Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth

[svinayak]

(6) RV was composed by people with strong steppe memory, and a steppe culture where mighty rivers do flow.

I think Sarasvati is not a steppe memory. Other aspects of vedic culture like horse, chariotry and use of grass in ritual to name a few, are.

How is this deduced. The sanskrit words for all these elements have been found in the old version of the RgV sanskrit. Correct me If I am wrong.

There is contradiction here. Saraswati is in the Indus region but the elements of vedic culture like horse, chariotry and use of grass are in steppes.

In this analysis the archeology is used to support this hypothesis but for other things archeology/genetics is discouraged.

[svinayak]

^^^According to Rig Veda, the horse mentioned has 34 ribs, unlike the version from Europe/Steppe. But others think that the mention of 34/33 is a reference to Gods and don't agree that it is a reference to number of ribs. And also some argue that the number of ribs fluctuate in the same species at times give or take one or two rib bones. Manish ji asked about this number (33/34). Now I am guessing his real reason is to question this rib count? not sure, just assuming here.

Here are the past discussion and debate on the horse going on for the last 15 years.

THE HORSE AND THE ARYAN DEBATE

Conclusions

That the invasionist scholars should have skirted such important issues, as regards both findings and methodology, does little to inspire confidence. Clearly, the whole question of the Vedic and Harappan horse has been treated simplistically. To sum up:

1. Several species of Equus, including the true horse, existed in the Indus- Sarasvati civilization, probably in small numbers. Some of them may have entered India over a much longer time span than is usually granted, in the course of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization’s interactions with neighbouring areas, but certainly not through any Aryan invasion or migration, which in any case has already been rejected by archaeological, anthropological, genetic, literary and cultural evidence.70

2. This process continued with a gradual but slight increase after the end of the mature phase of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization right up to early historical times. There was no epoch exhibiting a sudden, first-time introduction of the animal.

3. The Rig-Veda has been misread; it tells us strictly nothing about a sizeable horse population, and rather suggests its rarity. The animal was important in symbolic, not quantitative terms.

4. The Rig-Veda also tells us nothing about conquering Aryans hurtling down from Afghanistan in their horse-drawn “thundering” chariots and crushing indigenous tribal populations; it is high time we abandoned once and for all those perverse fancies of nineteenth-century scholars, even if some of their peers hang on to such myths even today.

The hypothesis I have put forward is testable: if correct, we should expect further excavations of Harappan sites to come up with more horse remains and depictions, although nothing on the scale that the Aryan invasion theory wrongly expects of a Vedic society — and has failed to document in post-
Harappan India.

This article, which supplied evidence that demolished Witzel's claims once and for all, drew the following response from Witzel. It is not hard to see that Witzel was concerned mainly with negating all evidence--from equine data to the Sarasvati River! He also failed to note that the possible presence of the 'Siwalik horse' for millions of years is further evidence against his thesis of the horse as a late arrival in India. Further, contrary to his claim, the 34 ribs of Indian, Southeast Asian and some Arab horses is a genetically inherited trait that cannot be wished away. Also, it is not just the Rigveda that mentions the 34-ribbed horse, but the Yajurveda as well. Editor

HARAPPAM HORSE : POLEMICS AND PROPAGANDA

HARAPPAN HORSE

There is an urgent need to jettison from our textbooks the unproved statements on Indian civilisation and consign them to academic polemics, and keep the power mongering self-seeking Taliban politicians out of educational field.

R. Nagaswamy

THE READERS have been following closely the debate on Harappan civilisation, published in The Hindu in its Open Page. The latest article by Michael Witzel (March 5) seems to be taking a partisan view. Archaeologists have found certain artefacts and scholars are trying to infer the meaning of the findings and in the process express divergent views. Such debates are welcome to advance our knowledge academically, no matter where it comes from. Unfortunately, Witzel's present article reads personal rather than an academic presentation. For example, he ridicules the other writer N.S. Rajaram personally by repeating his name time and again, with personal digs in every mention. Witzel is not free from the same fault that he attributes to Rajaram, as in the example of horse in Harappan sites. He states the horse bones found in the early excavations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa do not come from secure levels, and such horse bones "found their way into deposits through erosion cutting and refilling, disturbing the archaeological layers." Neither does he say how he arrived at this conclusion nor has he cited any report in support of his view.

Whatever the case may be, it only shows that horse bones were actually found in the excavations at Harappan sites. In order to justify his stand he writes that Marshal's Harappan data are "dubious and decades old." One cannot throw away the data presented by Marshal as it is the earliest available archaeological report and it is not possible at this point of time to say suddenly that Marshal has not reported that layers that were eroded and disturbed in places where horse bones have been found. One may ask Witzel to state on what basis he says that the layers that yielded horse bones in more than one site as at Mohenjodaro and Harappa were eroded and disturbed and the bones got mixed up? Does he want us to believe that in both the sites, the same layers yielding horse bones got mixed up in eroded layers? There are three major excavations conducted at Mohenjodaro and Harappa namely by Marshal, Mackey and Mortimer Wheeler.

Reports of excavations

George F Dales, who was the last in the series to investigate the sites, published his findings "Some unpublished, forgotten or misinterpreted features on Mohenjodaro" in the book Harappan Civilisation , published by the American Institute of Indian Studies, 1982. He has stated that the reports of all the three great excavations including that of Wheeler are "incomplete and suffer from serious losses." Dales states that there is "no end to speculation that these claims have aroused but it is impossible to reach objective conclusions with the published details." It is not at all possible to assess that the layers were disturbed unless other factual evidences are shown to approve the disturbed conditions.

Michael Witzel also states that conclusions cannot be arrived at with incomplete bones. Yes. However there cannot be two sets of standards in dealing with the matter. For example, he questions the views of Rajaram, but does not show whether R. Meadow, whose conclusions he supports, based his views on "a full skeleton or full sets of onager, donkey, or horse skeletons." Further it is known that there are very rare examples where the full skeletons of animals have been found in excavations. Are we not aware that most of the reconstructions of dinosaurs are based not on full skeletons? Archaeologists reconstruct several cultures with broken pottery. At one place he admits that clear examples of horse bones are found in Harappan civilisation after 1800 BCE, which still falls in the late Harappan period. Witzel has a dig at archaeologists that they are not zoologists or palaeontologists to comment on animal bones. This would apply equally to Witzel who is not a trained archaeologist to comment on this science. No archaeologist is expert in all fields but certainly consults experts before expressing his comments on which he has no expertise.

Problems are complex

To sum up Witzel's arguments proceed on the following lines: (1) No horse bone has been found in Harappan sites. (2) When pointed out that they are found in some instances, it is said they are only fragments and not full skeletons. (3) When pointed out they were found in more than one site it is said the layers in which they were found ought to have been eroded ones or disturbed. (4) When pointed out that the reports of horse bones were not by present day archaeologists but by the early pioneers it is said that those are dubious and decades old. (5) When pointed out they were reported by archaeological excavators then comes the argument that archaeologists are not trained zoologists and palaeontologists to comment on horse bones (though by the same argument no credence can be placed on Witzel's opinion as he is neither an archaeologist nor a palaeontologist). Such arguments are brought under reductio ad absurdum by logicians. More examples of willful rejections of points can be cited throughout the article but suffice to say that for an unbiased reader, the whole article reads purely a personal attack on an individual writer and exhibits certain amount of impatience to listen to other view. This does not mean that I agree with either of the views on the Aryan problem except stating that we are yet not in a position to go with either of the views for lack of evidence and would prefer to wait for further discoveries.

The debate has undoubtedly focused on one aspect of Harappan civilisation: the problems are complex and the data available are inadequate to come to any conclusion. The vital question that is not in the debate by the general reader is that in the past 50 years of India's independence, the unproved inferential views of these scholars, some of which have been proved totally wrong as in the case of "the total massacre of the Harappans by the invading barbaric Aryans", are fully incorporated in our school textbooks, right from the third or fourth standards. Wheeler dramatised this theory vehemently that invading Aryans destroyed the Harappan civilisation and within ten years he was proved totally wrong by new finds of several Harappan sites spread in space and time. And yet millions of children of India have been indoctrinated and brainwashed with these views for the past five decades, and that has caused immense damage to scientific knowledge. Is there any one party in India today which will repent for this incalculable damage? Are we justified in continuing to brainwash our generations of children? Is it not time that we remove these from school books and confine such debates to post-graduate community of the country and our children are told only the factual history. A perusal of the books would show enormous imbalances in representing regional and dynastic histories. It may be seen, for example, that South Indian history receives inadequate representation. The rule of the Pallavas, Cholas or Chalukyas that lasted for over four hundred years each and had glorious achievements in all fields gets summary representation, when compared with Mughal rule and the Colonial rule that did not last even half that period. South India has witnessed exemplary democratic institutions at the village level for several centuries in the medieval period that is yet to be brought to the notice of the children. Surely there is no proportionate representation.

While the Western history gets exalted position in all fields, the history of South East Asia like Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and even China does not even get a cursory mention. There is clearly an urgent need to jettison from the books the unproved statements on Indian civilisation and consign them to academic polemics, keep the power-mongering self-seeking Taliban politicians out of educational field, and seek a proportionate place for Indian civilisation in our textbooks. In fact Witzel has agreed to the need to revise Indian history in his earlier article, which should be entrusted to a body of unbiased and balanced academic body free from racial, religious or political bias.

