Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

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Prem Kumar
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

EashwarPrakash: if you want the exact chronology of the oldest Sanskrit layers (which is Vedic Sanskrit) and work forward from there, please read Srikant Talageri's book. The best one would be "Rig Veda and Avesta: the final evidence". Its also available online.

He has systematically classified the RigVedic Mandalas (books) from the oldest to the newest.

But please keep in mind that there can be significant language changes even within the oldest to the newest Rig Vedic mandalas. Not to mention changes from Vedic Sanskrit to Paninian Sanskrit. That's because the Rig Vedic mandalas were themselves composed over a period of a millenia or more.

An example: in the oldest mandalas, the word for night is "nakht" (which is why this word is there in most Indo-European languages). The word "rathri" for night, appears only in the later Vedic texts. Nowadays, almost no one uses the Sanskrit word "nakht"
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by EswarPrakash »

Prem Kumar wrote:EashwarPrakash: if you want the exact chronology of the oldest Sanskrit layers (which is Vedic Sanskrit) and work forward from there, please read Srikant Talageri's book. The best one would be "Rig Veda and Avesta: the final evidence". Its also available online.

He has systematically classified the RigVedic Mandalas (books) from the oldest to the newest.

But please keep in mind that there can be significant language changes even within the oldest to the newest Rig Vedic mandalas. Not to mention changes from Vedic Sanskrit to Paninian Sanskrit. That's because the Rig Vedic mandalas were themselves composed over a period of a millenia or more.

An example: in the oldest mandalas, the word for night is "nakht" (which is why this word is there in most Indo-European languages). The word "rathri" for night, appears only in the later Vedic texts. Nowadays, almost no one uses the Sanskrit word "nakht"
Many thanks for this. Added his book to my literature collection. Paanin's treatise is an amalgamation of a lot of existing languages and dialects - this I am aware of. The other authoritarian literature that I have heard of is Amarasimha's Amarakosha.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by KL Dubey »

Tut-tut....back to "dating the Veda". Seems like some people cannot keep their hands off it.

This thread was going nicely for the last 100 pages, now back to the Talageri versus Witzel type of stuff.

The Veda was never composed.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by KL Dubey »

Prem Kumar wrote: An example: in the oldest mandalas, the word for night is "nakht" (which is why this word is there in most Indo-European languages). The word "rathri" for night, appears only in the later Vedic texts. Nowadays, almost no one uses the Sanskrit word "nakht"
Fake statement. According to Nirukta there are more than 20 veda words which are taken as synonyms for "night" in Sanskrit. "Nakta" is proposed by Yaska to be derived from the root "naksh", which is also likely the root for "nakshatra". So why people have not "stopped using the word nakshatra" ? Similarly, "rAtrih" is proposed to be derived from the root "rA" which is also extensively found in the Veda in all mandalas.

The Veda is not in "Sanskrit". It is a mass of data in the form of sounds. The data can have any kind of distribution. It is fine to observe these distributions, but to start connecting that to history and geography is ridiculous.

Sanskrit is derived from the Veda. Whoever idiots are still engaged in this "dating the Veda" pursuit do not understand even the basics of word derivation in Sanskrit, using the Veda.
Last edited by KL Dubey on 13 Apr 2021 23:00, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Rudradev »

Have you read Talageri's books? If you have an issue with his logic, it would help to articulate that rather than merely asserting in all caps that it is so.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by KL Dubey »

I am not going back to that nonsense again.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Same here. Not interested in going over that debate again

Let people read Talageri and make up their own minds
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by KL Dubey »

Prem Kumar wrote:Same here. Not interested in going over that debate again

Let people read Talageri and make up their own minds
Let people read real evidence (archaeology, genetics, etc) and make up their minds. Not "veda dating" charlatans of any affiliation (AIT, AMT, OIT, etc).

When there is 3000+ years of Indian scholarship that declares the veda to be uncomposed, authorless, and not possible to interpret in terms of Sanskrit words, going along with the outlandish and fraudulent claims of "my veda date is older than yours" is simple dishonesty. This medicine seems destined to kill the patient while trying to defeat the infection. Bl**dy idiots.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Another amazing discovery & paper - this one from 2014 by Vasant Shinde & Willis. Please read the Twitter thread & the paper below

https://twitter.com/MumukshuSavitri/sta ... 4624794624

https://www.ancient-asia-journal.com/ar ... /aa.12317/

1) Shinde & Willis found copper plates in a private collection in Pakistan
2) These were NOT seals but had all the characteristics of PRINTING PLATES made of copper (proof: one sided-printing, characters printed in reverse, thicker plates for applying pressure etc)
3) The largest of them had 34 characters, which is much longer than any known Indus seal
4) Possible evidence that printing was invented in India before the Chinese
5) Also references Tussar Silk garments with block-printing, which you can buy even today! Tussar silk was made in the Indus Valley region. This is also mentioned by Shail Vyas in the video/paper I posted above a few days back
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

An excellent crisp 20 min video by an Oman researcher (who worked with the noted archaeologist Kenoyer), that talks in detail about the influence of IVC on Oman:

1) Seals
2) Carnelian beads
3) Metalwork, including working with locally available copper
4) Presence of Indus tech-workers who settled in Oman and possibly inter-married

As with Mstopotamia, the flow of merchants, technology & goods were predominantly one-way

The initial slides are very revealing: it shows the presence of Indus artifacts in Troy, Hattusa (Anatolia, where Hittites ruled) etc. The Hittite connection is especially interesting - Indus goods went there (possibly merchants too). Indo-European language went there (Hittite was one of the earliest language to leave the PIE homeland). Put 2 & 2 together and you get India as the homeland. Its such a "duh" moment!

https://www.academia.edu/video/kpDNmk
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by sudarshan »

How "mainstream" is all of the above? Is it still peripheral work, or is it gaining acceptance in a wider sense? Specifically, when will a good case be made for textbook reform?

Of course, each of us should regardless do our little bits.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

1) Lets define "mainstream". If you need a pat on the back from Western Academia, forget it. It'll never come
2) Even Indian academia in humanities is a brown-sepoy copy of trashy western theories. So far, Modi sarkar hasn't shown any inclination to dismantle it. So, no changes to be expected there either
3) "Periphery" is where all the action is. Take Shrikant Talageri - his work is the backbone of OIT. Its in the form of books, not papers. Others must build upon it. Shail Vyas, Aliaksander Semenenko, Igor Tonoyan-Belyayev etc are all non-mainstream. But they are the ones making pioneering innovations
4) While we should keep up the pressure on the GOI to detoxify academia & textbooks, we should also amplify the "periphery" and even claim it as badge of honor. "We are proud that we are not part of the compromised establishment"
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

To give you an idea how toxic, imbecilic & dishonest the "mainstream Western academia is", read what happened to linguist Joanna Nichols, whose rigorous work established that the Western languages could have only come from the BMAC area. Because her work directly pointed to OIT, she was hounded by the Western Academia to add a hastily worded retraction which she did not believe in.

See what Talageri had to write about it here
A very detailed and complex linguistic study by Johanna Nichols and a team of linguists, appropriately entitled "The Epicentre of the Indo-European Linguistic Spread", examines ancient loan-words from West Asia (Semitic and Sumerian) found in Indo-European and also in other language families like Caucasian (with three separate groups Kartvelian, Abkhaz-Circassian and Nakh-Daghestanian), and the mode and form of transmission of these loan-words into the Indo-European family as a whole as well as into particular branches, and combines this with the evidence of the spread of Uralic and its connections with Indo-European, and with several kinds of other linguistic evidence : "Several kinds of evidence for the PIE locus have been presented here. Ancient loanwords point to a locus along the desert trajectory, not particularly close to Mesopotamia and probably far out in the eastern hinterlands. The structure of the family tree, the accumulation of genetic diversity at the western periphery of the range, the location of Tocharian and its implications for early dialect geography, the early attestation of Anatolian in Asia Minor, and the geography of the centum-satem split all point in the same direction [….]: the long-standing westward trajectories of languages point to an eastward locus, and the spread of IE along all three trajectories points to a locus well to the east of the Caspian Sea. The satem shift also spread from a locus to the south-east of the Caspian, with satem languages showing up as later entrants along all three trajectory terminals. (The satem shift is a post-PIE but very early IE development). The locus of the IE spread was therefore somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana." (NICHOLS 1997:137): i.e. in the very area outside the exit point from Afghanistan into Central Asia indicated by the data in the Puranas regarding the emigration of the Druhyu tribes.
But nothing weirder than the Stalin-era like Confession and visibly reluctant Apology by a major western linguist, Johanna Nichols, whose linguistic study on the locus of the Indo-European language spread, which she locates in Bactria-Margiana in Central Asia east of the Caspian, is mentioned above. Read the full quote of Nichols' conclusions in her 1997 paper, given in the body of this blog above. She has posted the above paper (and another one from 1998) on academia.edu, but she prefaces the paper with the following "retraction":



"PARTIAL RETRACTION:

The theory of an east Caspian center of the IE spread argued for here is untenable and with much regret I retract it. It's a beautiful theory that accounts elegantly for a great deal of the dynamic and linguistic geography of the IE spread, but it conflicts with essential archaeological and etymological facts. The paper that convinced me to abandon it is:

Darden, Bill J. 2001. On the question of the Anatolian origin of Indo-Hittite, Robert Drews, ed., Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family, 184-228. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man.
The rest of both chapters still stands, but the east Caspian locus is post-PIE. The PIE homeland was on the western steppe."

https://www.academia.edu/18306905/The_E ... _dispersal

Incredible but true. The scholar who had presented such detailed data and conclusions in 1997 and 1998 ("The locus of the IE spread was therefore somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana." NICHOLS 1997:137), is now (after her conclusions were profusely quoted by opponents of the AIT) forced by academic and "peer" pressure to state (without detailed explanation in the form of data, logic or logistics which would negate the original thesis) that "the east Caspian locus is post-PIE. The PIE homeland was on the western steppe", even as she still insists that the "rest" of what she had written "still stands"! She fails to point out the details of the "archaeological or etymological facts" which now overturn the "beautiful theory that accounts elegantly for a great deal of the dynamic and linguistic geography of the IE spread", or to point out which part of this theory "still stands" as opposed to the part which does not, and why she is now compelled to create this new division of her original thesis into one part which "still stands" and another part which does not.

