the difficulties and dangers of the enterprise, to conduct his large army through the same country in safety and triumphantly.
A_Gupta wrote:
Think about it:
1. If Sarada was the only thing dating Indian history, then, see, all of a sudden, around five additional centuries turn up. It may even be as much as the 660 or so years that Vedveer Arya postulates.
2. Why does Vedveer Arya need his 660 years or so? It is required because of the clash between the traditional Indian chronologies and the anchoring of Indian historical dates via Ashoka and Alexander the Great.
3. IMO, Vedveer Arya makes a mistake in e.g., trying to push back Muhammad the Prophet by 660 years, and so on. There is simply too much outside-of-India evidence to do any such thing.
4. IMO, the point is a good one that "Maka" in the Ashokan inscriptions likely refers to a Bactrian land that is mentioned in the Behistun inscription of Darius rather than Magas of Cyreniaca (ruled 276-250 BC) - Cyreniaca is the eastern coastal region of Libya. But why would "Maka" a place-name be mentioned along with people's names in the inscription? I think some further scrutiny here may be helpful.
5. IMO, even Aryan Invasionists like Hermann Jacobi who nevertheless placed the RgVeda to before 2000 BC, or Sten Konow who believed that the Mitani treaty mentions Indian gods, not gods of the postulated earlier period of Aryan (i.e. Indo-Iranian) unity or of an even earlier Indo-European period, need that five hundred-six hundred years, pushing back from the usual 1500 BC of the Aryan Invasion Theory.
I think where I'm getting to is that regardless of whether you are an indigenist or an AITer, there is a suggestion that there are centuries missing in the cross-linkage of Indian historical dates and the rest-of-the-world that can't be dismissed out of hand.
syam wrote:@shiv ji, I am reading a book written by Dr. Raja Ram Mohan Roy .
I found something amazing,Alexander, being impressed with the current report that Semiramis had effected her escape from India with about twenty men and Cyrus with about seven, was ambitious, though aware of the difficulties and dangers of the enterprise, to conduct his large army through the same country in safety and triumphantly.
According to the author, above incident was described by Strabo.
So Ctesias account of Semiramis is true. And here Cyrus also mentioned. Cyrus battle also must be there in Ctesias' Persica. Only two people tried to invade India before Alexander. Both of them failed. But Herodotus says Persians had India as one of their satrapy. No wonder Ctesias disagree with Herodotus.
Prasad wrote:So another doubt, if the gents here will kindly excuse - Lack of mention of iron in the RV is supposed to signify that the 'aryans' didn't know iron working and it was later developed/encountered after entering India. The earliest iron working sites in India are after 2000BC. Sarasvati civ sites contain copper/bronze artefacts and no iron. We see iron predominantly after 1500 BC within India in sites like Gufkral. So how do they state both together without making any sense? If these so called aryans didn't know iron working, neither did the harappans whom they supposedly displaced/replaced when they died out and iron working began after that. So there was no existing iron working knowledge these charriot riding aryans encountered and learned.
shiv wrote:But the Greeks themselves did not like what Ctesias said and willy-nilly destroyed much of his writings
Prasad wrote:Upon further reading, Malhar in Chandauli district UP (right next to Benares btw) upon the Karmanasa river has massive iron furnaces denoting large scale iron smelting, with iron arrowheads, tools etc. Dated to 1800BC. That far east. So atleast around 2000BC iron working knowledge was present near present day benares. Much earlier than the saraswati civilisation appears to have seen iron in such quantities.
That is very interesting ..syam wrote:Sir, Greeks did not like Ctesias because he exposes something they tried desperately to hide.
Semiramis tried to invade India and failed. But she came back to her Empire and ruled it till her end days. Assyrian empire didn't fall. Same thing can be said about Cyrus. He also tried to invade India and failed. But he didn't lose his empire and Persia didn't fall.
Now lets come to Alexander. He tried to invade India and lost. In the process, his whole empire imploded. His generals fought among themselves. Which proud Greek accepts this fact. They had to discredit Ctesias. They didn't want the past to overshadow their Hero.
And the thing is Greeks also not guilty here. Only few glorified Historians are guilty. Historians who helped the next generation of historians to build new narrative.
shiv wrote:That is very interesting ..
One of his most famous achievements was at the outbreak of the Second Punic War, when he marched an army which included war elephants from Iberia over the Pyrenees and the Alps into Italy.
Carthage seems to have fielded a formidable cavalry force, especially in its North African homeland; a significant part of it was composed of light Numidian cavalry. Other mounted troops included North African elephants (now extinct), trained for war, which, among other uses, were commonly used for frontal assaults or as anticavalry protection. An army could field up to several hundred of these animals, but on most reported occasions fewer than a hundred were deployed.
"He (Antiochus) crossed the Caucasus and descended into India; renewed his friendship with Sophagasenus the king of the Indians; received more elephants, until he had a hundred and fifty altogether; and having once more provisioned his troops, set out again personally with his army: leaving Androsthenes of Cyzicus the duty of taking home the treasure which this king had agreed to hand over to him". Polybius 11.39
shiv wrote:Prasad wrote:Upon further reading, Malhar in Chandauli district UP (right next to Benares btw) upon the Karmanasa river has massive iron furnaces denoting large scale iron smelting, with iron arrowheads, tools etc. Dated to 1800BC. That far east. So atleast around 2000BC iron working knowledge was present near present day benares. Much earlier than the saraswati civilisation appears to have seen iron in such quantities.
Can you provide some links because they will be useful to squeeze a few recalcitrant balls
syam wrote:
Edit: this one too,"He (Antiochus) crossed the Caucasus and descended into India; renewed his friendship with Sophagasenus the king of the Indians; received more elephants, until he had a hundred and fifty altogether; and having once more provisioned his troops, set out again personally with his army: leaving Androsthenes of Cyzicus the duty of taking home the treasure which this king had agreed to hand over to him". Polybius 11.39
We focus too much on Horses, all the while ignoring elephant in the room.
Prasad wrote:Rakesh Tewari - http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/tewari/tewari.pdf Current DG ASI.
Also this - NIAS journal http://eprints.nias.res.in/756/1/2015-S ... ations.pdf
Another key finding being pgw & harappan co-existing at Alamgirpur.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ary_Report
Another interesting thing wrt language and scripts was the Porunthal excavation. They found an urn/jar with rice that was carbon dated to 490-450BC. What is interesting is that it was 2kilos of rice and there is tamil brahmi script writing on the jars found there pushing back date for a written brahmi script beyond the earlier upper limit of ashokan brahmi in 3rd century bc.
shiv wrote:Hannibal's elephants are well known - but the horse debate is critical to the "language spread theory". Where does the elephant fit in?
shiv wrote:Another interesting thing wrt language and scripts was the Porunthal excavation. They found an urn/jar with rice that was carbon dated to 490-450BC. What is interesting is that it was 2kilos of rice and there is tamil brahmi script writing on the jars found there pushing back date for a written brahmi script beyond the earlier upper limit of ashokan brahmi in 3rd century bc.
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