{What Witzel has to do with this is unclear. His record so far does not inspire confidence in his unbaisedness. His scholarly contribution is also negligible-- he is known more for his personal attacks on Indian scholars, especially Rajaram than any substantial contribution. Also, are there not enough Indian scholars capable of writing Indian history? Is it necessary to go to someone who struggling to save what is left of his reputation, both as a scholar and as a human being? Editor}

[svinayak]

The debate has undoubtedly focused on one aspect of Harappan civilisation: the problems are complex and the data available are inadequate to come to any conclusion. The vital question that is not in the debate by the general reader is that in the past 50 years of India's independence, the unproved inferential views of these scholars, some of which have been proved totally wrong as in the case of "the total massacre of the Harappans by the invading barbaric Aryans", are fully incorporated in our school textbooks, right from the third or fourth standards. Wheeler dramatised this theory vehemently that invading Aryans destroyed the Harappan civilisation and within ten years he was proved totally wrong by new finds of several Harappan sites spread in space and time. And yet millions of children of India have been indoctrinated and brainwashed with these views for the past five decades, and that has caused immense damage to scientific knowledge. Is there any one party in India today which will repent for this incalculable damage? Are we justified in continuing to brainwash our generations of children? Is it not time that we remove these from school books and confine such debates to post-graduate community of the country and our children are told only the factual history.

This is the most important task which should be done on the Indian textbooks.
Fixing it quickly is of utmost urgency

[svinayak]

^^^According to Rig Veda, the horse mentioned has 34 ribs, unlike the version from Europe/Steppe. But others think that the mention of 34/33 is a reference to Gods and don't agree that it is a reference to number of ribs. And also some argue that the number of ribs fluctuate in the same species at times give or take one or two rib bones. Manish ji asked about this number (33/34). Now I am guessing his real reason is to question this rib count? not sure, just assuming here.

Now the question which should be asked is what is the need of the linguistics for the Europeans. Why is it important for them to show that it is credible and that European languages have antiquity.
Why should they attach their analysis with RgV and Vedic culture. What is the reason for spending lot of resources for the last 100 years to prove that European linguistics have their ancient origin and they have similarity to Sanskrit.
The important of Horse for them is to show the the Steppes is the region of their antiquity.
So they need the RgV which refers to Horse to show that they are connected to their land origin in the Steppes and hence prove that their languages have antiquity. They will do anything to prove that Horse is not from India and the only origin of Horse is in Steppes.

But then they have to carry all the other parts of RgV also to the steppes which is impossible. That is where the contradiction lies. They have a motive to show that Harrapan civilization is dead and there is no horse. They dont want to carry all the Indus region elements to the Steppes since this will give the game away. But they need sufficient elements to prove that PIE speakers are from Steppes and they are connected to the Indus region after they were found in Steppes.

[brihaspati]

(1) Saraswati is a strong presence in RV.
(2) It appears to describe a "mighty" river.
(3) It also gets associated at various points with a "goddess", speech and cow.

Yes to all. The fact that this river is so important in RV should make us think esp. about the impossibility of Talageri's OIT hypothesis which makes almost all the rest of IE group leave India during RgVeda, but carries no rememberance of this river; not even as a Goddess.

Just reverse this argument. By the same logic, AIT is trash. Since the steppeland or steppeland hinterland "mighty" rivers, and their names linked solidly to PIE by the PIE lobby, carries no remembrance by the steppeland origin PIE speakers coming to India. Not even as a goddess.

I will draw out the significance of (2)+(3) more later.

(4) It is supposed to be non-existent in India by a portion of PIEists

Sarasvati, whether a true river, or a Goddess of inspiration is a feature of Indian culture. There is some sharing with Iranian, but since the Iranian cognate is debuccalized, the Indian Sarasvati is the original.

If it did exist in India as a river, and Vedics did not carry the name from one of their homeland rivers, then it is open to existence as a pre-existing river name - a possibility allowed in the case of Celtiberian even within the so-called "Romance" languages, or in the case of proto-Italic. In fact given the postulated rules of change in PIE, it would be impossible to show any of the roots connected to water/river/river bank in PIE as influencing or leading to saraswati.

If it was a goddess, whose goddess was it that the steppeland invaders adopted since they don't mention it in their supposed previous stops? An invading culture with thousands of mounted warriors and war-chariots forgets its own goddesses [who are typically connected strongly with corresponding male partners - and the AIT/Steppe/Kurganites are supposed to be also patriarchal - so allowing goddess partners to roam freely at will would be unexpected, and does not appear] and adopts a foreign goddess after establishing its own dominance?

If there was no previous name attached to this river when the steppelanders arrived in India, they must have called it by some name? That name would be constructed from their fresh PIE memories. Why would horse and its geographical context be remembered perfectly, but river names, place names be forgotten. Migrants typically rename rivers/places if they can [if a pre-existing culture does not make it infeasible]- in a way that reminds them of their point of origin.

(5) It has been proposed that it was not the name of any real river but an imaginary, spiritual construct.

As I said earlier, I'm not certain whether Ghaggar-Hakra paleochannel is the correct identification for the river. I'm hoping for clarity from geologists on this.

But purely from a cultural PoV, it's unparalleled for Vedic to have mythical rivers. In fact, it's the reverse - real rivers become Goddesses.

That conclusion is based on an interpretation of supposedly surviving traces of those names in modern rivers [or later dated records]. If we drop this assumption, there is nothing that prevents ascribing goddess qualities to a river from a pre-existing goddess.

However, the spiritual connection to a river makes it quite problematic. If Saraswati was being connected spiritually to a goddess, it implies that the invaders had to replace one of their pre-existing goddesses, if saraswati as a goddess did not exist within the invader pantheon. Or add a new goddess. In real theological trajectories, a new goddess is typically adapted as a manifestation of a previously existing one. So it is reasonable to expect these layers of a pre-existing PIE goddess within attributes of Saraswati. Those underlying attributes should then be found in various adaptations wherever the PIE went [the same logic as that of incremental adaptation of sound change that allows us supposedly to go back to a unique proto-root]. But no saraswati attributes extractable elsewhere.

(6) RV was composed by people with strong steppe memory, and a steppe culture where mighty rivers do flow.

I think Sarasvati is not a steppe memory. Other aspects of vedic culture like horse, chariotry and use of grass in ritual to name a few, are.

Ultimately, it seems the only memory that counted to the PIE speakers was horse, horse, and horse. What is tied to the horse or attached to the horse. What the horse eats. [Horse dung and manure?] I did not know that grass onlee grew in steppes or was only used in rituals in steppes. Was it so that the PIE speakers also domesticated the grass first in steppes and no humans elsewhere knew about the grass technology? But lets say the Steppelanders remembered the grass because the horse ate it. [A lot of other things also grow in Steppes, naturally, which would be important to pastoralists of the claimed period- but they do not seem to have survived in invading memory. Hence the conclusion that grass was remembered because it was horse fodder.]

[Also grass use in ritual exists in non-PIE and pre-Steppeland populations too.]

But horses also drink water. Water sources for hydrating horses should also continue in memory. The big water bodies, flowing sources of fresh water for the horses - should be part of the memory too.

(7) RV was developed by an endogamous people carrying their culture from the steppes, across obviously many mighty rivers all the way to India, preserving their PIE language with very little or "incremental" changes.

There is no endogamy in RgVeda. And nothing like "incremental" changes; even if we look just at vedic, the regularization and simplification of PIE ablaut, sandhi rules etc. are not "incremental". Nothing to say of Pāṇini's work.

There is nothing to indicate exogamy as a general practice either. The endogamy was referred to our previous exchange on the absurdity of genetic compliance with preservation of Y-DNA markers supposedly characterizing Europeans and Indian genetic diversity. Without assuming strict endogamy by the invaders, endogamous well into and after conquest and settlement - the presence of so-called European origin genetic markers cannot be assumed.

The "incremental" term comes from your linguistic claims - that sound changes are limited in their scope. It cannot go from the back of the mouth to the front at one quick kick. I understand that the PIE lobby demands to determine how much == too far. Anyway you missed or chose to ignore why I mentioned the crossing of many mighty rivers.

Do you see the problems in reconciling your conclusion that there was [or could not be?] any PIE equivalent for Saraswati?

No problem at all for AIT. Just like no cognate for Viṣṇu is needed in PIE. The main problem is for one flavour of OIT - ie the chronology as proposed in Talageri's book.

This has nothing to do with S. Talageri's chronology. So, just to confirm, you see no problems with all the above with AIT claims?

This is not even Neti, neti. Please do lay out the linguistic reasons that conclude why "aswa" in RV means the modern horse.

I think burden of proof of "not true horse" is yours. The current usage is for "true horse", not hermiones after all.

No, the burden of proof lies with those who claim that the word "aswa" in RV stood for modern horse. It is after all an ancient text, with possible different uses of words from what their supposed derivatives are used as in modern times.

The fact remains that it could simply represent a transliteration dilemma about a paired sound which might have been used by two different groups within the same population in subtly different ways.

Yes; it is a dilemma - and the proof is in the dilemma itself. What does a syllabogram get confused with - the sound that is closest to it.

I fail to see why you have to be so blindly defensive about the Myc. inscription. The dilemma is not the proof. The dilemma in my post refers to the possibility in the inscriber or the scribe using/developing the script in how to represent what seemed to him like a sound pair separated or pronounced in quick succession in different contexts.

A quick paired pronunciation could be interpreted by someone not aware of the origins of the pair and its usage logic, to try and represent them by a single symbol. Thus a single "labiovelar" symbol could be invented to approximate an unfamiliar apparently often paired sound - whereas the original was meant to be separate.