Can there be testimony more eloquent than this to the defeat of the AIT and the stranglehold of Stalinistic scholarship in Western Academia?
Talageri's blogpost on this topic: https://talageri.blogspot.com/2017/07/t ... story.html
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by EswarPrakash »

Prem Kumar wrote:1) Lets define "mainstream". If you need a pat on the back from Western Academia, forget it. It'll never come
I can vouch for this. I was writing some assignment paper for Masters in the field of AI and was looking to refer to Nyaya sutras for establishing trust propagation and provenance for data as an idea. While I was not actively discouraged, there is this sense of condescension that was displayed which effectively meant I will not get anywhere in my proposal if I referred to the Indian texts. For them: everything related to logic and knowledge representation start with Greece, the rest is all not worthy.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

^ Thanks for sharing your experience. I am assuming you're in a Massa university.

Each one has to make a decision on their own, but if its possible, go ahead with your project anyway and refer to our Nyaya system. Force them to point out why they have a problem with it. The worst form of censorship is the unstated one.

A friend of ours had a son in middle or high school. He was asked to write an essay on Thanksgiving. He wrote a scathing piece about how he wouldn't celebrate it because it would mean the celebration of genocide. Needless to say, it didn't go down well with his teacher. But the boy stuck to his guns, even if it meant a poorer grade. Brave Dharmic individual who has inherited his parents' courage.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by EswarPrakash »

Prem Kumar wrote:^ Thanks for sharing your experience. I am assuming you're in a Massa university.

Each one has to make a decision on their own, but if its possible, go ahead with your project anyway and refer to our Nyaya system. Force them to point out why they have a problem with it. The worst form of censorship is the unstated one.

A friend of ours had a son in middle or high school. He was asked to write an essay on Thanksgiving. He wrote a scathing piece about how he wouldn't celebrate it because it would mean the celebration of genocide. Needless to say, it didn't go down well with his teacher. But the boy stuck to his guns, even if it meant a poorer grade. Brave Dharmic individual who has inherited his parents' courage.
The UQ - no better than the Massa, I am sure.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by krishGo »

Prof Vasant Shinde, Former Vice-Chancellor, Deccan College, presents the latest findings from Rakhigarhi

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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by sudarshan »

Prem Kumar wrote:1) Lets define "mainstream". If you need a pat on the back from Western Academia, forget it. It'll never come
I know, it's one reason why I couldn't publish some books yet.

Defining mainstream:

* The number of "believers" - I don't know a good ratio, probably when the new theory gets to have half the number of adherents as the old, one can say "mainstream."

* What does a truly objective, but fresh (as in - just getting into the topic) investigator see when researching the subject? Is the weight of evidence for the new theory enough to at least give pause? To convince would be even better.

* Is the weight of evidence for the new theory enough, that the other side prefers to just shut up out of embarrassment, rather than to argue further? Is the evidence enough to give back some stinging rejoinders, to which there is no reply?

* Is the ecosystem for the new theory self-sustaining, or do a few committed individuals have to keep putting in effort to keep the flame going?

Etc - this is what I meant when I said "mainstream."
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Per your definitions, critieria 1, 2 and 3 are already met. I am talking about primarily Indians when it comes to those who believe in the OIT. I don't care for the West.

Specifically for point #4, the AIT camp has been stonewalling for the last 15 years. Koenraad Elst points to this shift in the year 2005, when they refused to engage with the OIT camp. That's a victory. We should hammer that point again & again - "AIT-wallahs are cowards who run away when confronted with facts. They are no different from leftists this way."

#4 is our biggest handicap. Its a few brave individuals carrying a disproportionate share of the burden. Hopefully, more will follow, given the increasing level of interest in the subject.

To take it truly mainstream, the Govt should put its full weight behind it so that impressionable children aren't taught the wrong theory to begin with. I see some green shoots there - example: Haryana Govt planning to setup a historical museum in Rakhigarhi. But we have a long way to go.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Rudradev »

There is enough evidence to perforate the AIMT (both Steppe & Anatolian hypotheses) on multiple axes, but an Indian who is not a professional academic has to do lots of homework to learn about it... not much of it is readily available to a casual student of the subject. Dr. Shiv's recent book does a lot to address this deficit, but we need more like it.

On the other hand, we are very far away from being able to establish OIT beyond Iran. This leaves the great bulk of the Indo European language family unaccounted for.

Since we cannot formulate OIT as a thesis that explains most observations beyond Indo-Iranian languages, the badly flawed Steppe/Yamnaya hypothesis (which offers plausible explanations for IE language spread to Europe & the Altai mountains) continues to rule the roost even despite the failure of its Indian subset, AIT. So by default, it continues to be taught to schoolchildren as "historical" fact.

We have a long way to go.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Rudradev: agreed that a lot of work (exciting work, actually) remains in OIT. But a few observations on your post

We *do* have evidence of OIT beyond Iran. Examples:

1) Archaeology: Seals, carnelian beads, lapus lazuli in Afghanistan, Central Asia (Northern Route) & Iran, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Oman, Armenia, Anatolia (Hittites) etc (Western route)
2) Food Evidence of turmeric, banana etc all the way to Israel
3) Cattle Bos Indicus all the way to Europe
4) Literary: the only literary evidence of IE migration, i.e. Rig Veda & the earlier Puranas: documenting the migration of Druhyus, Anus, Alinas, Arattas etc
5) Linguistics PIE linguistics doesn't provide any direction of migration. If at all it does, in the form of isoglosses, linguistic paleontology, presence of a kentum language like Bangani etc, it clearly points to an OIT route, not an AIT route

The only thing the Steppe Hypothesis has shown is that, from the Yamna culture, there was an invasion into Europe attested by aDNA & archaeological changes. That only proves that an Aryan Invasion happened into Europe.

Attempts to prove AIT into Armenia, Anatolia, Iran, Central Asia or India have been an unmitigated disaster.


Why should the standard demanded of OIT be any higher than that of AIT?
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Follow-up post:

1) What did the Anatolian Hypothesis have, going for it, for it to be considered a "viable candidate"?
2) What did the Steppe hypothesis have, going for it? The only thing that has bolstered the theory is aDNA discovery. I'm not even sure how strong the archaeological support is. That only makes the Steppes a secondary homeland at best.

The OIT actually has a lot more weighty evidence going for it, compared to the above two. And formal OIT is only a decade+ old. It'll only get stronger with time. Compare this to "200+ year old scholarly evidence" for AIT - what do they have to show for it?

"Smoking gun" evidences are hard, if not impossible to come by. If I were to wish for some smoking-guns, the following would make the list:

1) Dravidian, Bangani or Tibeto-Burman influence on PIE (not on IA, but PIE)
2) aDNA evidence of Indian emigration to the Steppe
3) Archaeological evidence from the Indus valley in the steppe and/or Europe
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Rudradev »

Prem Kumar wrote:Rudradev: agreed that a lot of work (exciting work, actually) remains in OIT. But a few observations on your post

We *do* have evidence of OIT beyond Iran. Examples:

1) Archaeology: Seals, carnelian beads, lapus lazuli in Afghanistan, Central Asia (Northern Route) & Iran, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Oman, Armenia, Anatolia (Hittites) etc (Western route)

2) Food Evidence of turmeric, banana etc all the way to Israel
3) Cattle Bos Indicus all the way to Europe
This is evidence of trade, not of an out-of-India migration. There is no doubt that ISVC traded to all these regions and beyond. Trade may lead to cultural influence, but there is also no doubt that many of these areas had their own indigenous cultures and civilizations of equal antiquity. So what exactly are we trying to say went "out of India" on the basis of this?

Indeed, the presence of goods may not even indicate Indian-controlled (as opposed to merely Indian-sourced) trade. It is quite possible the traders themselves (like Arabs and Central Asians on the Silk Route much later) were foreigners. Let alone emigrants, it is not even clear we provided merchants.
4) Literary: the only literary evidence of IE migration, i.e. Rig Veda & the earlier Puranas: documenting the migration of Druhyus, Anus, Alinas, Arattas etc
Again, what does it prove? Talageri's analysis of the Puranas (1997) and Rig Veda and Avesta (2000, 2008) shows conclusively that the "Avestan" Iranians were nothing but the Parasus... and subsequent genetic analyses clearly show a major component of shared ancestry between ISVC and ancient Iranians, so Iran is covered.

Beyond that, in textual analysis, we have only one shred of a clue of emigration out of India: the destination Aratta mentioned in the Baudhayana Shrautasutra (as recounted by B B Lal) pointing to a colony of Indian-origin people probably somewhere in Armenia. The Boguzkoy inscription shows some influence of (potentially this same) colony on Hittite and Mitanni rulers; yet, the Hittites themselves are almost certainly indigenous to that area (a group of people from Nesa who spoke an entirely different family of Indo-European from Sanskrit).

The only evidence north of the Caucasus is linguistic attestation of commonalities between "Indo-Iranian" and Finno-Ugric/Uralic languages. Also, Tocharian (Central Asia) and Greek/Latin (Romance)/Gaelic/Germanic European languages are all centum, while Sanskrit and the Balto-Slavic languages are satem. That is in our favour as one of the sole indications that our culture traveled north of the Caucasus.
5) Linguistics PIE linguistics doesn't provide any direction of migration. If at all it does, in the form of isoglosses, linguistic paleontology, presence of a kentum language like Bangani etc, it clearly points to an OIT route, not an AIT route

The only thing the Steppe Hypothesis has shown is that, from the Yamna culture, there was an invasion into Europe attested by aDNA & archaeological changes. That only proves that an Aryan Invasion happened into Europe.

Attempts to prove AIT into Armenia, Anatolia, Iran, Central Asia or India have been an unmitigated disaster.

Why should the standard demanded of OIT be any higher than that of AIT?
Sorry, but if we want to prove OIT we have to adhere to a higher standard. Complaining that AIT isn't held to a higher standard doesn't help us prove anything. After all, aren't we the ones complaining that AIT is a fraud? How can we turn around then and say that our proof should be accepted because it is merely "as good" as this fraud?

