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

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

Post by hanumadu »

shiv wrote:
A date earlier than 1500 BC is fatal to not just the bogey of Aryan migration but also to the cooked up story of origin and spread of Indo European languages.
Isn't the 1500 BC itself a date agreed reluctantly by AIT proponents after pushing it back from 800 BC because of horse remains found in India from that time?
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

hanumadu wrote:
shiv wrote:
A date earlier than 1500 BC is fatal to not just the bogey of Aryan migration but also to the cooked up story of origin and spread of Indo European languages.
Isn't the 1500 BC itself a date agreed reluctantly by AIT proponents after pushing it back from 800 BC because of horse remains found in India from that time?
None of this matters. The date for Veda is prior to 3000 BC. This screws up all "language origin and migration" theories. Not just "Aryan Invasion". We really must stop talking about "Aryans" and "migration" that is dead. It is now about language origins. The "Aryans" were cooked up to place language origin nearer to Europe than India.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prem Kumar »

shiv wrote: What this also means is that the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda existed before Old Persian and Old Persian is not a sister language of Vedic Sanskrit but a daughter language. This is exactly what is indicated by studies of the Zend Avesta I mentioned earlier

QED
Shiv: you should start a "AIT myth-buster this week" episode where you take 1 topic and tear it up. Each week. In a blog. Will be a superhit!

1) Your passage above also brings up another inconsistency in AIT. If BMAC had Vedic Sanskrit, how did it keep the "s" in Syria, change it to "h" in Iran and regain it to become "s" again in Punjab?

2) Talageri has a comprehensive list of Vedic names in Mittani and shows proof of how all of them are from the late Rig Vedic & Atharva Vedic books, And how none of these names are present in the early Rig Vedic books.
Last edited by Prem Kumar on 17 Sep 2017 19:48, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by A_Gupta »

The missing centuries mentioned by Vedveer Arya have been bothering me. Now, I don't think world history is missing that many centuries, it is the cross-linkage of Indian history and rest-of-the-world history that is missing it. In this regard the recent carbon dating of the Bakhshali manuscript is of interest, in my very inexpert opinion. Original post with links on my blog, quoting without links here:
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2017/0 ... arger.html
The Bakhshali manuscript is now the oldest extant manuscript on Indian mathematics -- it has recently been carbon-dated by the University of Oxford to date to 200-400 AD. That date is much older than previously thought, at least by five centuries, if not more. This now supposedly pushes back the earliest recorded date for the use of zero in a place-value system.

Perhaps however, there is a larger point that is being missed. E.g., as per Wiki, the Bakhshali manuscript "is written in an earlier form of Śāradā script, which was mainly in use from the 8th to the 12th century, in the northwestern part of India, such as Kashmir and neighbouring regions."

To me it seems that now the inferred dates of everything written in the Śāradā script may need to be reexamined. (e.g., Wiki again: "The Śāradā or Sarada or Sharada script is an abugida writing system of the Brahmic family of scripts, developed around the 8th century.") Even with the caveat that Wiki isn't the most reliable source of information, it seems to me that some non-trivial amount of history may need to be re-written.
Think about it:
1. If Sarada was the only thing dating Indian history, then, see, all of a sudden, around five additional centuries turn up. It may even be as much as the 660 or so years that Vedveer Arya postulates.
2. Why does Vedveer Arya need his 660 years or so? It is required because of the clash between the traditional Indian chronologies and the anchoring of Indian historical dates via Ashoka and Alexander the Great.
3. IMO, Vedveer Arya makes a mistake in e.g., trying to push back Muhammad the Prophet by 660 years, and so on. There is simply too much outside-of-India evidence to do any such thing.
4. IMO, the point is a good one that "Maka" in the Ashokan inscriptions likely refers to a Bactrian land that is mentioned in the Behistun inscription of Darius rather than Magas of Cyreniaca (ruled 276-250 BC) - Cyreniaca is the eastern coastal region of Libya. But why would "Maka" a place-name be mentioned along with people's names in the inscription? I think some further scrutiny here may be helpful.
5. IMO, even Aryan Invasionists like Hermann Jacobi who nevertheless placed the RgVeda to before 2000 BC, or Sten Konow who believed that the Mitani treaty mentions Indian gods, not gods of the postulated earlier period of Aryan (i.e. Indo-Iranian) unity or of an even earlier Indo-European period, need that five hundred-six hundred years, pushing back from the usual 1500 BC of the Aryan Invasion Theory.