[A_Gupta]

As per Michael Witzel, Sanskritist of Harvard residence, the last I followed him, the original Saraswati was in the Helmand River system in Afghanistan: the Arghandab, the largest tributary of the Helmand. The Helmand probably was the Avestan Haetumant, and the Arghandab the Avestan Harahvatii. Supposedly etymologically this means "having natural dams" and "having many ponds/lakes" and the Helmand does end inland in lakes and marshes. The paucity of water in the Helmand compared to the mighty Saraswati river of the Rg Veda is attributed by Witzel to the fact that the Aryan composers of the Rg Veda were prone to great exaggeration.

So, the Rg Veda was supposedly composed up in Afghanistan, and then when the folks moved into India proper, they encountered the drying up river Ghaggar-Hakra and named it Saraswati as a name sake of their mighty river in Afghanistan, and this is the Saraswati mentioned in the Mahabharata.

From someone, "The Vedic river-name Sarasvatii is a regular IE formation meaning 'having many ponds' (saras 'pond, pool' is from PIE *seles, nom./acc.sg. *selos, because of Greek helos 'marshy meadow, backwater'; the suffix -vatii is the feminine form of -vant/-vat, from PIE *-went, forming adjectives of possession Cf. the river-name Dr.s.advatii 'having many rocks'."

PS: for these theories to work, the Rg Veda composers have to be both great boasters and very forgetful too, except when it suits the philological theory.

PPS: The Harahvaiti and Saraswati either arise from a common etymology, or if the name was transferred from one river to another, shows some memory being carried from A to B.

[tyroneshoes]

Had enough of this PIE from the horses rear?!

Take a map of Eurasia. Draw an Arc from Netherland all the way to the coast of Western Australia. Draw a parallel Arc from northern Estonia all the way to Federated Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean. Make sure the these two parallel Arcs stay clear of the northern and southern tips of modern day India. (If someone has skills to map this would appreciate it).

Between these two parallel lines exists - Sarasvati Indus Valley Civilization (SIVC) area of influence. This does not mean that SIVC did not influence other area. It is just that the strongest lines of back and forth movements have occurred along this arc. This does not also mean that there was no influence prior to SIVC, indeed it can be shown that people to people contact along this line has not been unidirectional as once originally thought.

It will perhaps take a book to tie up all the cultures. Suffice to give some example.
The Croatians (Hrvati of Hrvatska) believe they came from Sapta-Sindu or Harahvaiti in Iran. I am not sure if anyone has looked at their ancient language Hurrvuhe.

There is more evidence for migration out of India-Afghanistan-Iran to Europe than there is to incoming mauraders, yet, the opposite direction finds more takers. I'd like to relate a true story - Years ago, one of my Croatian friends, was showing us his Grandfathers letters which included personal notes, but talked about his ancestors coming from India-Afghanistan region. One of my other European friends said this plainly, "So, why would you want to acknowledge this proudly?" That about sums up the bias for me.

The Sredny Stog culture (6500 - 5500 BP), Khvalynsk culture (7000-6500 BP), Samara (7500-6800 BP), etc. All can be shown to had contacts with Iran and India. One classic example is the copper techniques used. Many of these cultures are (incorrectly in my humble opinion) considered illiterate.
What if the SVIC area since history has been radiating people, ideas, languages, etc, way prior to any written documentation. What if some of these folks who went to the northern climes came back carrying new ideas, just as they had originally taken new ideas and language with them. All prior to the composition of the Rig Veda. The current genetics of India does not get impacted as is shown by most research.

What if at some point this two way flow was interrupted and therefore results in the split and further evolution of the two different branches.

See this image:

[brihaspati]

A_Gupta wrote
Micahel Witzel...

^^^But they did not boast when it came to horses and chariots? Maybe they had only one measly pony or donkey and exaggerated to make it a fine golden maned racehorse after having seen one among smelly barbarian traders bringing fur and slave wimmin?

[ukumar]

In this model, PIE who came to India would only bring the primitive language. Vedic religion and Vedas were composed in India and they were only singing what they experienced in India. Song containing domesticated horse were composed after the domesticated horse were available in India. Vedic Rishi developed the language and made it to Sanskrit
So, as per this theory the horses and chariots that are referred to in the Rig Veda were in India at the time of composition of the Rig Veda.

Unfortunately there is no record of such horses and chariots in India at the time of the Rig Veda. To explain this anomaly it has been stated that the people who composed the Rig Veda were nomads who were migrating from central Asia and composing songs in Sanskrit about all the horses and chariots they came across on the way to India.

This is the traditional model. Do you agree with this?

No I think that is farfetched. It is plausible model but has nothing to back it up. Even AMT people don’t argue against Rig Veda composition in Indian subcontinent.
Fact that Vedic people were definitely in India by 1500BC (If not earlier) and there are no horses remains in large quantity even after the 1500BC. So why do we need the evidence in earlier era? For whatever reason horse remains are not preserved in India. Or may be we are not interpreting the text correctly when giving too much importance to horse.
It is wrong to single out horses to determine the location of the Rig Veda composition and ignore other important things from the text like river names, people names and other animals.
I leave out chariot from my answer because the case for linking Rig Vedic Ratha with Steppe chariot is very weak. Chariot is an engineering innovation and could happen independently in different regions.

And can you explain what you mean by PIE? I thought PIE was a hypothetical cooked up language. That is the context in which it has been discussed so far on this thread.

I used generic meaning of PIE here. It is a language spoken by proto IE people before IE languages were split. I don’t mean reconstructed PIE. Reconstructed PIE is highly subjective endeavor and hard to know if it matches real PIE.

[ukumar]

(1) Saraswati is a strong presence in RV.
(2) It appears to describe a "mighty" river.
(3) It also gets associated at various points with a "goddess", speech and cow.

Yes to all. The fact that this river is so important in RV should make us think esp. about the impossibility of Talageri's OIT hypothesis which makes almost all the rest of IE group leave India during RgVeda, but carries no rememberance of this river; not even as a Goddess.

I think Talageri is only saying that the people from Iranian dominated area of Pamir valley migrated out to Europe. It doesn't require them to remember Saraswati river. Saraswati was important for Rig Vedic people and not as much for Avestan people.

[brihaspati]

From :

Reasons for the Persistence of Migrationism
Ann. Rev. Anthropology. 1978. 7:483-532
THE RETREAT FROM MIGRATIONISM
William Y Adams
Dennis P. Van Gerven
Richard S. Levy

PERSISTENCE OF THE CREATIONIST WORLD VIEW As we noted earlier, migration is the only explanation for culture change which is fully congruent with a creationist world view; as such it was the basic explanatory paradigm for change down to the nineteenth century. It was out of the anticreationist ideology of nineteenth century natural science that the rival paradigms both of evolutionism and of diffusionism arose, and in the study of culture these still remain more or less specifically anthropological concepts. There are large areas of the world, however, where the investigation of prehistory has not become exclusively or even primarily the province of anthropologists. European prehistorians are still as often trained in the classical-historical tradition as in the anthropological one, while Near Eastern archaeologists draw their interpretive paradigms from the ancient and traditional literature of their respective areas. It comes as no surprise to find that migrationist theory continues to flourish particularly in those parts of the world which have been least influenced by specifically anthropological thinking: eastern Europe, the Near East, and India. The relentless application of migration theory to every successive prehistoric stage by such scholars as Kenyon (127, pp. 36, 47, 60, 70, 82, 84), Reisner (181, pp. 5-6; 182, pp. 313-48), and Woolley (116, pp. 367-69) suggests that alternative explanations for culture change never occurred to them.

THE LINGERING AFTEREFFECTS OF RACISM [...]in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries racial and cultural data were often used in conjunction to suggest historical theories based on notions of differential creativity among peoples. In these circumstances the spread of "high cultures" at the expense of backward ones was often attributed to the movement of racially "superior"peoples (cf 185, pp. 30-37; 207; 221, pp. 119-24). Although the destruction of Nazism was accompanied by a general repudiation of this kind of thinking, there are remaining areas in which migration theory is not entirely free from notions of differential capacity among peoples. This is clearly apparent in the rather large body of theory relating to Indo-European migrations, although, curiously, the ancestral Indo-Europeans are imagined not as great creators but as great destroyers (54, pp. 141-54, 209-11; 66, pp. 853-59; 167, pp. 6-11; 172, pp. 78-97).

THE CONSTRAINTS OF SHORT CHRONOLOGY Daniel and others have pointed out that an evolutionary perspective requires a certain amount of chronological elbowroom (69, pp. 31-49). Thus the emergence of a general concept of evolution had to await the discovery of geologic time, for the 6000 or so years allowed by biblical commentators was simply insufficient time for the slow processes of adaptive mutation and of cultural innovation to take place. The same limitation applies in a lesser sense to diffusion theory, in that diffusion in culture history is usually conceived as a slower process than is the movement of peoples. Thus migration has been and remains the preferred explanation when major culture change must be fitted within a short period of time. As Grahame Clark has observed, even after the general acceptance of geologic time, the relatively conservative guess- dating applied to prehistoric cultures often did not allow sufficient time for the operation either of evolutionary or of diffusion processes.

THE INFLUENCE OF HUMANISTIC PARTICULARISM [...] Such active and successful field practitioners as Gordon Childe, Flinders Petrie, and Mortimer Wheeler probably never took an anthropology course in their lives. Their academic training was in the European tradition of classics and history, which means in the general climate of historical particularism. This is an approach which, when applied to cultural data, is generally anticomparative and consistently stresses differences as opposed to similarities between cultures. It is not surprising then that scholars like Kenyon (127), Reisner (181, 182), and Woolley (1 16), trained in the particularist tradition, should have been overimpressed by the seeming differences between successive cultures; differences which appeared to them so great that only migration could account for them.Very often anthropologists looking at the same data have seen much more cultural continuity than discontinuity, and have suggested that a migration theory raises more problems than it solves. [...]