You are also incorrect about Central Asia: the migration of IE languages to the Altai Mountains from the Pontic-Caspian steppe *IS* in fact attested, both archaeologically (in the Kurgan mounds and the Afanasievo culture) and linguistically (Tocharian and its descendants). There ARE holes to pick in this evidence regarding the Yamna theory specifically (for example, Tocharian has agriculture-related terms, suggesting a settled civilization, so why would such terms exist in a language supposedly brought to the Altai mountains by pastoralist nomads?) But there is substantial evidence that the migration happened.

If we want to tear down AIT that is easy enough. But we have NOT been able to furnish adequate evidence of OIT by any measure-- IF by "OIT" you mean the idea that Indian peoples and culture originated Indo-European languages and carried them to all the regions where they are spoken today.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Rudradev »

Prem Kumar wrote: "Smoking gun" evidences are hard, if not impossible to come by. If I were to wish for some smoking-guns, the following would make the list:

1) Dravidian, Bangani or Tibeto-Burman influence on PIE (not on IA, but PIE)
2) aDNA evidence of Indian emigration to the Steppe
3) Archaeological evidence from the Indus valley in the steppe and/or Europe
We will almost certainly never find a "smoking gun". What we will likely need to rely on (as the proponents of any such theory ultimately do) is the condition that when considering the entire available body of evidence from multiple disciplines, correlated with one another, our scenario provides the most consistent, most parsimonious (simplest), and least ambiguous explanation.

Of course not all lines of evidence are equal, with the direct evidence of archeology being the most compelling, followed by evidence from data-driven disciplines in the hard sciences (hydrology, paleoclimatology, paleobotany/zoology etc correlated with archaeology and textual analysis), followed by theoretical disciplines of reconstruction (such as linguistics and-- unfortunately-- quite a bit of human population genetics as it stands today). So if contradictions appear in the lower-tier lines of evidence, it's still all right as long as the upper-tier lines of evidence firmly converge upon our scenario.

As to the smoking guns you mention, (2) would be the hardest to argue with. (1) involves PIE, which itself is a purely theoretical reconstruction-- i.e. it is a goalpost that can be moved at will. (3) would be very useful IF it can be shown that artefacts in Europe that shared commonalities with ISVC were not merely trade goods, but examples of local material culture at the site... that establishes cultural origination rather than just trade.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Rudradev wrote: This is evidence of trade, not of an out-of-India migration. There is no doubt that ISVC traded to all these regions and beyond. Trade may lead to cultural influence, but there is also no doubt that many of these areas had their own indigenous cultures and civilizations of equal antiquity. So what exactly are we trying to say went "out of India" on the basis of this?

Indeed, the presence of goods may not even indicate Indian-controlled (as opposed to merely Indian-sourced) trade. It is quite possible the traders themselves (like Arabs and Central Asians on the Silk Route much later) were foreigners. Let alone emigrants, it is not even clear we provided merchants.
No - there is evidence of people migration. Cattle for instance. The high likelihood of settled artisan communities in Oman, Mesopotamia etc, because of the evidence of Indus-style finished goods made from local materials. The mtDNA evidence, once again in Mesopotamia. The references to people from Meluhha in Sumerian inscriptions as "keepers of gardens" etc. Sumerian records also indicate that the people in Armenia were skilled in making goods from carnelian & lapus lazuli - that'd be our Arattas.
Again, what does it prove? Talageri's analysis of the Puranas (1997) and Rig Veda and Avesta (2000, 2008) shows conclusively that the "Avestan" Iranians were nothing but the Parasus... and subsequent genetic analyses clearly show a major component of shared ancestry between ISVC and ancient Iranians, so Iran is covered.

Beyond that, in textual analysis, we have only one shred of a clue of emigration out of India: the destination Aratta mentioned in the Baudhayana Shrautasutra (as recounted by B B Lal) pointing to a colony of Indian-origin people probably somewhere in Armenia. The Boguzkoy inscription shows some influence of (potentially this same) colony on Hittite and Mitanni rulers; yet, the Hittites themselves are almost certainly indigenous to that area (a group of people from Nesa who spoke an entirely different family of Indo-European from Sanskrit).
Hittites, as you very well know, are an early IE branch. The Mittanis (contemporaneous with late Rig Veda, as conclusively proven by Talageri), moved into an already IE area. The Hittites were definitely foreign, though they adopted the Hittite name from the local area. The natives there were non-IE before the Hittites came in.

In addition to Baudhayana's Shrautasutra, there is also the Druhyu migration (Northward branch) referred to in the Puranas. You can ask: "what does it prove?". Well, the Puranas & Rig Veda are the only literary evidence of an IE dispersal. There is none other. You admit below that smoking guns are hard to find, but ask "where is the proof?".

There is proof enough to formulate a theory. The skeleton exists. Muscle & fiber need to be constantly added to it. If you are claiming that even a skeleton doesn't exist, then it implies that you don't fundamentally believe in OIT.
The only evidence north of the Caucasus is linguistic attestation of commonalities between "Indo-Iranian" and Finno-Ugric/Uralic languages. Also, Tocharian (Central Asia) and Greek/Latin (Romance)/Gaelic/Germanic European languages are all centum, while Sanskrit and the Balto-Slavic languages are satem. That is in our favour as one of the sole indications that our culture traveled north of the Caucasus.
The Indo-Iranian, Uralic connection is actually close to a "smoking gun" in OIT's favor. Hundreds of loan-words and its all one-way: from Indo-Iranian into Uralic.
Sorry, but if we want to prove OIT we have to adhere to a higher standard
Higher standards are double standards. I am in agreement with you that OIT is not in its final form. Its consistent but not complete. But as mentioned above, we have enough to formulate a solid theory. We will keep adding more data points to support it. We will learn more and have to keep adjusting it, but I believe that OIT is fundamentally the right theory.
You are also incorrect about Central Asia: the migration of IE languages to the Altai Mountains from the Pontic-Caspian steppe *IS* in fact attested, both archaeologically (in the Kurgan mounds and the Afanasievo culture) and linguistically (Tocharian and its descendants).
You lost me here. Where is the attestation that Tocharian came from the Steppes?
Last edited by Prem Kumar on 01 May 2021 00:34, edited 1 time in total.
Prem Kumar
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Rudradev wrote: We will almost certainly never find a "smoking gun". What we will likely need to rely on (as the proponents of any such theory ultimately do) is the condition that when considering the entire available body of evidence from multiple disciplines, correlated with one another, our scenario provides the most consistent, most parsimonious (simplest), and least ambiguous explanation.
Great point. Of the 2 remaining homeland theories (Steppe & India), OIT is currently the most parsimonious. Take linguistics for instance: explaining the isoglosses via AIT takes an enormous amount of convolution. Tribes have to travel West, make a U-turn, get some more influence and go back West again etc. That's why a Hock cannot answer Talageri's explanation on how isolglosses can be explained most easily by OIT without having to create convolutions. Its also, as Elst points out, the way all languages have spread historically - i.e. anisotropically (non-symmetrically). Steppe hypothesis is almost a school-boy like fantasy where things start in the middle and expand in all directions. Languages have never spread like that.
(3) would be very useful IF it can be shown that artefacts in Europe that shared commonalities with ISVC were not merely trade goods, but examples of local material culture at the site... that establishes cultural origination rather than just trade.
Glad you mentioned it. Plz see my post above. Also check out the link I'd posted about Indus colonies in Oman. The presence of Indus style artifacts, adapted to local culture and materials is precisely what we find in the entire Western zone.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Rudradev »

Rudradev wrote: This is evidence of trade, not of an out-of-India migration. There is no doubt that ISVC traded to all these regions and beyond. Trade may lead to cultural influence, but there is also no doubt that many of these areas had their own indigenous cultures and civilizations of equal antiquity. So what exactly are we trying to say went "out of India" on the basis of this?

Indeed, the presence of goods may not even indicate Indian-controlled (as opposed to merely Indian-sourced) trade. It is quite possible the traders themselves (like Arabs and Central Asians on the Silk Route much later) were foreigners. Let alone emigrants, it is not even clear we provided merchants.
Prem Kumar wrote: No - there is evidence of people migration. Cattle for instance. The high likelihood of settled artisan communities in Oman, Mesopotamia etc, because of the evidence of Indus-style finished goods made from local materials. The mtDNA evidence, once again in Mesopotamia. The references to people from Meluhha in Sumerian inscriptions as "keepers of gardens" etc. Sumerian records also indicate that the people in Armenia were skilled in making goods from carnelian & lapus lazuli - that'd be our Arattas.
Cattle are the easiest thing for pastoralists to transfer from one settled civilization to another-- they don't provide any indication that it is the people of the settled civilization, or their ancestors, who actually migrated out of their homeland.

Do you have a reference for conclusive evidence that Indus-style finished goods were made from *local materials* in Oman or Mesopotamia? Would be useful to see, and it potentially pushes the evidentiary boundary for OIT at least a little beyond Iran if so.

MtDNA, as you know, proves nothing other than shared ancestry of much greater depth. It can as easily be used by "Fertile Crescent" hypothesis-supporters to argue that migration happened from Mesopotamia to India. In fact, it is.

Meluhha itself is yet to be located precisely let alone attested by archeological evidence. In the absence of corroborating hard evidence, it is pure speculation what Meluhha was, or even if the name referred to the same place/people/civilization in the accounts of different people who mention it.

Skill at gardening or making crafts is not an exclusive trait. It can hardly be used to substantiate the origin of a people.
Hittites, as you very well know, are an early IE branch. The Mittanis (contemporaneous with late Rig Veda, as conclusively proven by Talageri), moved into an already IE area. The Hittites were definitely foreign, though they adopted the Hittite name from the local area. The natives there were non-IE before the Hittites came in.
The Mitanni Kingdom was Hurrian-speaking. Hurrian was not an IE language, but belonged to the now-extinct Hurro-Urartian family. What is remarkable is that the Mitanni used many loan-words, names, etc. that were not Hurro-Urartian but originated from Vedic Sanskrit, specifically the Sanskrit contemporaneous with the Late Rig Veda. These names and loan-words are found in association with specific contexts: names of rulers, deities, and (in one particular case, the manual of a horse-trainer named Kikkuli) the lexicon of horse training and husbandry.