I think where I'm getting to is that regardless of whether you are an indigenist or an AITer, there is a suggestion that there are centuries missing in the cross-linkage of Indian historical dates and the rest-of-the-world that can't be dismissed out of hand.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Nilesh Oak »

shiv wrote: Nilesh let me point out something that bugs me in this entire debate. Many of us desi "science types" for whom English is a layer of language added on top of our mother tongue often do not see the manner in which western academia use a web of rhetorical constricts and straw men to obfuscate and take the debate in a direction that is bound to reach a dead end.
.....

The Aryan Invasion Theory is similar. First the straw man concept of Aryan was cooked up -like Green Stone Eater.

As a second step it was claimed that Aryans invaded India (or migrated) bringing language. If you object to the latter and say that there was no evidence of invasion you are by default accepting that "Aryans" existed. And this type of argument has in fact led to the side effect of people not knocking down the straw man while they debate the life story of the straw man.

Trying to rebut AIT but showing that there were no migrations is a mistake and that mistake is being repeated by genetics studies. Migration is not the issue. The Aryan race simply did not and does not exist and could not have migrated.

I think everyone would have understood this easily if they had said "Martian Invasion Theory". If that had been the idea then everyone would have pounced on the "Martian" word and asked wtf are Martians? But what has happened now is that Western academia have moved away from "Aryan" are are saying "language migration". we are still stuck on Aryan. We need to blow down the Aryan (and related Dravidian) straw man and start looking at the core issue of "Language migration"

I think language migration needs to be addressed with the following questions:
"If language was brought by some people from point A to point B, what is the evidence that the language existed in point A?"

Culture is not the same as language. People will be hard put to differentiate the culture of Maharashtra from that of Karnataka. Yet one is "Indo-European language" and the other is "Dravidian language". Finding evidence of culture is does not indicate finding language. For an outside observer the culture of a person from France is no different from someone in Germany.

Linguistics - especially "Philology" or "historical linguistics" which is no different from "phrenology" or voodoo magic has been used to write history and that edifice must be torn down.
I agree.

What Talageri has done so far, and it is impressive, is to show that the langugage flow, if at all it occurred, is more plausible scenario in the opposite direction to what is claimed by AIT.

When it comes to linguistics, not only my current knowledge is limited, but also my brain structure which is most unsuitable to learn linguistics. That is precisely the reason while I enjoy the works of (likes of ) Talageri, I treat all the cooking that happens within linguistic field---cognates, and isoglosses, as a 'black box' of engineering and only focus on inputs and outputs. This is purely due to my limitations of linguistics.

I presume you have already consumed all 3 books of Talageri? (1993, 2000, 2008).
--
Regarding migrations, I very much agree with what you are saying.

There were migrations to India and out of India throughout. As science of genetics develops further and as resolution (haplogroups) improves, we will able to see more migrations.. both in and out of India through all the periods.
--
I am focusing on four features of AIT - Aryan, language (sanskrit or precursor to Sanskrit), location (outside India to Greater India) and timing (2000 BCE - 1000 BCE) and the constraints on each of these 4 features. and then with the help of evidence from various disciplines of hard sciences asserting existence of Sanskrit language, Sanskrit based culture in India long time before 2000 BCE.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by A_Gupta »

Briefly:

1. Languages spread by people moving (e.g., how English came to North America) or by contact (e.g., how English came to India).

2. Both contact and migration may involve conquest (both are involved in the examples of 1.)

3. In all cases, a specific people are involved in this spread of language.

4. To abolish the "Aryan" of the Aryan Invasion Theory (unreal as Martians) one has to come up with an alternative narrative of why a language family formed, why people adopted it and how it spread.

5. In that regard, I don't know why more attention is not paid to the ideas of Robin Bradley Kar.
Some summary of one of his papers on my blog: http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2015/0 ... opean.html
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by A_Gupta »

On a somewhat different note: The Greeks had encountered a major non-Indo-European language of significance with the Egyptians, and perhaps more in Mesopotamia. They then came in contact with the Indians; and they might have noticed that the languages were closer to their own. I'm wondering if there are any ancient Greek commentaries on the languages of India.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Yayavar »

Prem wrote:
Gyan wrote:As per my High School level understanding, the European view on History seems to be that any Civilzation anywhere in the world could have started only after the end of last ice age ie 10,000 years ago. At that time a portion of Europe was also habitable.But if Civilzation in India started at Ice Age Maximus (not at end) then that would be around 20,000 years ago when practically no part of so called Anatolia was habitable.Now if we lower Sea level by 500m (rather than 500 feet) then it seems one could walk from Horn of Africa to coast of Gujarat. Indian Coast would be almost 100-200km ahead of where it is today. And India would be practically the only place in the world where agriculture could have produced adequate surplus so that a modern large Civilization could have developed. OIT? By the way one would be able to row from West Africa to South America in small boats as some peaks of Mid Atlantic Mountain Range might be islands. Voila one more concumdrum solved.
I may be wrong but some one said India escaped last ice age that North India was the onleee place left for humanity to survive.
I've found this instructive, and posted it before too http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/
Humanity was present across the globe in the timelines you write.