OVEREMPHASIS ON "INDEX FOSSILS" [...] archaeologists dealing with cultural stratigraphy have learned to distinguish one time horizon from another by individual diagnostic traits which are analogous to "index fossils." These are invariably the most stylistically expressive of surviving culture elements: arrowheads until they are succeeded by pottery styles; pottery styles until they are succeeded by monumental architecture; monumental architecture until it gives way to language and literature.

[...] There is, however, a tendency to forget that traits which are valuable for heuristic purposes were not necessarily significant in any larger sense (cf 50, pp. 35-38; 126, pp. 132-33). For example, a truly extraordinary number of migration hypotheses have been suggested simply to account for the distribution of pottery styles (cf 180, p. 7), as though pottery styles are inherently more important and more demanding of explanation than are such nondiagnostic traits as basketry, stone technology, or domestic architecture. Setting aside the evidence of ceramics, we often find that the differences between supposed premigration and postmigration cultural horizons are few. Grieder has attempted to overcome this difficulty by suggesting that pottery change always mirrors more significant change in other domains of culture (107, p. 850), but W. Y. Adams argues that, at least in the historic period, no such correlation can be demonstrated (8).

OVERPERIODIZATION FROM FRAGMENTARY EVIDENCE [...] Still another factor is the tendency, in the early stages of investigation in a new area, to construct periodized culture chronologies before much actual data has come to hand. The first recognition of different archaeological "cultures" in the same regions usually results either from the investigation of "pure" sites (containing remains of only one horizon) of different types, or from relatively limited test cutting through stratified sites. Neither procedure gives an adequate measure of the extent of cultural continuity between one horizon and the next. Thus cultural discontinuities nearly always appear greater in the early stages of investigation than they do when more information has come to hand.
[...]

THE "HALO EFFECT" FROM TEXTUAL HISTORY In areas of the world with a long recorded history, and above all in the Near East, there has not been a sharp theoretical or methodological dividing line between prehistorians and excavators of historic remains. Excavators like Kenyon, Petrie, Reisner,and Woolley worked with equal facility both in prehistoric and in historic horizons. Since in the historic periods they looked for explanation and interpretation to the surviving textual records of these periods, it is hardly surprising that they attempted to apply the same interpretive models to the prehistoric horizons.
[...]

The fallacy of such reasoning lies in the fact that the evidence for migrations in the historic period is philological,not cultural. Without the supporting evidence of texts no single archaeological site, or even culture trait, can be identified specifically and exclusively as Sumerian or Akkadian, Amorite or Kassite or Hurrian. In short,the great population movements of the historic period brought about no recognizable culture changes except in the domain of language. And since we observably cannot argue from ethnic change to cultural change in the historic period, it follows that we also cannot argue from culture change to ethnic change in the prehistoric period(6,pp.202-3). The likelihood that culture change is apriori evidence of ethnic change still remains to be demonstrated (cf 166, pp. 485-86; 207).

THE ANTI-EVOLUTIONIST REACTION[...] As Daniel suggests, the Childean approach liberated the study of prehistory from the sterile culturological models characteristic of evolutionism and allowed the contemplation of social as well as cultural factors (69, p. 84). This approach has brought only limited enlightenment, however, partly because of Childe's own inability to distinguish diffusion and migration as separate processes.

[svinayak]

Yes to all. The fact that this river is so important in RV should make us think esp. about the impossibility of Talageri's OIT hypothesis which makes almost all the rest of IE group leave India during RgVeda, but carries no rememberance of this river; not even as a Goddess.


I think Talageri is only saying that the people from Iranian dominated area of Pamir valley migrated out to Europe. It doesn't require them to remember Saraswati river. Saraswati was important for Rig Vedic people and not as much for Avestan people.

OIT does not mean that they need to remember all the RgV things when they reach other regions. This is not a copy of the AIT/AMT. It cannot be made similar to Aryan invasion and it is a false suggestion.

[RamaY]

^ OIT could also mean that people who did not want to adher to Vedic systems and social rules moved out or kicked out. So there is a fair chance that they would deny their Vedic roots or twist them to suit their world-view at best.

[shiv]

Folks I would discard the horse argument with a snigger and a word of solace to the person who needs to depend on that to prove anything about the Rig veda.

I am not sure how many of you bothered to look at Arun Gupta's Horse domestication link, but that got me thinking.

You see the only proof that these people will accept as "real proof" that horses were domesticated is:

1. A dead horse's teeth have to be examined for wear of teeth caused by a "bit" that horses are supposed to hold in their mouths so that the horses head direction can be controlled. This is bullshit. Any horse owner soon figures out that the horse does not even have to open its mouth. Look at any jhatka gaadi in India. There no bit. What is used is a halter

This is a halter. Nothing goes in the horses mouth and teeth wear does not occur


2. Horses heads buried with people are used as "proof" of domestication

You know the reason why I spend time on this thread arguing is that we have to roll back a century of outright lies from people who have misled everyone. Perhaps they were misled themselves - for whatever reason. But the bullshit has to be rolled back. The horse domestication argument is complete and utter vacuous nonsense.

It is a strawman that says "Show me one grave in India with horse teeth that are worn out or horses buried with their owners and then I will take that as proof because that is what "we" have found in Central Asia"

But let me post a word of caution. The people who claim that horse domestication indicated by teeth wear and chariot remains are not wrong. They are right and they are even following what we call "science" by saying that teeth wear and chariot remains are absolute proof. That is 100% correct.

But the reverse argument is also correct and that needs to be acknowledged. If you do not find teeth wear in horse remains, and you do not find horses heads in graves and you do not find chariot remains it is not proof that the horse was not domesticated.

All Pakistanis are circumcised
All circumcised men are not Pakistani

Horse teeth wear indicates domestication
Absence of such teeth wear does not prove that the horse was not domesticated.

There is a layer of arguments here - rhetoric actually:

Rig Veda mentions domesticated horses. What proof do you have of domesticated horses? . What is not mentioned is that the "Proof of domestication that I will accept from is worn out horse teeth. I am telling you that all your horse remains absolutely must and should have been controlled using a horse "bit" in its mouth. I am not going to accept your protestation that domesticated horses could have been controlled by a halter" (which is kinder and less injurious and the horse struggles less.) It is OK if we on the forum argue like this but some of the the biggest names in the study of linguistics resort to this sort of bullshit and they need to be pulled down and dragged in the dirt because that is all that they will understand.

It goes without saying that even if 90% of horses were controlled with halters and 10% with bits, it is only the latter whose remains will be taken as "proof" of domestication. Showing ancient horse remains to these people is useless.

Chariot remains as proof of domestication is meaningless tripe. Horses do not need to be hitched to chariots at all, and oxen can be hitched to chariots

Burials with horse heads as proof of domestication begs the question, "Do Rabbit remains in graves indicate Rabbit domestication?". As Arun Gupta's pdf demonstrates, many of those horsey graves have only the head. No limbs. I suppose that means only the head was domesticated, not the trunk or limbs. The line of argument that the "Horse domestication-wallahs" use is no more than feeble rhetoric. The Rig Veda speaks of cremation as the way to handle the dead. People who are cremated are hardly likely to leave behind traces after 5 years, let alone 5000 years.

The horse argument can be rejected as fake, but it is important to try and figure out exactly why the horse argument became so important. The reason lies in the concerted effort to prove that the Rig Veda was not local. Why prove that the Rig Veda was not local? Why not dismiss it as some ancient nonsense rhyme? Problem is that it is not. The Rig Veda and Sanskrit are inconvenient to a world view that was born out of the idea of white European Christian superiority. The Rig Veda and Sanskrit cannot be allowed to be Indian alone. Someone outside India has to get the credit.

[shiv]

Here is Wiki on the known history of using the "bit" to control a horse. Clearly Rig Veda scholars out to make a big deal about horses don't seem to know this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_%28horse%29#History

It is likely that the first domesticated horses were ridden with some type of bitless headgear made of sinew, leather, or rope.[4] Components of the earliest headgear may be difficult to determine, as the materials would not have held up over time. For this reason, no one can say with certainty which came first, the bitted or the bitless bridle.[4] There is evidence of the use of bits, located in two sites of the Botai, dated about 3500-3000 BC.[5] Nose rings were used on the equids portrayed on the Standard of Ur, circa 2600 BCE - 2400 BCE. To date, the earliest artistic evidence of use of some form of bitless bridle was found in illustrations of Synian horseman, dated approximately 1400 BC.[6]

Now check out what Wiki says about bitless bridles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitless_bridle#Origins

The earliest artistic evidence of use of some form of bitless bridle was found in illustrations of Synian horseman, dated approximately 1400 BC.[3] However, domestication of the horse occurred between 4500 and 3500 BC,[4] while earliest evidence of the use of bits, located in two sites of the Botai culture, dates to about 3500-3000 BC.[5][6] Thus there is a very high probability that some sort of headgear was used to control horses prior to the development of the bit.

[member_22872]

Place names in Rig Veda:

Manish ji said:
Plenty of "kings" (राजन्) are mentioned but no place names. If the society is truly sedentary, they'd have names for places they delve in. A truly sedentary people will have some name for their village/hamlet however small it is. It strikes me that they name rivers, but not their hamlets.

Manish ji here. I will make another post for river names. You can read it in the link, but just wanted to post for easy reading.