Notably, however the Mitanni kingdom's language itself was not Sanskritic or even IE. We can definitively conclude that there was trade (in terms of knowledge transfer in specific domains of expertise, such as horse husbandry and perhaps legalism), leading to the adoption of domain-related Sanskritic words into Hurrian. This is analogous to specific English terms like "modem", "router" etc that have become common parlance in many languages of the world in the digital age. But it doesn't support an actual migration of population from India out to Syria or Anatolia.

Indeed, even if the population of the Mitanni kingdom did migrate out of India they adopted the local (Hurrian) language and kept only a few linguistic traces of where they originated from. This actually argues against OIT. If Indians went out of India, but adopted local languages when they had got only as far as Northern Iraq/Syria, then what is the likelihood they would have taken their original language and culture any further?
In addition to Baudhayana's Shrautasutra, there is also the Druhyu migration (Northward branch) referred to in the Puranas. You can ask: "what does it prove?". Well, the Puranas & Rig Veda are the only literary evidence of an IE dispersal. There is none other. You admit below that smoking guns are hard to find, but ask "where is the proof?".

Saying we only have X (so far), therefore we have to regard X as "adequate evidence", does not fly.

Shrautasutra is important because it indicates a destination-- Aratta-- specifically. But what are we to make of "northward"? The family books of RV are from the point of view of the Purus. All we know about the Druhyus is that they left the Puru territory and moved north. How far north? 1000 km? 100 km? 10 km? There is no basis to say.
There is proof enough to formulate a theory. The skeleton exists. Muscle & fiber need to be constantly added to it. If you are claiming that even a skeleton doesn't exist, then it implies that you don't fundamentally believe in OIT.
This is semantics. People formulate theories based on all kinds of things.

If one believes in a theory based on assumptions that are neither verifiable nor falsifiable, then by definition, such belief is faith-based. For me, OIT is not a religion to "believe" in. It is a theory that I would be happy to see established as fact eventually, but if there is never enough evidence to support it conclusively, then so be it.

My main concern is that the AIT/AMT, which has seriously damaging consequences in the real-world and is the rationale advanced by BIFs for many of their stratagems, should be knocked off its pedestal. I am OK with OIT never being "proved"... but at the very least I want it to exist on par with AIT/AMT (Steppe, Anatolian, whatever) in the academic discourse, because as far as I am concerned none of those have been "proved" either.

The Indo-Iranian, Uralic connection is actually close to a "smoking gun" in OIT's favor. Hundreds of loan-words and its all one-way: from Indo-Iranian into Uralic.
Unfortunately not. It can also be interpreted as Indo-European originating in the Steppes, and one branch of it (proto-Indo-Iranian) influencing the Uralic languages before (or contemporaneously with) the migration of some Steppe people to India/Iran. Indeed that is what many of the Steppe/AIMT people say.

It is all very well to "believe" in OIT but that is no objective basis for saying our interpretation is better than their interpretation. It may be what we prefer to believe, but it doesn't objectively help establish OIT.
Higher standards are double standards. I am in agreement with you that OIT is not in its final form. Its consistent but not complete. But as mentioned above, we have enough to formulate a solid theory. We will keep adding more data points to support it. We will learn more and have to keep adjusting it, but I believe that OIT is fundamentally the right theory.
You cannot credibly tear down the AIMT folks' double-standard by simply erecting a double-standard of our own. AIMT peddlers definitely use a double standard: the evidence they want to believe is considered "conclusive" whereas alternative points of view, such as OIT, are "hindoo nationalist rhetoric" even if they meet the same or similar objective standards of proof.

If we try to simply mirror the situation (i.e. we say that AIMT is nonsense because it is based on speculation and has holes in the evidence, but OIT is true even though it is based on speculation and has holes in the evidence), then we will LOSE. They have the status-quo power in academia to make sure their speculation beats out our speculation. When you have two sets of competing double-standards, the only factor determining the winner is "might makes right".

So to my mind you need two distinct goals. The first goal is showing independently of anything else why AIMT is nonsense. This is a crucial goal with national-security implications for India, for reasons I have described above. It has to be done whether one "believes in OIT" or not.

In the meantime you have to accumulate a body of corroborative evidence for OIT that, even if not a "smoking gun", is clearly superior in consistency AND explains significantly more observations than AIMT does. Only then can you achieve the second goal, which is establishing OIT as definitive.
You lost me here. Where is the attestation that Tocharian came from the Steppes?
Per Kubarev (1988), Chernykh et al (2004) The Afanasievo (western Altai mountain i.e. Xingjiang/Kyrgyzstan) material culture exhibits traits characteristic of the Yamnaya culture (known as the Pit Grave Culture or Ochre Grave Culture). Yamnaya-Repin ceramic types and decoration, and sleeved axes and daggers of specific Yamnaya types, are all found in Afansievo sites in the Western Altai. The link between the linguistic ancestors of the Tocharians and the Afansievo culture has been expounded by Mallory and Mair (2000) and further by David Anthony (PBUH; 2010 and 2013).
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Responding to your main points:

1) Mitannis: several facts point to population movement of Sanskritic speakers into this area. King names for starters. Why would a non-IE speaking population's kings adopt names of a different culture/language. You are aware of the Kikkuli horse-training manual. Now, why would that be in Sanskrit? Because it was by the elites for the elites. So, its not just some random loanwords. The Mitanni kingdom was founded by Sanskrit speaking elites. Not just the Mitannis, even the earlier Kassites had Indo-Aryan names/loanwords.

Regarding the eventual overtake of Hurrian, it doesn't disprove OIT at all. OIT takes multiple forms. In some places, it involves outright population replacement & introduction of a new language/culture/religion. This happened in Europe. In some other places, it could be elite dominance, like in the Mitanni kingdom. A parallel is the English language spread. In Australia, US, UK, an entire population replacement happened. In India, it has become an elite language. But in both cases, the elite language doesn't enforce itself without a population moving in and staying/ruling at least for some period of time.

2) Druhyu migration: yes, we don't have much literary evidence, but RV & Puranas are the only ones which even provide a literary base for IE expansion. The Druhyu-Druid connection, not just in names but also in cultures (fire-worship), Goddesses (Birgit etc in Ireland - cognate with Bhrigu) provide a plausible base for the Northward expansion

3) Uralic-Indo/Iranian: the Steppe theory fails the occam's razor test. If the Indo-Aryans cohabited the Uralic speaking areas, then how come the loan-words are unidirectional? Wouldn't there be at least some words that the IA tribes would've borrowed from Uralic? However, its neatly explained in an OIT scenario, because only one of the branches went via the Uralic area and it didn't come back. It contributed to Uralic and moved West.

Moreover, if IA was spoken in the Uralic speaking regions, its quite rich for the AIT'ians to claim that the language was so well formulated by that time (to be identifiable so easily in Uralic), yet didn't change much in its long South/East journey of 1000s of miles into India and Iran. Too much of the language seems to have been preserved. This is, of course, a secondary objection to AIT. The primary objection is the uni-directional loanwords

4) Indus-style-artifacts from local materials in Oman: yes, there is solid archaeological evidence. I had posted it earlier. Linking it here again. Seems like a student of Kenoyer

https://www.academia.edu/video/kpDNmk

5) One more compelling piece of evidence is the research done by Shail Vyas. I believe this is path-breaking work, similar to that of Talageri. Its about Indus musicians/instruments in Mesopotamia & Sanskrit loanwords found in Sumerian, attested to circa 2600 BCE! Plz read my post on this: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6848&start=5280#p2493616

6) mtDNA: 2 factors militate against Fertile Crescent providing ancestry to IVC. One is the Rakhigarhi aDNA evidence, which busted the myth that agriculture came to India from West Asia. Secondly, the mtDNA found in Mesopotamia is of Indian subcontinent origin. Linking Gyaneshwar Chaubey's paper & excerpt below

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... references
The close ancestors of specimens TQ 28F 112 and TQ 28F 256 could fall within the population founding Terqa, the historical site constructed probably in the early Bronze Age [1], at time only slightly preceding the dating of the skeletons. All the studied remains could have been also left by descendants of much earlier migration waves spreading clades of macrohaplogroup M from the nearby subcontinent. It cannot be excluded that among them were people involved in the founding of the Mesopotamian civilizations. For instance, it is commonly accepted that the founders of Sumerian civilization came from the outside of the region, their exact origin is, however, still a matter of debate. It is suggested that migrants of Iranian, Indian [32], [33] or even Tibetan affinity [34] founded the Sumerian civilization, which suggestion can be supported by comparing the Tibeto-Burman and Sumerian languages [35]. The migrants could have entered Mesopotamia earlier than 45 centuries ago, during the lifetime of the oldest studied individual, as the Tibetan Plateau was peopled more than 20 Kyrs ago [21], [36]. However, one also should consider the possibility that studied individuals belonged to the groups of itinerant merchants moving along a trade route passing near or through the region, since a recent comparative study of strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotopes content in enamel indicates that people from Indus Valley were present in southern Mesopotamia 3 Kyrs BC [37].
Lastly, we have close to zilch artifacts from the Fertile Crescent in IVC, but copious amounts of IVC artifacts in the fertile crescent.

7) Meluhha: c'mon. Even the AIT'ians admit that Meluhha refers to the IVC/SSVC. The circumstantial evidences are too many to point to any other conclusion.

8 ) Agree with you that we need a 2-pronged approach. AIT-demolition & OIT-strengthening. We don't have enough experts doing this. And even among people doing this (amateur or professional), the focus is more on AIT-demolition. OIT-strenghtening is a wide-open space for a hundred years of research!