Gurus can comment on its veracity.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Dipanker »

Yayavar wrote:
Prem wrote:
I may be wrong but some one said India escaped last ice age that North India was the onleee place left for humanity to survive.
I've found this instructive, and posted it before too http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/
Humanity was present across the globe in the timelines you write.

Gurus can comment on its veracity.
Claim no Guru-hood but a simple Wiki lookup gives us the following map, meaning with the exception upper Arctic, Canada, upper 1/5 of USA, Antarctica, and most of Europe all other parts of the globe look habitable (no ice). First migration to Americas from Siberia across the Bering St. land bridge happened during this period.
Grey area in the map are under ice cover. Antarctic ice cap looks pretty impressive!

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

Post by Yayavar »

^^there is a lot more to the human spread as in the link I posted than what you are sharing.
Even though there was a spread across it passed through the Indian subcontinent due to the ICe Age. The rest of the details are interesting too.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by krisna »

aryans-and-dravidians-invented-by-racist-19th-century-scholars
What is astounding is that linguists and ‘orientalists’ who examined the Sanskrit Mitanni treaty documents did not link them with India where Sanskrit was known all over, but instead, claimed that the language had come to Syria with people from from Europe before vanishing completely from Syria and going to India and spreading all over India. Preposterous as this story may sound, there is documentary evidence that this is exactly what was done, and perfectly good explanations as to why this bluff was propagated. I will explain this in some detail, providing the sources.
:mrgreen:
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by krisna »

Unmasking the aryan migration controversy
European linguists and historians set about trying to find “proof” of a mother language that linked Sanskrit to European languages – which were all grouped under the name “Indo-European languages” (changed from the former name “Indo-Aryan languages”) . It turned out that there was no proof of any language available. Sanskrit existed as a language handed down orally, with no written texts and there were no European written texts of adequate antiquity for comparison.

Linguists and historians then started to try and find archaeological links between the proposed European place of origin of Indo European languages and India to fix a route of spread. Europe and Eurasia had archaeological finds but no evidence of language. India had the preserved ancient language but no archaeological links. No direct connection could be made. Then, apparently out of the blue, it was decided that the Vedas represented a “horse culture”. This idea was not sourced from Vedic scholars but from German and English translations of Vedas. To an educated reader these translations read like ludicrous mumbo-jumbo written by half-wits. However – since the Vedas were ancient, it was acceptable to imagine that poems could be the work of primitive humans of lower intelligence. The fact that the laughably faulty translations of the Vedas had more references to cows and fire worship than horses was ignored while declaring the Vedas as part of a “horse worship culture”
:mrgreen:
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Dipanker »

Yayavar wrote:^^there is a lot more to the human spread as in the link I posted than what you are sharing.
Even though there was a spread across it passed through the Indian subcontinent due to the ICe Age. The rest of the details are interesting too.
Agreed. Purpose of my post was to show that only a fraction of the land was under ice cover during the LGM and India was not the only place habitable.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

Dipanker wrote: Claim no Guru-hood but a simple Wiki lookup gives us the following map, meaning with the exception upper Arctic, Canada, upper 1/5 of USA, Antarctica, and most of Europe all other parts of the globe look habitable (no ice). First migration to Americas from Siberia across the Bering St. land bridge happened during this period.
Grey area in the map are under ice cover. Antarctic ice cap looks pretty impressive!
There is some additional complexity that the map leaves out. For a huge part of the Earth's surface away from the enlarged polar permafrost zones during the ice age there would have been long winters with 6 month or more of icing up leading to a less than tropical abundance of life for survival. So the zones that were not habitation friendly would have been far more extensive than the blue zones of permafrost on the map.

That aside - high altitude zones like Tibet, the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush mountains would have had either permafrost or poor weather for long enough in one year to make life difficult. Low sea levels from freezing would have made the entire coastal zone from Gujarat a nice plain for people to walk to Arabia.

Paleobotanical studies show that the subhimalayan zone had evergreen forest and much of India including the Saraswati river area had tropical rain forest until about 10,000 BC when warming started. At this stage the Subtropical evergreen became more like tropical rainforest and the Saraswati area started becoming more arid. By 5000 BC the Saraswati river zone started drying out and had plants typical of a semi arid zone after 5000 BC.