III.A. Afghanistan

The only place-name from Afghanistan that we find in the Rigveda is “GandhArI”, and this name occurs only once in the whole of the Rigveda: in the general and late upa-maNDalas of MaNDala I (I.126.7).
But, the name is also found indirectly in the name of a divine class of beings associated with GandhAra, the gandharvas, who are referred to in the following verses:

I.22.14; 163.2;
III.38.6;
VIII.1.11; 77.5;
IX.83.4; 85.12; 86.36; 113.3;
X.10.4; 11.2; 85.40, 41; 123.4, 7; 136.6; 139.4, 6; 177.2.

III.B. Punjab
The Punjab is known in the Rigveda as “Saptasindhu”.

There are other phrases in the Rigveda which mean “seven rivers”; but these do not constitute references to the Punjab, as seven is a number commonly applied in the Rigveda to various entities to indicate “all” or “many”.
However, the word “Saptasindhu” in the Rigveda (and, for that matter, Hapta-HAndu in the Avesta) is clearly a name for a specific region, which is generally and correctly identified by the scholars with the Punjab (the Land of the Five Rivers ensconsed between two more: the Indus in the west and the SarasvatI in the east).

The Saptasindhu is referred to in the following verses:
I.32.12; 35.8;
II. 12.3, 12;
IV.28.1;
VIII.54.4; 69.12; 96.1;
IX.66.6;
X.43.3; 67.12.

If Afghanistan is directly or indirectly referred to only in the Late MaNDalas, the Punjab is referred to only in the Middle and Late MaNDalas.

III.C. Haryana

The region in Haryana known as KurukSetra or BrahmAvarta in ancient times was considered to be the holiest place on earth.

However, neither the word Kuruksetra, nor the word BrahmAvarta, is found in the Rigveda.

But the Rigveda refers to this holy region by other names or epithets: it is known as vara A pRthivyA (the best place on earth) or nAbhA pRthivyA (the navel or centre of the earth); and two specific places in this region are named in the hymns: ILAyAspada or ILaspada, and MAnuSa.

These two places are clearly named in III.23.4: “He (DevavAta) set thee in the best place on earth (vara A pRthivyA) in ILAyAspada, on an auspicious day. Shine brightly, Agni, on the DRSadvatI, on MAnuSa on the ApayA, and on the SarasvatI.”

The above is not Griffith’s translation: he translates ILAyAspada literally as “ILA’s place” and misinterprets it as a reference to a fire-altar (any fire-altar); likewise, he translates MAnuSa as “man”.

However, the meaning of the verse is clear. And we find detailed confirmation of the identity and location of these two places in the MahAbhArata:
Mbh. III.81.53-54: “Then from there one should go to the world-famous ManuSa… By bathing (in the lake) there, a man who is chaste and master of his senses is cleansed of all evils, and (he) glories in the world of heaven.”
Mbh. III.81.55-56: “The distance of a cry east of MAnuSa, there is a river called ApagA, visited by the Siddhas;… when one brahmin is fed there, it is as though a crore of them have been fed.”

M.L. Bhargava, in his brilliant research on the subject points out that these places are still extant: MAnuSa is still known as MAnas, still a pilgrim centre, a village 3½ miles northwest of Kaithal; the ApayA or ApagA tIrtha is still recognised at Gadli between MAnas and Kaithal; and ILAyAspada or ILaspada at SAraka is the present-day Shergadh, 2 miles to the southeast of Kaithal: “MAnuSa and IlAspada were thus situated on the right and left sides of the ApayA, about 5½ miles apart, and in the tract between the DRSadvatI and the SarasvatI.”7

The following are the verses which refer to these places in Haryana:

a. Vara A pRthivyA:
III. 23.4; 53.11.
b. NAbhA pRthivyA:
I.143.4;
II.3.7;
III.5.9; 29.4;
IX.72.7; 79.4; 82.3; 86.8
X.1.6.
c. ILaspada/ILAyAspada:
I. 128.1;
II. 10.1;
III. 23.4; 29.4;
VI. 1.2;
X. 1.6; 70.1; 91.1, 4; 191.1.
d. MAnuSa:
I. 128.7;
III. 23.4.

III.D. Uttar Pradesh:

The Uttar Pradesh of the present-day is more or less equivalent to the land known in ancient literature as AryAvarta or MadhyadeSa. Neither the word AryAvarta, nor the word MadhyadeSa, is found in the Rigveda. Nor is there any direct reference in the hymns to any place in Uttar Pradesh.

But, the AnukramaNIs provide us with a priceless clue: hymns IX.96 and X.179.2 are composed by a late Bharata RSi who (like many other composers in MaNDala X and the corresponding parts of MaNDala IX) attributes his compositions to his remote ancestor, Pratardana. He, accordingly, uses the epithets of his ancestor: in IX.96, the epithet is DaivodAsI (son or descendant of DivodAsa); and in X.179.2, the epithet is KASirAja (King of KASI).

Pratardana was a king of KASI, which is in eastern Uttar Pradesh. This can only mean that the Bharata Kings of the Early Period of the Rigveda were Kings of KASI; and, in the light of the other information in the Rigveda, the land of the Bharatas extended from KASI in the east to KurukSetra in the west.

III.E. Bihar

The most historically prominent part of ancient Bihar was Magadha, also known as KIkaTa.

While the word Magadha is not found in the Rigveda, the word KIkaTa is found in III.53.14. The reference is to SudAs’s battle with the KIkaTas and their king Pramaganda (whose name is connected by many scholars with the word Magadha = Pra-maganda).

This clinches the origin of the Bharatas in Uttar Pradesh: the expansion of the Bharatas under SudAs took place in two directions, eastwards into Bihar, and westwards across the SarasvatI into the Punjab. Clearly, only a homeland in the area between KASI and KurukSetra fits into this picture.

[A_Gupta]

The latest on horses:
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/21/8202.abstract

[member_22872]

Rivers in Rig Veda:

Chronological mention of rivers in various mandalas:



River system :

1. In the pre-Rigvedic period and the early part of the Early Period (MaNDala VI), the Vedic Aryans were inhabitants of an area to the east of the SarasvatI.

2. In the course of the Early Period (MaNDalas III and VII), and the early part of the Middle Period (MaNDala IV and the middle upa-maNDalas), there was a steady expansion westwards.

3. Though there was an expansion westwards, the basic area of the Vedic Aryans was still restricted to the east in the Middle Period (MaNDala II), and even in the early parts of the Late Period: MaNDala V knows the western rivers from the KubhA (Kabul) in the north to the Sarayu (Siritoi) in the south, but its base is still in the east. SarasvatI is still the most important river in the MaNDala: it is referred to by the eponymous RSi Atri (V.42.12; 43.11) who also refers to the RasA (V.41.15). All the other references to the western rivers (Sarayu, KubhA, Krumu, AnitabhA, RasA, Sindhu) occur in a single verse (V.53.9) by a single RSi SyAvASva, obviously a very mobile RSi who also refers elsewhere to the ParuSNI (V.52.9) and even the YamunA (V.52.17).

4. In the later part of the Late Period (MaNDalas VIII, IX, X, and the general and late upa-maNDalas) the Vedic Aryans were spread out over the entire geographical horizon of the Rigveda.

The graph of the rivers clearly shows that there was a westward expansion of the Vedic Aryans from the time of SudAs onwards.

In the Early period, right from pre-Rigvedic times to the time of SudAs, the Vedic Aryans were settled in the area to the east of the Punjab: MaNDala VI knows of no river to the west of the SarasvatI.

However, in the MaNDalas and upa-maNDalas following MaNDala VI, we find a steady movement westwards:

a. MaNDala III refers to the first two rivers of the Punjab from the east: the SutudrI and the VipAS.

b. MaNDala VII refers to the next two rivers of the Punjab from the east: the ParuSNI and AsiknI.

c. The middle upa-maNDalas of MaNDala I contain the first reference to the Indus, but none to the rivers west of the Indus.

d. MaNDala IV contains the first references to rivers west of the Indus.

If the case for the westward expansion is strong enough even merely from the evidence of the names of the rivers, it becomes unimpeachable when we examine the context in which these names appear in the hymns:

1. The SutudrI and VipAS are not referred to in a casual vein. They are referred to in a special context: hymn III.33 is a special ode to these two rivers by ViSvAmitra in commemoration of a historical movement of the warrior bands of the Bharatas led by SudAs and himself, across the billowing waters of these rivers.

What is important is that this hymn is characterized by the Western scholars themselves as a historical hymn commemorating the migratory movement of the Vedic Aryans across the Punjab.,

But the Western scholars depict it as a movement from the west to the east: Griffith calls the hymn “a relic of the traditions of the Aryans regarding their progress eastward in the land of the Five Rivers”.

However, an examination of the facts leaves no doubt that the direction of this historical movement was from the east to the west: the very distribution of the river-names in the Rigveda, as apparent from our graph of the rivers, makes this clear.

But there is more specific evidence within the hymns to show that this movement was from the east to the west:

SudAs is a descendant of DivodAsa (VII.18.25), DivodAsa is a descendant of SRnjaya (VI.47.22 and Griffith’s footnotes to it) and SRnjaya is a descendant of DevavAta (IV.15.4): SudAs is therefore clearly a remote descendant of DevavAta.

DevavAta established the sacrificial fire on the banks of the ApayA between the SarasvatI and the DRSadvatI (III.23.3-4) The SarasvatI is to the east of the VipAS and SutudrI, and the ApayA and DRSadvatI are even further east. No ancestor of SudAs is associated with any river to the west of the SarasvatI.

On the Direction of Movement of Vedic Indians:

The historical movement of the Vedic Aryans across the SutudrI and the VipAS, at the time of SudAs, can only be a westward movement.