9) Will read the Afanasievo reference you gave. Thanks.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Rudradev »

Mitannis: several facts point to population movement of Sanskritic speakers into this area. King names for starters. Why would a non-IE speaking population's kings adopt names of a different culture/language.
Actually, the norm in elite dominance is exactly the opposite. It is for the incoming dominant/elite group to appropriate the names and trappings of indigenous dynasties rather than adopting king names of a different language. This is observed with the Ptolemaic Pharaohs of Egypt (Alexander’s descendants, who completely adopted the names and trappings of prior pharaonic dynasties); the Safavids of Persia (who adopted Achaemenid/Sassanid names and titles even though they were Turkic in origin); the Seljuk “Sultanate of Rum”-- a name taken because the land they conquered, Byzantium (present-day Turkey) was the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire; and Kublai Khan of the Mongols who became Emperor Yuan Shizu of China and styled himself the Son of Heaven as previous Chinese emperors had.

There are good reasons for this. It is easier for incoming elites, however “dominant”, to subdue the locals by doing so and assuming the “natural” mantle of rulership.

The fact that the mass population of the Hittite Kingdom were not even Indo-European speakers (let alone Sanskrit-speakers) is amply attested. The language they spoke was Hattic. The ruling class of the Hittite Kingdom spoke Nesili, an Indo-European language that comes from an entirely different family of IE than Indo-Iranian. Per Lewis & Pereltsvaig (2012):
“A few Hattic texts have survived, largely of a ritual nature (Bryce 1998: 11). Broader Hattic cultural elements were clearly evident in the Hittite realms of art and mythology, but not in those of administration, law, or diplomacy (Bryce 1998: 16). A few Hittite political terms, however, were borrowed from Hattic, including those for “administrative district”, “crown prince”, and “throne” (Melchert 2003: 20).”
So the picture that emerges is one of elite dominance, but the dominance of Nesili (non-Indo-Iranian language)-speaking elites over a Hattic-speaking aam janta. The Sanskrit traces definitely point to some Indian cutural influence, but it was in the form of scattered loan-words in specific domains.

To equate this to an all-out Indian population migration to the area is far-fetched. If Indians (post Late-Rig Vedic era) migrated en masse to Nesa, they first abandoned Sanskrit and adopted an unrelated IE language (Nesili) apart from a few traces; they then adopted the governmental trappings (and linguistic influence) of the Hatti people as a function of elite dominance, ultimately becoming a culture with only faint resemblance to anything that came “out of India”.

And that is only as far as Syria. To contend that these Hittites were carriers of Indic culture and language even further, across the Caucasus mountains and all the way across the Steppe into Europe is not a credible argument given current evidence.
You are aware of the Kikkuli horse-training manual. Now, why would that be in Sanskrit? Because it was by the elites for the elites. So, its not just some random loanwords. The Mitanni kingdom was founded by Sanskrit speaking elites. Not just the Mitannis, even the earlier Kassites had Indo-Aryan names/loanwords.
Many of your claims here are incorrect. The Kikkuli manual is NOT in Sanskrit, and there is mounting evidence to show that Sanskrit-speakers were not a significant elite in the Mitanni kingdom.

Per Lewis & Pereltsvaig (ibid):
“The best-known example of such terms comes from the Hittite horse-training manual of Kikkuli, a master horse trainer from the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni, which is “still” in print (Nyland 2009). Despite the fact that Kikkuli wrote in Hittite (Nesite) and was from a Hurrian-speaking land, he used many Indo-Aryan terms with obvious affinities to Sanskrit. Scholars of earlier generations thus tended to attribute the formation of the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni to Indo-European-speaking, chariot-driving invaders who established themselves as a ruling aristocracy. More recent work, however, downplays this element, stressing instead the preponderance of the indigenous Hurrian component in the Mitanni state. As Eva von Dassow (2008: 84) concludes, “The linguistic evidence suggests that speakers of an Indo-Aryan language were few, at most, even in Mittani”.
The picture that emerges from this is that Kikkuli was writing (in the local language) a manual that included some technical terms in a foreign language. Today the manual for a computer in Korean or French may include the English terms “mouse”, “motherboard” etc. interspersed with local language. That only indicates that the source of the original technology behind the merchandise is an English-speaking country. It does not indicate that people speaking English migrated to these areas in significant numbers, formed an “elite” or any such thing.
Druhyu migration: yes, we don't have much literary evidence, but RV & Puranas are the only ones which even provide a literary base for IE expansion. The Druhyu-Druid connection, not just in names but also in cultures (fire-worship), Goddesses (Birgit etc in Ireland - cognate with Bhrigu) provide a plausible base for the Northward expansion
Until and unless more evidence is found, this is pure speculation.
Uralic-Indo/Iranian: the Steppe theory fails the occam's razor test. If the Indo-Aryans cohabited the Uralic speaking areas, then how come the loan-words are unidirectional? Wouldn't there be at least some words that the IA tribes would've borrowed from Uralic? However, its neatly explained in an OIT scenario, because only one of the branches went via the Uralic area and it didn't come back. It contributed to Uralic and moved West.

Moreover, if IA was spoken in the Uralic speaking regions, its quite rich for the AIT'ians to claim that the language was so well formulated by that time (to be identifiable so easily in Uralic), yet didn't change much in its long South/East journey of 1000s of miles into India and Iran. Too much of the language seems to have been preserved. This is, of course, a secondary objection to AIT. The primary objection is the uni-directional loanwords
If Steppe theory fails Occam’s Razor, OIT fails twice as badly. On a map, the Steppe is right there to the south of the Ural mountains. For OIT you have to account for Indian-language speakers somehow transiting the Caucasus/Pamirs/Hindu-Kush/Caucasus and getting to the Steppe in the first place.

I don’t see why unidirectional loan-words are a problem for AIT either. The AIT assertion is that Indo-Iranic and Balto-Slavic are the last two branches to split off from PIE in the Steppe after 2200 BCE. By this time, they say, PIE had developed the innovations of a Satem language (all branches that split off from it earlier are Centum languages). This being the case, the PIE spoken in the Steppe at that period would have looked very much like Indo-Iranian; in fact, it would have been “proto-Indo Iranian” at that stage in its evolution. So what is the issue if all *surviving* loanwords point only one-way? I mean, it is a strange thing that no loan-words survived pointing from Uralic to Indo-Iranian, but that holds equally true for OIT, except that with OIT you have to additionally show Indic languages getting to the Steppe in the first place.

IF one takes the claims of the AIT people as a given up to this point (though there are myriad other reasons to reject them), then the unidirectional loanwords can be explained away as follows: By 2200 BCE PIE in the Steppe had become, essentially, Proto-Indo-Iranian. One branch of these Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers in the northwest Steppe came into contact with Uralic people and the Uralic language absorbed loanwords from this branch; ultimately this northwestern branch, along with whatever elements it had borrowed FROM Uralic, died out. Concurrently a southeast branch of Steppe Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers, who did NOT have extensive contact with Uralic speakers, migrated out of the Steppe and came to India/Iran bringing the language with them.

And where is AIT making the claim that there was no *language* change between proto-Indo-Iranian (spoken in the Steppe around 2200 BCE) and e.g. Sanskrit, which they say arrived in India only at 1500 BCE? There is no such claim. “Loanwords” do not equal “language”, they are only the most superficial layer of exchange between languages. On the other hand the AIT linguists claim that Sanskrit is almost certainly the mixture of Proto-Indo-Iranian with local Indian substrates.

We need to be more rigorous in formulating even the arguments we make based on the few OIT indications we do have. Otherwise, even though they feel free to change their goalposts at will, we are the ones who will be criticised for using strawman arguments.
4) Indus-style-artifacts from local materials in Oman: yes, there is solid archaeological evidence. I had posted it earlier. Linking it here again. Seems like a student of Kenoyer

https://www.academia.edu/video/kpDNmk

5) One more compelling piece of evidence is the research done by Shail Vyas. I believe this is path-breaking work, similar to that of Talageri. Its about Indus musicians/instruments in Mesopotamia & Sanskrit loanwords found in Sumerian, attested to circa 2600 BCE! Plz read my post on this: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6848&start=5280#p2493616
These are interesting observations.

The Oman evidence shows that at least there were probably settlements of ISVC craftsmen in Oman. It is nice to know, but not surprising considering Oman is just across the Persian Gulf from Iran. It may provide some evidence that ISVC was a seafaring civilization also. However, it doesn’t help OIT in terms of Indo-European language/cultural spread… if anything Oman is in the opposite direction, south, from Iran.

Musical instruments and loanwords are also interesting and also do not necessarily imply anything more than cultural or commercial exchange between ISVC and West Asian sites (which nobody is denying). The musical-instrument related terms can also be explained as terms from a pre-Aryan Harappan language that were absorbed (as many artifactual terms might have been) into Sanskrit as loanwords. So we cannot exclude that these terms made their way (via pre-Sanskrit ISVC cultural exchange) to Sumeria, and then later got absorbed into Sanskrit in 1500 BCE per AIT.

While all these can be very valuable corroborating pieces of evidence, I am hoping for incontrovertible primary evidence that cannot be explained any other way than by OIT. Simultaneously, while there are myriad reasons to demolish AIT, none of them end up supporting OIT in and of themselves.

mtDNA: 2 factors militate against Fertile Crescent providing ancestry to IVC. One is the Rakhigarhi aDNA evidence, which busted the myth that agriculture came to India from West Asia. Secondly, the mtDNA found in Mesopotamia is of Indian subcontinent origin. Linking Gyaneshwar Chaubey's paper & excerpt below

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... references
Two things. Firstly, the “agriculture came to India from West Asia” is a hallmark of Anatolian AIT, not Steppe AIT (where agriculturists don’t matter as the Steppe people are supposed to have been pastoralists). True, the Rakhigarhi findings do strike a body blow to the Anatolian hypothesis, as well as any version of AIT which argues that “Iranian farmers” were the ones who brought agriculture to India. But the Anatolian hypothesis is reeling under many attacks in any case: the primary one being that the Anatolian branch of the IE family (including Hittite/Nesili as discussed above) is so distantly related to all other IE languages (even Tocharian) that it is effectively an outlier. It is very unlikely that Anatolian reverted to PIE and then all the other branches came out of PIE leaving no trace of Anatolian; yet that is the only scenario in which the Anatolian hypothesis makes sense.

As far as that mtDNA paper (Witas et al 2013 that you linked) is concerned: what it shows is that aDNA from some individuals in Syria carried mtDNA haplogroup M4b1. This is intriguing because the whole of mitochondrial haplogroup M shows maximum diversity in India. However, it’s also known that haplogroup M is very ancient; it came to India more than 55000 years ago . Indeed M4b1, the haplogroup Witas et al investigate, is itself ~34000 years old. See https://www.academia.edu/675768/Updatin ... n_corridor (Chandrasekar 2009) for details.

That affords a big window of time for these individuals (or their ancestors) to have come to Syria from elsewhere.
mtDNA haplogroup M is one of the first haplogroups to leave Africa and exists in many parts of the world, including East Africa, Tibet (which is more closely identified with M4b1 than India of the Vedic geography), and even Austronesia/Australia. It is also generally accepted the ancestors of the Tibetan and Australasian branches of Haplogroup M passed through India at some point.

Notably, the Witas paper itself admits that the terminus post quem for the migration from Tibet/India to Mesopotamia could well have been earlier than 4.5 kya (the lifetime of the oldest individual studied). While two of the individuals carrying M4b1 lived (and were buried) during the time of ISVC, there is no way to tell if they migrated out from India to Mesopotamia during ISVC or were locals descended from some common ancestor they share with the oldest individual studied.

This again returns us to the question: WHAT IS OOI exactly? Are we saying some people at some time moved from the vicinity of India outwards, period? I don’t think there is any reason to dispute that such migrations happened (given the Onge Andamanese, Australian Aborigines, and others).

But if we want to say that a large population of Indians moved out from India to Mesopotamia during ISVC and took Indian culture/language with them, the occurrence of haplogroup M4b1 in Mesopotamia by itself is circumstantial at best (remember, it is 34000 years old and could have arrived there at any time).
Lastly, we have close to zilch artifacts from the Fertile Crescent in IVC, but copious amounts of IVC artifacts in the fertile crescent.
4000 years from now archeologists will find copious amounts of “Made in China” artifacts in Surinam and Madagascar, but close to zilch “Made in Surinam/Madagascar” artifacts in China. Artifacts show the commercial power of the ISVC to export and sell them: not the out-migration of people, culture, and language from ISVC to anywhere.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem »

https://twitter.com/Vritrahan2014/statu ... 60833?s=20
Dear All,
I have something to announce. Due to sample quality issues, the ancient dna study of The Bronze Age Sinauli warriors will not be published. Though initial results raised hope, the samples failed to pass standard quality criteria.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

^^ Just saw that tweet. If true, this is really crappy. I hope they didn't screw up the sample collection/preservation. They did that once before, before learning from mistakes, which resulted in the long-delayed Rakhigarhi paper.

If they messed up Sanauli aDNA, that's a disaster of Himalayan proportions.

Niraj Rai had tweeted in December 2020 that there was an aDNA paper coming out, that would disprove Steppe migration. I hope its not a case of typical bombast.

Overall, terribly disappointed with our scientists & the GOI. Given our long history, how its been molested by Western Indologists & how difficult aDNA is to come by, this should have been a project of national importance. Instead we have scientists giving out hints via Twitter, while people wait for years before any half-assed paper comes out. Gyaneshwar Chaubey's R1a paper has been talked about for ages now, but nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile the Reich lab keeps churning out papers each week. Our guys are just Tamasic asses!
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Actually, the norm in elite dominance is exactly the opposite.
Not always true. When the Brishits ruled over India, they didn't adopt titles of "Maharajah". Nor did they walk around with Indian trappings. When the Spanish conquered South & Central America, they didn't call themselves the descendants of the Sun God. They imposed their language and culture.
The fact that the mass population of the Hittite Kingdom were not even Indo-European speakers (let alone Sanskrit-speakers) is amply attested. The language they spoke was Hattic. The ruling class of the Hittite Kingdom spoke Nesili, an Indo-European language that comes from an entirely different family of IE than Indo-Iranian. Per Lewis & Pereltsvaig (2012):
We are talking 2 different things here. I was referring to the Mitannis and you're talking about the Hittites. The Mitanni rulers had late Rig Vedic names, which Talageri demonstrated. They also had the famous Suppiluliuma-Shattiwaza Treaty treaty, which invoked Vedic Gods. But the native population was non-IE speaking. Clearly indicates an elite dominance
To equate this to an all-out Indian population migration to the area is far-fetched. If Indians (post Late-Rig Vedic era) migrated en masse to Nesa, they first abandoned Sanskrit and adopted an unrelated IE language (Nesili) apart from a few traces; they then adopted the governmental trappings (and linguistic influence) of the Hatti people as a function of elite dominance, ultimately becoming a culture with only faint resemblance to anything that came “out of India”.
As you know, there are at least 2 OIT waves here. The very early Hittite branch (pre Rig Vedic), which was the 1st to separate from PIE. Then the late Rig Vedic branch, whose rulers ruled/established the Mitanni kingdom.

The connection between Hittite and PIE itself is quite tenuous. So, any theory will have trouble explaining it. At least in the case of OIT, we have archaeological evidence of Indian goods (& possibly people) in Northern Iraq, Syria & Anatolia (areas of the Hittites and Mitannis). The Kurgan theory doesn't even have this luxury
Many of your claims here are incorrect. The Kikkuli manual is NOT in Sanskrit, and there is mounting evidence to show that Sanskrit-speakers were not a significant elite in the Mitanni kingdom.
.....

The picture that emerges from this is that Kikkuli was writing (in the local language) a manual that included some technical terms in a foreign language. Today the manual for a computer in Korean or French may include the English terms “mouse”, “motherboard” etc. interspersed with local language. That only indicates that the source of the original technology behind the merchandise is an English-speaking country. It does not indicate that people speaking English migrated to these areas in significant numbers, formed an “elite” or any such thing.
I mentioned Sanskrit just in jest. I know it was not written in Sanskrit, any more than the Gathas are. But try understanding the horse training manual without knowing Sanskrit!

My point still stands: if the Mitanni rulers were late Rig Vedic contemporaries & their horse training manual contains Sanskritic technical terms, it does indicate elite dominance. And a fun-fact: its a horse-training-manual - the much maligned horse, which supposed Indo-Aryans didn't know about. Yet, their language is the one that's used to describe technical terms to train a horse. This shows that the IA-speaking people were the true domesticators of the horse & pioneers in chariotry. At the very least, it indicates that the IA-speakers took the horse domestication/training to the next level, which helps OIT (they used horses, wagons & chariots in their world dominance)
Druhyu migration
......
Until and unless more evidence is found, this is pure speculation.
The Druhyu-Druid connection is an agreed upon one in linguistics. Additionally, RV talks about the Druhyu migration as a distant memory. Its enough of a base for a hypothesis. We are building the OIT picture here and Talageri's work gives a solid framework. Instead, what you are asking for is: "where is the final picture?" & dismissing any framework-building efforts as "mere speculation".
If Steppe theory fails Occam’s Razor, OIT fails twice as badly. On a map, the Steppe is right there to the south of the Ural mountains. For OIT you have to account for Indian-language speakers somehow transiting the Caucasus/Pamirs/Hindu-Kush/Caucasus and getting to the Steppe in the first place.
*Any* homeland theory will involve tribes traveling 1000s of miles, many times across inhospitable terrain. You are saying that Indians somehow could not have crossed the Hindu-Kush and gone North & West. While the Steppe people could have made the reverse trip?

Specifically, my Occam's razor point was about isoglosses and how they completely trip up the Steppe theory because there would need to be really twisted movements of tribes for the language families to have such isoglosses. Its most parsimoniously explained by an Indian homeland theory. Please read Talageri on this, where he extensively quotes the work of Gamkralidze & Ivanov (who themselves were Anatolian Hypothesis supporters, but whose own work negated it)
IF one takes the claims of the AIT people as a given up to this point (though there are myriad other reasons to reject them), then the unidirectional loanwords can be explained away as follows: By 2200 BCE PIE in the Steppe had become, essentially, Proto-Indo-Iranian. One branch of these Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers in the northwest Steppe came into contact with Uralic people and the Uralic language absorbed loanwords from this branch; ultimately this northwestern branch, along with whatever elements it had borrowed FROM Uralic, died out. Concurrently a southeast branch of Steppe Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers, who did NOT have extensive contact with Uralic speakers, migrated out of the Steppe and came to India/Iran bringing the language with them.
This is special pleading and failing the Occam's razor test: you have to make an additional assumption to explain one-way Uralic borrowings using AIT. But you don't need to make that extra assumption with OIT.
The musical-instrument related terms can also be explained as terms from a pre-Aryan Harappan language that were absorbed (as many artifactual terms might have been) into Sanskrit as loanwords. So we cannot exclude that these terms made their way (via pre-Sanskrit ISVC cultural exchange) to Sumeria, and then later got absorbed into Sanskrit in 1500 BCE per AIT.
Special Pleading - again. No, they cannot be Dravidian words. Shail Vyas specifically did a cognate comparison with Dravidian words and it turned up empty. Not only are these Sanskrit (or proto-Sanskrit words), many of them have deeper word-roots that can only be explained via Sanskrit or Indo-Aryan, but not Dravidian. The most interesting conclusion from Shail Vyas' preprint is the fact that these attested words are circa 2600-2100 BCE and these are Sanskrit (or at the least, Indo-Aryan) words. This gives a kick in the nuts of AIT & strengthens OIT because the latter theory alone permits such early dates for Sanskrit.