2. The ParuSNI and AsiknI, also, are not referred to in a casual vein: they also are referred to in a special context. The context is a major battle fought on the ParuSNI by the Bharatas under SudAs and VasiSTha (who replaced ViSvAmitra as the priest of SudAs).

The direction of the movement is crystal clear in this case as well: SudAs with his earlier priest ViSvAmitra is associated with the SutudrI and VipAS, and with his later priest VasiSTha is associated with the ParuSNI which is to the west of the two other rivers.

But there is more specific evidence in MaNDala VII about the direction of movement in this battle, which is the subject of various references throughout the MaNDala:

a. The battle is fought on the ParuSNI and the enemies of SudAs (who is referred to here as the PUru) are described in VII.5.3 as the people of the AsiknI. The AsiknI is to the west of the ParuSNI hence it is clear that the enemies of SudAs are fighting from the west of the ParuSNI while SudAs is fighting from the east.

Curiously, Griffith mistranslates the name of the river AsiknI as “dark-hued”, thereby killing two birds with one stone: the people of the AsiknI become “the dark-hued races”, thereby wiping out the sense of direction inherent in the reference, while at the same time introducing the racial motif

b. In VII.83.1, two of the tribes fighting against SudAs, the PRthus and the ParSus, are described as marching eastwards (prAcA) towards him.

Griffith again mistranslates the names of the tribes as “armed with broad axes” and the word prAcA as “forward”.

c. VII.6.5 refers indirectly to this battle by talking of the defeat of the tribes of Nahus (i.e. the tribes of the Anus and Druhyus who fought against SudAs) as follows: “Far, far away hath Agni chased the Dasyus, and, in the east, hath turned the godless westward”. SudAs is therefore clearly pressing forward from the east.

3. The first references to the Indus are in the middle upa-maNDalas (I.83.1) and in MaNDala IV (IV.30.12; 54.6; 55.3). There is, perhaps, a westward movement indicated even in the very identity of the composers of the hymns which contain these references: I.83 is composed by Gotama RAhUgaNa who does not refer to any river west of the Indus, while the references in MaNDala IV are by his descendants, the VAmadeva Gautamas, who also refer to two rivers to the west of the Indus (IV.18.8; 30.18).

Thus, we have a clear picture of the westward movement of the Vedic Aryans from their homeland in the east of the SarasvatI to the area to the west of the Indus, towards the end of the Early Period of the Rigveda: IV.30.18 refers to what is clearly the westermnost point in this movement, a battle fought in southern Afghanistan “on yonder side of Sarayu”.
[/quote]

There are three rivers named in the Rigveda to which this applies: the SarasvatI, GomatI and Sarayu. The SarasvatI in the Rigveda is the river to the east of the Punjab (flowing through Haryana) and the GomatI and Sarayu in the Rigveda are rivers to the west of the Punjab (western tributaries of the Indus). This is the general consensus, and it is confirmed by an examination of the references in the Rigveda.

But a SarasvatI (HaraxvaitI) and a Sarayu (Haroiiu) are also found in Afghanistan; and a GomatI and a Sarayu are found in northeastern Uttar Pradesh. Clearly, there has been a transfer of name, in the case of these three river-names, from one river to another.

Some scholars, not satisfied with the idea that the Vedic Aryans came from the west, attempt to show that they were still in the west even during the period of composition of the Rigveda: the Saptasindhu, it is suggested by some, refers to seven rivers in Central Asia, and the SarasvatI in the Rigveda is not the river of Haryana, but the river of Afghanistan.

You can read it all from here:
wiki page for Nadistuti http://www.tri-murti.com/ancientindia/r ... ry/ch4.htm has a link at the bottom:
http://www.tri-murti.com/ancientindia/r ... ry/ch4.htm

Even if one disputes the chronology of the various mandalas, the mention of river names and places can't be ignored.

[member_22872]

As per Michael Witzel, Sanskritist of Harvard residence, .... The paucity of water in the Helmand compared to the mighty Saraswati river of the Rg Veda is attributed by Witzel to the fact that the Aryan composers of the Rg Veda were prone to great exaggeration.

Arun Gupta ji you already might have come across RV 10.75 the famous Nadistuti:
ga~NgA - yamunA - sarasvatI- shutudri (Sutlej)-paruShNi (Ravi) – asikni (Chenab) – marudvR^idha (maruvardhan) - vitastA (Jhelum) – ArjIkI (Haro) – suShomA (Sohan).

In that there is no hyperbole, just a mention of rivers flanking one anoother and as per wiki:
The late Rigvedic Nadistuti sukta enumerates all important rivers from the Ganges in the east up to the Indus in the west in a clear geographical order. Here (RV 10.75.5), the sequence "Ganges, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Shutudri" places the Sarasvati between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, which is consistent with the Ghaggar identification.

Shows to prove that not always RV is full of exaggeration and hyperbole and the verse also places Sarasvati river in India.

[member_22872]

THE "HALO EFFECT" FROM TEXTUAL HISTORY In areas of the world with a long recorded history, and above all in the Near East, there has not been a sharp theoretical or methodological dividing line between prehistorians and excavators of historic remains. Excavators like Kenyon, Petrie, Reisner,and Woolley worked with equal facility both in prehistoric and in historic horizons. Since in the historic periods they looked for explanation and interpretation to the surviving textual records of these periods, it is hardly surprising that they attempted to apply the same interpretive models to the prehistoric horizons.
[...]

The fallacy of such reasoning lies in the fact that the evidence for migrations in the historic period is philological,not cultural. Without the supporting evidence of texts no single archaeological site, or even culture trait, can be identified specifically and exclusively as Sumerian or Akkadian, Amorite or Kassite or Hurrian. In short,the great population movements of the historic period brought about no recognizable culture changes except in the domain of language. And since we observably cannot argue from ethnic change to cultural change in the historic period, it follows that we also cannot argue from culture change to ethnic change in the prehistoric period(6,pp.202-3). The likelihood that culture change is apriori evidence of ethnic change still remains to be demonstrated (cf 166, pp. 485-86; 207).

Very aptly said about linguistic and phonetic analysis and applying it to make migratory predictions mainly applicable to Indian context. May be it should be demanded from linguists that they substantiate their linguistic claims through some archeological proof than make a prediction and they throw the burden of disproving linguistic analysis at others. They should be burdened with substantiating their philological migration theories through proof or they should simply hold their peace.

[harbans]

Rama who ruled out of Ayodhya sent out a Horse to expand his Kingdom. Luv and Kush stayed in the area known as Lahore where they caught the Horse and threw a challenge. As the Ramayana is dated much before, does this piece of 'mythology' help in the debate? When do they date the Ramayana if at all. Ayodhya seems quite real to me, so why not the Horse mentioned in it?

[member_22872]

Harbans ji, Ramayana would be brushed off as fable, a nice bed time story. Firstly why do we have to provide proof everytime they ask for? Firstly PIE is a 'reconstructed' hypothetical language, yet they don't have problem basing and advancing their migration theories based on that, and when you present dates like Mahabharata around 3067BCE based on astronomical planetary alignment observations and described in MB, they then ask why no remains of horse found from during that era, they don't flinch a bit that firstly it is them who are basing their theories on PIE which doesn't even exist.

[RajeshA]

Published on Oct 25, 2009
By jk
The Aryan Debate: Horse: Varnam

In 1974, archaeologists J. P. Joshi and A. K. Sharma found horse bones in Surkotada, a Harappan site in Gujarat. This was a sensational discovery: first, it was the bones of a horse and second, it was dated to the period 2265 B.C.E. to 1480 B.C.E, which corresponds to the Mature Harappan period.

one of the earliest claims of horse is dated to 4500 B.C.E in the Aravalli range in Rajasthan – the same place from where the Harappans got their copper. This period is the same time when horse was first domesticated in the world.

The find at Surkotada upset this narrative because it crossed a lakshman rekha into Mature Harappan and also violated the threshold for the Indo-Aryan arrival. Hence the findings themselves became suspect ? – at least till 1991.

The eminent archaeozoologist, Sandor Bokonyi, was in Pune to attend a workshop on ‘Prehistoric contacts between South Asia and Africa’ at the Deccan College. Following the conference he spent some time in Delhi where the Excavation Branch of the ASI showed him the finds from Surkotada which consisted of six samples, mostly teeth. After examining the artifacts, he concluded that they were not of a half-ass, but a real domesticated horse

Meadow believes that horses could have come to the region, maybe by 2000 B.C.E since there is figurine evidence and painted shreds in Swat

In 1971, K. R Alur found horse bones from a Neolithic site in Hallur, Karnataka and they were dated between 1500 and 1300 B.C.E. Alur’s report sparked a controversy and he was asked to clarify his find since it went against the prevalent belief that Aryans introduced the horse around 1500 B.C.E. A re-excavation of Hallur was done and 21 years later Allur reported that he had indeed found the true horse and he could not deny or alter this scientific fact.

Besides these, there have been other finds as well which includes horse teeth from Baluchistan dating to a pre-Harappan level, from Allahabad (2265 – 1480 B.C.E), horse bones dated between 2450 and 2000 B.C.E in Chambal Valley, and an upper molar from Kalibangan. Horse remains have been found in other locations — in Mohenjo-daro, Rupar, Inamgaon, and Kalibangan —- but they all are from a later period.