Notably, the Witas paper itself admits that the terminus post quem for the migration from Tibet/India to Mesopotamia could well have been earlier than 4.5 kya (the lifetime of the oldest individual studied). While two of the individuals carrying M4b1 lived (and were buried) during the time of ISVC, there is no way to tell if they migrated out from India to Mesopotamia during ISVC or were locals descended from some common ancestor they share with the oldest individual studied.
The whole discussion of Mesopotamia happened because you asked if there was evidence of Indians migrating further West than Iran. And the answer is yes. IVC influence on Mesopotomaia itself doesn't directly impact AIT or OIT because they are different language families. But it does show a few things:

1) Indians were seafarers, explorers & exporters. Helps the mental maps of many Indians, whose history books have taught them that we only import & get invaded

2) Shail Vyas' evidence of Sanskritic terms into Mesopotamia, with a very early attestation, anchors Sanskrit/IA to a much earlier date that OIT can accommodate but AIT can't
4000 years from now archeologists will find copious amounts of “Made in China” artifacts in Surinam and Madagascar, but close to zilch “Made in Surinam/Madagascar” artifacts in China. Artifacts show the commercial power of the ISVC to export and sell them: not the out-migration of people, culture, and language from ISVC to anywhere.
Out-migration of people has strong circumstantial evidence in the form of

1) Artisans building IVC style artifacts with local materials
2) References to Meluhhans in Sumerian texts
3) Mittani rulers in a place where IVC artifacts are also found

Evidences 1, 2 & 3 above are from archaeology. Evidence 3 above is also from linguistics. Beyond this, if you want "incontrovertible evidence" of Indians elsewhere, we have to rely on aDNA only.

And given how shoddily we are handling aDNA research here, I am not holding my breath.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

2020 paper that shows, based on aDNA, that horse domestication didn't happen in Anatolia. Rather domestic horses were imported into Anatolia from elsewhere

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/38/eabb0030
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

2019 paper that shows that, around 2000 BCE, there was a rapid turnover of cattle breeds in the Fertile Crescent. Zebu cattle were introduced wholesale from India into this region

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 141346.htm
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

A 2020 paper that demonstrates that the "lactase tolerance" mutation (allele rs4988235-A) did not originate in the Steppes. Its one of the most prevalent mutations seen in modern humans.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fu ... 20)31187-8
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

An excellent summary by Jaydeepsinh Rathod in BrownPundits, about the Sanauli chariots and their implications.

https://www.brownpundits.com/2021/06/13 ... ronze-age/

Key points
1) Sanauli chariots are real chariots of war! Their dimensions, structure & the fact that they're buried with warriors clearly prove this

2) They have several copper components for strength. This is the main reason that these chariots survived this long. This indicates advanced metallurgy and chariot-building tech. See image below to see the copper components

3) By comparison, the so-called Sintashta chariots are a joke on these 3 counts:
a) All we have are just "partial wheel imprints". Forget about a chariot, not even a full-wheel is present. Not even a full wheel imprint is present. Western crapologists have reconstructed an entire chariot based on "partial wheel imprints". Semenenko tears into this academic fraud. Per Semenenko's chariot classification (listen to his YouTube lectures that I posted earlier), the burial remains don't qualify to be called chariots
b) Per Littauer & Crouwel (1996), based on the dimensions on the imprints, these are, at best, ceremonial wagons. They wouldn't stand the rigors that a chariot is subject to. The wheels/vehicle would come apart at high speeds and turns
c) Sintashta ceremonial wagons represent a lower tech than Sanauli due to lack of copper. This is the reason that nothing remains (because the wood rotted)

4) For those who like to gripe about spoked vs solid wheels, here are the key points:
a) As Shiv pointed out, solid-wheels are not "old tech". For many heavy duty purposes, solid wheels are the ones used. Car wheels, tank wheels etc. For wars over a rough, uneven terrain, solid wheels are a better option
b) Its not like the Indians didn't know spoked wheels. Krishendu Das' has an extensive compilation of figurines, models etc which show spoked wheels. The Sanauli chariot-makers (which would have been a dedicated profession by itself), would have made a conscious choice to build chariots with solid wheels

5) The dating of these chariots (2100 - 1900 BCE) in the interior of India, knocks-out a key tenet of AIT - i.e. chariot riding Aryans came in via the Northwest circa 1500 BCE

6) Sanauli chariots are the oldest excavated chariots in the world - period! To quote Jaydeep, there are no such specimens found in the entire 2nd millennium BCE anywhere in the world. The above-mentioned wheel-imprints in Sintashta are only from 1600 BCE. Even the depiction of chariots in art, toys etc in the Middle East, Steppes don't occur before 1900 - 1800 BCE

7) Ore extraction, metal-working & chariot-building would have been expensive affairs with its own dedicated guild of craftsmen. The Indus Civilization had metal-workers par excellence. Only a settled civilization (unlike Steppe pastoralists) could afford to pay for the sustenance of such dedicated craftsmen. Moreover, when the IE speaking elites spread out, the chariots would have required upkeep/maintenance - the "logistics chain". The spread of Indus bronze-age metallurgy over huge swaths of Eurasia is well attested.

Only a hi-tech, warrior-like civilization could afford to take maintenance personnel with them, as they went about Aryanizing the rest of the world

Image
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Rudradev wrote:Per Kubarev (1988), Chernykh et al (2004) The Afanasievo (western Altai mountain i.e. Xingjiang/Kyrgyzstan) material culture exhibits traits characteristic of the Yamnaya culture (known as the Pit Grave Culture or Ochre Grave Culture). Yamnaya-Repin ceramic types and decoration, and sleeved axes and daggers of specific Yamnaya types, are all found in Afansievo sites in the Western Altai. The link between the linguistic ancestors of the Tocharians and the Afansievo culture has been expounded by Mallory and Mair (2000) and further by David Anthony (PBUH; 2010 and 2013).
Rudradev: I read a supplementary paper to that of Damgaard, 2018. This talks about Tocharian and theorizes how it might have originated from the Afanasievo culture. Look at the quality of "evidence" in this link: https://zenodo.org/record/1240524#.YMYat2lX4zQ

Whether Afanasievo shares material culture with Yamnaya is hardly material, because "Where is the evidence that Tocharian came from Afanasievo?"

Anything that the fraud Anthony says, I'll take with a boat of salt. This was the guy who misinterpreted (possibly intentionally) a Rig Vedic verse and said it resembled Kurgan mounds. The crook then silently removed references to it in subsequent editions of his book
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Rudradev »

Prem Kumar wrote:Not always true. When the Brishits ruled over India, they didn't adopt titles of "Maharajah". Nor did they walk around with Indian trappings. When the Spanish conquered South & Central America, they didn't call themselves the descendants of the Sun God. They imposed their language and culture.
Poor argument.

Both the examples you provide are of European colonial empires in the post-renaissance period. By this time, European countries had evolved the concept of the linguistic nation-state to the extent of using it as a driving force of supremacism. The Spanish and British believed they were destined to rule the territories they colonized by virtue of the fact that they were Spanish or British, respectively (and secondarily, as representatives of a “civilizing Christendom”).

When we talk about “Out of India” we’re talking about the ancient world, when none of these concepts was operational.

I have provided FOUR examples in this post of how elite dominance in this era involved the incoming, conquering elites adopting the language and cultural tropes of the conquered populace in order to govern more effectively. There is no question that the pattern for elite dominance by an incoming settler population in the ancient world followed this template. viewtopic.php?p=2498921#p2498921
We are talking 2 different things here. I was referring to the Mitannis and you're talking about the Hittites. The Mitanni rulers had late Rig Vedic names, which Talageri demonstrated. They also had the famous Suppiluliuma-Shattiwaza Treaty treaty, which invoked Vedic Gods. But the native population was non-IE speaking. Clearly indicates an elite dominance
An observation like this can as easily be fit into the Aryan Migration hypothesis— by claiming that the names in the Mitanni treaty hail from a time before Aryan culture became established in India at all. And indeed this is how the AMT/AIT backers explain it. Simply stating that an ambiguous data point “clearly indicates” XYZ does not make it so.

In fact the AIT/AMT backers claim that the “elite dominance” was of Steppe charioteer/mercenaries who took over the Mitanni kingdom and used these Steppe-origin names in their royal families and religious invocations. I believe that is a bogus argument, for reasons described above—elite dominance is not attested in this way. But by the exact same token, using it as a pro-“OIT” argument is equally bogus.
I mentioned Sanskrit just in jest. I know it was not written in Sanskrit, any more than the Gathas are. But try understanding the horse training manual without knowing Sanskrit!
What exactly do you mean?

There are literally millions of vegetable vendors all over India who understand and use the term “kilo”, i.e. “kilogram” as a measure of weight in English, further derived from the Greek “kilo” for “one thousand”. Do you claim that all these vegetable vendors can understand Greek because they know this term?

Likewise, I myself happen to know about ten words in Tamizh. This does not mean I can speak or understand Tamizh, not by a long shot. I cannot make sense of someone speaking to me in Tamizh or express my own ideas in that language. Moreover, even if I took the time to mug up 100 Tamizh words, that STILL would not make me someone who “understands” Tamizh.

So the claim that someone had to “understand Sanskrit” in order to follow Kikkuli’s horse-training manual goes absolutely nowhere. For that matter, Kikkuli’s own name is not even of Indo-European origin (so much for “elite dominance”).
My point still stands: if the Mitanni rulers were late Rig Vedic contemporaries & their horse training manual contains Sanskritic technical terms, it does indicate elite dominance. And a fun-fact: its a horse-training-manual - the much maligned horse, which supposed Indo-Aryans didn't know about. Yet, their language is the one that's used to describe technical terms to train a horse. This shows that the IA-speaking people were the true domesticators of the horse & pioneers in chariotry. At the very least, it indicates that the IA-speakers took the horse domestication/training to the next level, which helps OIT (they used horses, wagons & chariots in their world dominance)
You are digging yourself deeper and deeper into Steppe/AIT origins by using this type of argument. It fits in perfectly with the idea that Sanskrit evolved in the Steppe (where horses were common) rather than India (where they were clearly not). In all the fossil record, there is only ONE instance of horse (Equus caballus) remains in the Indus Valley Civilzation (Surkotada) as compared to huge numbers in the Steppe.

Even Talageri admits that the horse (Equus caballus) was an extremely rare animal in India during the early Rigvedic period, and only introduced as an elite mount during the later Rigvedic period. In fact, his evidence shows that “asva” in the RigVeda probably referred to the Onager, a species of wild donkey. Only later, when domesticated donkeys were also introduced to India, did the semantics of Sanskrit drift— the term “gardhaba” came to be used for donkeys, while “asva” came to mean horse specifically.