Also, E.J.H Mackay in 1931 and R.E.M.Wheeler in 1968 found terracotta models of animals in Mohenjo-daro and one of them was the horse. From this Wheeler concluded that the horse was known from an earlier period in Baluchistan. Thus, from a complete absence of horse, we see little evidence of horse remains around the subcontinent, but not quite a lot. Maybe horse bones are lying undiscovered in various bags in Indian museums

But if the Indo-Aryans bought the horses shouldn’t we see an explosion of horse remains and depiction of horse in art after 1500 B.C.E? In fact horse remains are rare even after 1500 B.C.E. Also, it is around the Mauryan period – around 350 B.C.E — that the depictions of horse and lion gains popularity. Thus the time period 2000 – 1500 B.C.E was not significant regarding the arrival of horse in India. So much for that.

The people of the subcontinent had trade relations with the external world much before 1500 B.C.E. Also the trade relations between various parts of India and the Near East, dating as far back as 4000 BCE with the find of cotton in Dhuwelia and carnelian bead in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE, showed that trade need not introduce a cultural change or introduce new people. Isn’t it possible that the horse too arrived just like that due to the trade relations with Central Asia?

Finally, consider this: is the horse required to identify a site as Indo-Aryan? The Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex is another Indo-Aryan site where the horse was depicted in grave goods was never found in large numbers in excavations. But this lack of horse bones did not prevent scholars from identifying it as an Indo-Aryan culture, so why not the Indus valley?

[disha]

You are right here - the armada of horse-riders from steppes is a myth. Most steppe chariot burials also have prestige objects - meaning chariots were always an elite possession.

Thanks! Prestige possessions are given exalted status and across several cultures (including Maya) only prestige or rare possessions are sacrificed. Sacrificing the mundane and easily obtainable is not a sacrifice at all.

And the severity of winter gives another important advantage to a people who have domesticated horse. The horse will remove snow with it's hooves and get at the grass below. But cattle don't do that - an attested behaviour

.

First of all sir, please do not make off-the-cuff remark to defend your position and tarnish your reputation.

A cow can survive severe weather (including deep snow, thunderstorms) extremely well. They know how to dig under snow (BTW, a 2-3 feet of snow is an excellent blanket) to find forage to survive through deep winter (yes seen that). I have seen Bisons dig under 4-6 feet of snow to find forage easily*. Extremely domesticated cows (some cows reside in special air-conditioned "houses" with daily massages) can easily be retrained to dig under snow for forage in 1-2 days (this are the couch potatoes of the cow).

Now you do not have to rely on my attestation:

1. Here is a video of cow foraging under snow: unattested behaviour of cow foraging under snow

2. Here is a farmer talking about the benefits of winter grazing (note the american cow is meant for the table as beef, so their sizes and quality of meat matters a lot to the farmer): http://www.grit.com/daily-commute/Winte ... attle.aspx

3. Bisons range before they were killed off for sport using guns: http://www.nwf.org/Wildlife/Wildlife-Li ... Bison.aspx. Central Canada is cold!

4. Here is a farming manual (the message is for farmers who think human instead of cow): http://ohioline.osu.edu/b872/b872_5.html

*4-6 feet of snow is extremely heavy. It is enough to bury most of the humans standing up. And this is average snow across huge (several square miles) of pastures.

** Horses are at a disadvantage in snow. First of all with their hooves they can get at most to 1 or 2 feet of snow (horseplay for cows) and second the nutritional value of some of the graze they get is that of a cardboard (yes - cardboard, you can feed that to your cow or goat in winter and they will just be fine - a little gassy with emissions problem though). Horses do not have the advantage of cow of a large stomach. They have to continuously feed and they need high energy feed compared to the slow lumbering cow. You are welcome to do the research, there are several attested notes on the web.

Bottomline: There is no point in having a horse in the eurasian steppe to control the cattle. The line of thinking that horses provided an enormous advantage to control cattle has to be dropped. In fact it was a clear disadvantage. Again outside of western cowboy movies (and usage of horse for cattle - that is a distinct 19th century invention)., the whole horseplay around the horsemen having an advantage over others w.r.t cattle some 5-6kya should be done away with.

This is one more indictment against the AIT/AMT wallahs on the usage of horse.

Coming to my conjecture: I think there was not one OIT., there were multiple OITs, the last one was in 10/11 century AD and the current one is already underway (the national dish for UK is butter chicken for eg.). I am collecting material to provide basis to that conjecture - in the meantime - AIT/AMT can be done away with.

[disha]

Folks I would discard the horse argument with a snigger and a word of solace to the person who needs to depend on that to prove anything about the Rig veda.

I am not sure how many of you bothered to look at Arun Gupta's Horse domestication link, but that got me thinking.

You see the only proof that these people will accept as "real proof" that horses were domesticated is:

1. A dead horse's teeth have to be examined for wear of teeth caused by a "bit" that horses are supposed to hold in their mouths so that the horses head direction can be controlled. This is bullshit. Any horse owner soon figures out that the horse does not even have to open its mouth. Look at any jhatka gaadi in India. There no bit. What is used is a halter

This is a halter. Nothing goes in the horses mouth and teeth wear does not occur

Thanks sir for the above image! Just to add those leather halter do not survive to be found archeolgically! I do remember the tonga wallas not using a bit and when I saw one here, I thought it was too dangerous and dirty!!

[disha]

^ OIT could also mean that people who did not want to adher to Vedic systems and social rules moved out or kicked out. So there is a fair chance that they would deny their Vedic roots or twist them to suit their world-view at best.

OIT could also mean that due to economic, population and environmental pressures, there is a movement out.

I need a little help. I am trying to ascertain when the svetambar/digambar split in Jains occurred. Due to plague a large section of Jains moved to South and they were digambars. When some of them came back, they found that Svetambar philosophy had risen and thus the split. Certain cultural habits of Jains (like drinking only once boiled water in preferably copper/brass/bonze) attest to a disease free environment.

My line of thinking is that such pressures on large populations triggered several small and large waves of migrations outside (why South? Why not North? Or East or West?) from the Saptha-Sindhu/Sarasvati complex.

We already have a proof point in Gypsies doing an OIT in recent memory. The other being all the punjabis in Canada (Canada has become an extended punjab).

[RajeshA]

disha ji,

in fact, it is possible that the horse itself was the reason for some Bharatiyas to move out of the Sapta-Sindhu region northwards. The Rigveda attests to it that the horse was indeed a very prestige animal. So if people can move to California and settle there because of the California Gold Rush, perhaps many enterprising Bharatiyas moved Northwards as well, to tap into the big "Steppe Horse Rush".

This could have been the case with Tocharians, Iranians and others.

I personally can't think why this should not have been a motivation for Bharatiyas of that time.

[vishvak]

From wiki link on Acharya Bhadrabahu

While there Bhadrabahu was able to foresee through his nimitta jnan (subtle cognition of causes and effects) that there would be a 12-year famine across North India. He decided the famine would make it harder for monks to survive and migrated with a group of monks to South India, bringing with him Chandragupta, the founder of the Mauryan Empire[1] turned Jain monk.[2]

Also notice mention of Chandragupta.
Another link History section

[RajeshA]

A paper

Volume 13, Issue 1, 1997
By Sándor Bökönyi
Horse Remains From the Prehistoric Site of Surkotada, Kutch, Late 3rd Millennium B.C.: South Asia Studies

[A_Gupta]

Apropos of nothing, we call the telephone the telephone and not a door-bhashi-yantra. So it is interesting that the Sumerians called the horse "ass of the mountains" (as per wiki) and not the name as given by the people who are said to have domesticated it (some derivation from PIE over 1400 years prior.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_horse

"Later, images of horses, identified by their short ears, flowing manes, and tails that bushed out at the dock, began to appear in artistic media in Mesopotamia during the Akkadian period, 2300-2100 BCE. The word for "horse", literally translated as ass of the mountains, first appeared in Sumerian documents during the Third Dynasty of Ur, about 2100-2000 BCE.[43][44] The kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur apparently fed horses to lions for royal entertainment, perhaps indicating that horses were still regarded as more exotic than useful, but King Shulgi, about 2050 BCE, compared himself to “a horse of the highway that swishes its tail”, and one image from his reign showed a man apparently riding a horse at full gallop.[45] Horses were imported into Mesopotamia and the lowland Near East in larger numbers after 2000 BCE in connection with the beginning of chariot warfare."

[shiv]

disha ji,

in fact, it is possible that the horse itself was the reason for some Bharatiyas to move out of the Sapta-Sindhu region northwards. The Rigveda attests to it that the horse was indeed a very prestige animal. So if people can move to California and settle there because of the California Gold Rush, perhaps many enterprising Bharatiyas moved Northwards as well, to tap into the big "Steppe Horse Rush".

This could have been the case with Tocharians, Iranians and others.

I personally can't think why this should not have been a motivation for Bharatiyas of that time.

Rajesh you may well be right. But first I think the Into India theory needs to be dealt its last death blows after which one can ask "Hey what the fuq was this greatly developed Sanskrit and associated gyan doing in India and India alone for 1000 years before Buddhism spread out in 500 BC?" You see the whole world is accustomed to looking at the subject as though people came in and brought in the languages and memories that resulted in the Rig Veda. This is nonsense. Even without arguing against a PIE you can say that Sanskrit based knowledge in 1500 BC probably did diffuse out and did not wait till 500 BC (Buddha) and 600 AD (Maths/Astronomy). Current bullshiiting claims it was all in in in into India

[Vayutuvan]

Rivers in Rig Veda:
Chronological mention of rivers in various mandalas:

Venug garu

Could you please explain what mandalas are for the benefit of those of us who don't know.

[A_Gupta]

From when I was more interested in this stuff:
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2005/1 ... dians.html
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2005/1 ... contd.html
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2005/1 ... swati.html

[A_Gupta]

"Hey what the fuq was this greatly developed Sanskrit and associated gyan doing in India and India alone for 1000 years before Buddhism spread out in 500 BC?"

You are not aware that the date of the Buddha has been under intense attack for the last decade or so? The idea is to make the Buddha more recent by 150 years or so, making it possible for the Greeks to have influenced the Upanishads, and so on.

e.g., see this, please read it through:
http://indology.info/papers/cousins/node4/

and here is the conclusion

It is clear that if the objective of these volumes was to find absolute proof as to the exact date of the Buddha, then they would have failed. No method or evidence we have at the present is sufficient to establish that to the strictest standards of evidence. What certainly has been done is a firmly dethrone the old consensus - it is not impossible that the long chronology may yet be rehabilitated, but someone will have to undertake the task. From the point of view of reasonable probability the evidence seems to favour some kind of median chronology and we should no doubt speak of a date for the Buddha's Mahaparinibbana of c.400 B.C - I choose the round number deliberately to indicate that the margins are rather loose.

It follows that the date of Mahavira and kings such as Pasenadi or Bimbisara must be correspondingly brought down, as they are part of the same historical context. Probably also the date of the Upanisads must be later and possible connexions with the Greek world must be rethought.

PS: I have not examined it, but people dispute Heinz Bechert's archaelogical arguments.

[ukumar]

We are spinning wheel on the horse argument. Here is Edwin Brayant's concluding summery of the horse argument in the book Indo Aryan Controversy 10 years back. We haven't covered new ground

"Some caveats seem to be in order, here: the first point that needs to be established is that, in terms of its proto-Indo-European pedigree, there seems to be awidespread opinion among linguists, going back at least to Fraser (1926), that considering *ekwosto have been a domesticated horse involves accepting some major assumptions which can easily be called into question. We don’t know if the term referred to equus caballusLinn or some other type of equid in the proto-period, we don’t know if it referred to a domesticated horse or a wild horse, and, allowing that it did refer to a domesticated equus caballus Linn, we cannot rule out the possibility that it was a late loanword that circulated around the IE-speaking area (D’iakonov 1985; Coleman 1988; Diebold 1987; Zimmer 1990; Dolgopolsky 1993; Lehmann 1993). Clearly, if the word for horse could have circulated afterthe dispersal of the IEs, and then been restructured according to individual dialects, then stating that the IEs knew the horse beforetheir dispersal and must therefore have inhabited an area wherein the horse is native (and eliminating other areas where the evidence for the horse is a later phenomenon) is barking up the wrong tree. Furthermore even if *ekwosdoes refer to a PIE domesticated caballusLinn, horse domestication may well have occurred in the steppes, since this is the natural habitatof the animal, but it is an unwarranted assumption to then conclude that the IEhomeland must have also been in the same area. The horse could have been very well known to the proto-Indo-Europeans in their original homeland without the horse necessarily being a native of that homeland, or they themselves its domesticators. Of course, in the Indian context, irrespective of the referent of PIE *ekwos, there is little dispute that the ¸gvedadoes refer abundantly to equus caballusLinn, and one cannot fault scholars using the first appearance of these specific horse bones in the archaeological record as an approximate terminus post quemfor this text. However, although the horse has always been highly valued in India – from the Vedic, through the Epic, and up to the Sultanate period, it has always been an elite item – it has always been an import from the Northwest and never indigenous (although foreign breeds have been imported and bred on the subcontinent with varying degrees of success, especially up in the Northwest – later Vedic texts speak about the fine horses of Kandahar and other places). One must accordingly be wary of making the Indo-Aryans themselves overly synonymous with the horse. horse could have been imported in the proto-historic period, just as it has been throughout the historic period, but this in itself need not indicate a priori that the Indo-Aryans were imports as well, especially if the domestic horse was a post-IndoEuropean development that circulated throughout the various dialects as Lehmann (1993) has argued, or an item known only in some areas where the proto-IndoEuropean dialects were spoken as Colemann (1988) has suggested."

[Vayutuvan]

ukumar ji

Is it from this book by Edwin Bryant?

The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (Oxford University Press, 2001)

That summary very succinctly points out the fallacy in the AIT/AMT camp argument.

From wikipedia

J. P. Mallory commented on this book: "Edwin Bryant's The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture ... systematically exposes the logical weaknesses of most of the arguments that support the consensus of either side. This is not only an important work in the field of Indo-Aryan studies but a long overdue challenge for scholarly fair play."

So, what are the weaknesses in the OIT camp's argument? Probably should have to read the book. Sitting on the fence seems the correct course of action, at least for now.

[member_22872]

Could you please explain what mandalas are for the benefit of those of us who don't know.

matrim garu,
I am not a vedic scholar, I am learning myself, but Rig Veda appears to be divided into roughly 10 books or sections or Mandalas. While each Mandala consists of suktas. It is proposed that all the ten mandalas aren't composed in the same time period but the composition is spread across time. Rig Veda before it was put into written form, was passed on from generation to generation through verbal transmission (pl look at the Story of India documentary), so in actuality no one know when Rig Veda was composed. Even the dates of composition are hotly debated. some mandalas like 2-7 are supposed to be composed by some families hence are called the family books:
from wiki:
2-7 books/mandalas->oldest
1 and 10 are the youngest
8 and 9th composed middle(perhaps)
Chronology wise Talageri places them in this order:
an earlier group consisting of books II III IV VI VII and a later group consisting of books V I VIII IX X. Chronology of earliest books is hotly debated for obvious reasons as it pushes the date of composition into antiquity or makes them very recent compositions in a relative sense.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

[ramana]

Arun Gupta, There was a reference to "ass of the mountains' in Tamil(?) on this very thread!

Its called konda gurram

http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 3#p1291663

[member_22872]

Shiv garu and Arun Gupta ji,

Some Vedic scholars don't consider Gautama Buddha to be the same as Vaidiki Buddha. The former is nastika, there is no way astikas would bow to him or consider him to be Vishnu reincarnation. So one has to be careful to base Buddha's dating periods when one bases them on Hindu scriptures. There are many Buddhas so which one in particular hindus are mentioning is to be first ascertained.

[shiv]

Shiv garu and Arun Gupta ji,

Some Vedic scholars don't consider Gautama Buddha to be the same as Vaidiki Buddha. The former is nastika, there is no way astikas would bow to him or consider him to be Vishnu reincarnation. So one has to be careful to base Buddha's dating periods when one bases them on Hindu scriptures. There are many Buddhas so which one in particular hindus are mentioning is to be first ascertained.

Buddha dating is a secondary issue if we stick to what is being claimed about the Rig Veda.

RV was composed by people with strong steppe memory, and a steppe culture where mighty rivers do flow.

This theory is an attempt by linguists to reconcile their theories (not facts) with existing archaeological findings to try and make them come true.

• A series of related languages have been found over a large contiguous land area, of which Rig Veda is the oldest by using dating methods that allow for a pre-assumed "Into India" theory
• Archaeological findings in one corner of that large contiguous area of land have shown remains reminiscent of references in the Rig Veda.

Therefore the these two bits of information - (1) the "dating of Rig Veda" based on an earlier assumption + (2) discovery of objects in graves similar to that described in Rig Veda have been linked together by "scholars" to say that the Rig Veda refers to memories from the steppes.

Two assumptions have been converted to fact. To find out where this idea comes from you need to look at earlier "established" theories of who is supposed to have gone from where to where.

The first theory is that Indians and Iranians come from the same stock and that they both originated in the central Asian steppes. The central Asian steppes in turn has archaeological remains from what is called as the "Andronovo" culture which has all those graves with chariots and domesticated horses. There is absolutely NO evidence of an Andronovo language. Most web references say that the "Indo-Iranian" people are "associated" with the Andronovo culture. Why? Because the horses and chariots fit in with what is known of "Indo-Iranian" langauges.

It is stated by linguists that:
1. North Indian languages are descended from "Indo-Iranian" (Sanskrit, Avestan, Iranian)
2. Indo-Iranian languages are descended from "proto Indo-Iranian - a hypothetical non existent language like PIE
3. This cooked up hypothetical Proto Indo-Iranian was spoken in the Anrdonovo culture region (steppes) whose language is actually unknown. No evidence of any such language exists.

In fact if you look at the language of the Zoroastrians (Avestan) it is almost exactly like Sanskrit. In fact Avestan may be a branch of Sanskrit. But that is not what lingusts say. They say language came down from central Asia (offering no linguistic evidence for this, only horse bones, and manure from one area). This imaginarly languagee came towards India and Iran and split into Iranian, Avestan (Zoroastrian language) and Sanskrit.

The whole thing really is a mess and this mess was created before you were born.

Although Manishji claimed earlier in this thread that he was making no assumptions about the direction in which languages moved, there is already a pre existing assumption where a proto language is cooked up in one region and assumed to have moved towards Iran and India giving rise to "daughter languages".

In this case the daughter language Sanskrit is older by a thousand years than her sister Avestan. And father language "Proto-Indo Iranian" does not even exist. Immaculate conception. God impregnated Mary leaving intact hymen no? God created Proto Indo Iranian leaving no proof of entry. This is current science.

There is already an assumption made by the highest "scholars" that Sanskrit came from outside. That is why there is no one asking if Sanskrit did not influence Avestan or Tocharian although Vedic and Indian culture greatly influenced the areas of both these languages that are at least existing known languages unlike the cooked up Proto Indo European assumed to have been spoken by the "steppe based" Andrononvo culture.

Folks lies upon lies upon lies have been built into very strong foundations here. It will decades before the lies can be cleared out and the truth can be assessed. Don't expect quick resolution. People have to live out their lives and die before things can move on.