The only OIT data-point in the case of horses is the following: Armenian uses the term “es” (a cognate of Sanskrit “asva”) for “donkey”, while it uses the term “ji” (a cognate of Sanskrit “haya”) for “horse”. If indeed the Armenians came from India that would coincide with the semantic evolution of the words “Asva” and “haya”. “Haya” in Sanskrit refers to a “superior form of steed”… which could correspond to the horse, as compared to the onager, after it was introduced into India from outside.
The Druhyu-Druid connection is an agreed upon one in linguistics. Additionally, RV talks about the Druhyu migration as a distant memory. Its enough of a base for a hypothesis. We are building the OIT picture here and Talageri's work gives a solid framework. Instead, what you are asking for is: "where is the final picture?" & dismissing any framework-building efforts as "mere speculation".
Of course framework-building without a shred of physical evidence is mere speculation. As indeed, any hypothesis without supporting evidence is also mere speculation. What is more inaccurate? My referring to it as speculation, or you trying to pass it off as “proof” of OIT?
*Any* homeland theory will involve tribes traveling 1000s of miles, many times across inhospitable terrain. You are saying that Indians somehow could not have crossed the Hindu-Kush and gone North & West. While the Steppe people could have made the reverse trip?
You were talking about the pollination of Uralic languages with Indo-European terms. For these terms to have gone “Out of India”, you need to show how the people who used them ended up in the vicinity of the Urals. The Steppe on the other hand is already in the immediate vicinity of the Ural mountains. The application of Occam’s razor is obvious to anyone looking at a map.

Steppe people are claimed to have moved in several directions, consistent with their having been a nomadic pastoralist population with well-established migration routes spanning thousands of miles, and attested by the widespread occurrence of Kurgans or burial grounds.

There is, on the other hand, no evidence that Indus Valley people (or their predecessors) built any structure-- or left any archeological trace of their settlement (as opposed to mere trade commodities) outside India.

Moreover, there is a great deal of evidence supporting out-migration of Steppe peoples into more hospitable climes of the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, Southern and South-western Asia throughout history… from the Sakas/Hunas to the Turco-Mongols. This typically happened because periodic climate events in the Steppe imposed outward migration pressures into more hospitable climes. Conversely, there is no evidence that people would depart from the already hospitable climate and fertile lands of India to go anywhere else in the ancient world.
This is special pleading and failing the Occam's razor test: you have to make an additional assumption to explain one-way Uralic borrowings using AIT. But you don't need to make that extra assumption with OIT.
No, you have to make ten additional assumptions. You have to insist that just once in history, for some reason, Indians left the fertile riverine plains of India, crossed the Hindu-Kush/Caucasus/Pamirs, went into the dry cold Steppe, arrived 1000s of miles away at the base of the Ural mountains with their language and culture somehow intact, and then taught it to the Uralic tribes.

Exceptional events do take place in history, and indeed RigVeda suggests that the outmigration of Anus and Druhyus following the Dasarajna war did occur. But again— your contention is that we are “close to proving” OIT, and not even one of the arguments you have provided comes anywhere near supporting that contention.
Special Pleading - again. No, they cannot be Dravidian words. Shail Vyas specifically did a cognate comparison with Dravidian words and it turned up empty. Not only are these Sanskrit (or proto-Sanskrit words), many of them have deeper word-roots that can only be explained via Sanskrit or Indo-Aryan, but not Dravidian. The most interesting conclusion from Shail Vyas' preprint is the fact that these attested words are circa 2600-2100 BCE and these are Sanskrit (or at the least, Indo-Aryan) words. This gives a kick in the nuts of AIT & strengthens OIT because the latter theory alone permits such early dates for Sanskrit.
This is a strawman argument if I ever heard one. Who says that any pre-Indo-European language spoken in India had to be “Dravidian”? Even among the AIMT proponents, only a few (e.g. Akso Parpola) contend such a thing. All that is known about the ISVC language is that it hasn’t been deciphered. It could just as easily have belonged to some language family that has since become extinct. The extinction of language families that were widely spoken has been recorded in history—one example being Etruscan, which dominated South-Central Europe before the arrival of Latin.

Shail Vyas’ claims of Indo-Aryan words in West Asia during the 2600-2100 BCE period can be as easily coopted into AIMT as the Mitanni nomenclature of kings and deities. The AIMT people claim these were traces left during the southward/eastward migration of PIE (which by 2500 BCE had evolved into proto-Indo-Iranic) into India and Iran.

If this is not true you have to show that the terms were unquestionably of Indian origin. Otherwise, the burden of proof for those who wish to claim “out of India” origins for these words has not become one gram lighter.
The whole discussion of Mesopotamia happened because you asked if there was evidence of Indians migrating further West than Iran. And the answer is yes.
Sorry, if you claim that a mitochondrial DNA allele is proof that “Indians migrated” further West than Iran then by the exact same token you have to accept that "Steppe people migrated into India” per the Vagheesh Narasimhan paper of 2019.

Relying on a single allele, that too a Y-chromosomal or mitochondrial allele (which is notoriously susceptible to distortion by founder effects) is really grasping at straws. Narasimhan has not shown a significant influx of Steppe population into India in his study, and neither have Chaubey et al demonstrated this convincingly for a migration of Indian population into West Asia.
IVC influence on Mesopotomaia itself doesn't directly impact AIT or OIT because they are different language families. But it does show a few things:
1) Indians were seafarers, explorers & exporters. Helps the mental maps of many Indians, whose history books have taught them that we only import & get invaded
2) Shail Vyas' evidence of Sanskritic terms into Mesopotamia, with a very early attestation, anchors Sanskrit/IA to a much earlier date that OIT can accommodate but AIT can't.
Regarding (1), Indians need to come out of their mindset whether OIT is proved or not, for their own sake. We cannot wait for OIT to be proven before insisting on the rejection of a colonized mindset.

BUT meanwhile, putting up half-baked notions of OIT as “proof” does not help the matter in any way. In fact, when such feeble attempts at “proof” are easily demolished (as they will be), the consequences of that exposure will be all the more damaging to the Indian psyche.

If we call something “evidence” when it is merely conjecture, the only thing that will end up suffering is our own credibility when we are exposed.

Regarding Shail Vyas’ list (again)—as I mentioned, AIT linguistics does very much allow for proto-Indo-Iranic to exist post 2500 BCE. So it can accommodate such words in West Asia in that timeframe.

Out-migration of people has strong circumstantial evidence in the form of

1) Artisans building IVC style artifacts with local materials
This is still explicable as the setting up of local manufacturing facilities by ISVC merchants at West Asian trading posts. Local artisans would have used local materials to make ISVC-style artifacts at these locations. Nothing about this is necessarily consistent with out-migration of Indian-origin populations.
2) References to Meluhhans in Sumerian texts
There are also references to Atlantis in many texts. This in itself proves nothing.

3) Mittani rulers in a place where IVC artifacts are also found

Artifacts from all kinds of places are found in Northern Syria from that period, the bulk of them NOT from IVC. And the “elite hypothesis” explanation is special pleading of the sort that can be very easily turned over to support Aryan invasion, as I have shown above. If it doesn’t work for them, it cannot work for us.
Prem Kumar
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

Rudradev: will respond to your key points at leisure. Have a few updates to share in the meanwhile

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A new study conducted by Kurukshetra University has concretized the evidence for the Sarasvathi and its tributary, the Dhrishadhvathi.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/c ... ce=twitter

A very interesting data-point
All major archaeological sites in Haryana - Siswal, Rakhigarhi, Banawali, Bhirrana, Kunal, Balu, Thana – were located at a radial distance of less than 500m from the paleochannels of Saraswati or the Drishadwati rivers
Prem Kumar
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Posts: 4215
Joined: 31 Mar 2009 00:10

Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

This is a must-read paper for anyone interested in knowing about the migration of Vedic Harappans to West Asia. It talks about the introduction of elephants into Syria from the Indus Valley. Though the earliest depictions of elephants in art there start from the end of 3rd millenium BCE, the first concrete evidence of elephants start from the 15th Century BCE onwards. It coincides exactly with the establishment of the Mitanni empire!

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 16.1198068

Key points:

1) Ivory, tusks and artifacts make their appearance in late 3rd millenium BCE. Elephants also appear in artwork
2) Physical elephants make their appearance circa 1600 - 1500 BCE, coinciding with the Mitanni empire establishment
3) The population of elephants increases to the point that there are many free-ranging elephants in the wild
4) By the 1st millenium BCE, the elephants are hunted to extinction

Linguistic evidence parallels the archaeological evidence

1) Before you do anything, read Talageri's masterpiece about the elephant being a PIE word, present in all Indo-European languages! Its a solid evidence from "linguistic paleontology" that the homeland of PIE was in the Indian subcontinent

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2017/06/t ... opean.html

2) The word for elephant has been transferred to the word for ivory as far west as the Hittite language. This is not surprising, considering that the Anatolians wouldn't have encountered physical elephants. But ivory trade and back & forth movements of Indus artisans continued for millennia. So, they wouldn't have lost the word or replaced it for a different animal (like the Germanic tribes did with camels). Instead, they transferred it to the word for ivory. On a side-note, the Greeks preserved the Indo-European word for the physical animal itself - possibly because they continued to encounter the animal.

3) As Talageri said in his addendum, the simultaneous appearance in West Asia of the Mitannis (with their Indo-Aryan language, late RigVedic names etc), elephants, Zebu bull and peacocks is clinching evidence that these were Harappan emigrants
Note added 22/7/2019: The fact that the appearance of elephants and peacock motifs in Iraq and West Asia in general coincides exactly with the presence and activities of the Mitanni in West Asia is now confirmed by a third important factor: recent scientific studies have confirmed that the Indian humped zebu cattle, domesticated in the Harappan area since thousands of years, suddenly started appearing in West Asia around 2200 BCE, and by 2000 BCE there was largescale mixing of the Indian zebu cattle, bos indicus, with the genetically distict western species of cattle, bos taurus, in West Asia. Thus we have three very distinct animal species native to India - the elephant, the peacock and the domesticated Indian zebu cattle - appearing in West Asia exactly coinciding with the presence and activities of the Mitanni in West Asia at the time, thus confirming that the Mitanni people were migrants from India to West Asia:
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