If we look at the Rig Veda even as a record of people who came on horses and chariots and chased away the pesky black Dasyus with their flat "anas" noses living in their cotton pickin' "purs" we are still looking at dates prior to 5000 BC because that's when the Saraswati was a mighty river. Now where did those horses and chariots and Ayr-yans come from? Certainly not from the steppe area whose people who existed 2500 years later. The language spread fairy tale has huge holes in it.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

Nilesh Oak wrote:
When it comes to linguistics, not only my current knowledge is limited, but also my brain structure which is most unsuitable to learn linguistics. That is precisely the reason while I enjoy the works of (likes of ) Talageri, I treat all the cooking that happens within linguistic field---cognates, and isoglosses, as a 'black box' of engineering and only focus on inputs and outputs. This is purely due to my limitations of linguistics.

I presume you have already consumed all 3 books of Talageri? (1993, 2000, 2008).
--
Nilesh no. I have not yet read a single Talageri book simply because I wanted to do my own research without being coloured by any earlier rebuttals to AIT.

But let me pass a comment about your modest (and IMO mistaken) statement that your brain is unsuitable for linguistics. I will rephrase that as "You cannot learn linguistics because your scientific mind will not accept bullshit but you are too modest and soft hearted to call out linguistic bullshit"

I will explain my rather harsh judgement of linguistics. But my reference is mainly to historical linguistics (aka philology) and not the modern neurolinguistics

In science one is trained to make observations and record them. If Litmus paper turns red you record that. If a direction is designated as east because the sun rises in that direction, you will not rename that direction as "banazag" when you see the moon rising from the east. Consistency, repeatability and testability remain hallmarks of science. If I step on yellow stinking smelly stuff that sticks to my shoes I will recognize that as a turd. But if I step into an entire pool of that stuff, and I can see that it is shit - it behoves me to point that out. A whole lot of historical linguistic theories are bad enough to be declared as bullshit.

To an extent linguists have been very diligent scholarly and productive in translations. But once they started rewriting history ("glottochronology") by trying to judge "older sounds" and "newer sounds" and judging that people in 2000 BC would not have been able to produce certain sounds, or that it is "normal and natural" for pronunciation to change from ka to cha and not cha to ka these linguists got carried away and produced loads and loads of unreadable and fake bullshit that needs to be discarded. Too much sewage has been passed off as clean science by historical linguists posing as scientists and it is high time those of us who are in science stand up and say "We are not too stupid to learn complex stuff and we can recognize bullshit when it is thrown at us"
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by csaurabh »

Something which really bugs me about the AIT: According to it, the Aryans were a group of Sanskrit ( or 'Proto-Indo-European' ) speakers that came from Caucasus mountains region and brought their language and culture to the lands of Europe, Greece, Syria, Iran, India, etc.

But only in India do historians assume an "Aryan invasion" , caste , etc. No one is talking about an Aryan invasion of Germany, Aryan invasion of Russia, Aryan invasion of Iran, etc. So do they really believe in the AIT?
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by A_Gupta »

This is how they talk about Europe:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/ ... population
Call it an ancient thousand man march. Early Bronze Age men from the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppe swept into Europe on horseback about 5000 years ago—and may have left most women behind. This mostly male migration may have persisted for several generations, sending men into the arms of European women who interbred with them, and leaving a lasting impact on the genomes of living Europeans.

“It looks like males migrating in war, with horses and wagons,” says lead author and population geneticist Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in Sweden.

Europeans are the descendants of at least three major migrations of prehistoric people. First, a group of hunter-gatherers arrived in Europe about 37,000 years ago. Then, farmers began migrating from Anatolia (a region including present-day Turkey) into Europe 9000 years ago, but they initially didn’t intermingle much with the local hunter-gatherers because they brought their own families with them. Finally, 5000 to 4800 years ago, nomadic herders known as the Yamnaya swept into Europe. They were an early Bronze Age culture that came from the grasslands, or steppes, of modern-day Russia and Ukraine, bringing with them metallurgy and animal herding skills and, possibly, Proto-Indo-European, the mysterious ancestral tongue from which all of today’s 400 Indo-European languages spring. They immediately interbred with local Europeans, who were descendants of both the farmers and hunter-gatherers. Within a few hundred years, the Yamnaya contributed to at least half of central Europeans’ genetic ancestry.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by A_Gupta »

Apart from Varuna, Mitra, Indra, Nasatyas mentioned in the Mitanni treaty, let us not forget the contemporaneous chariot horse training manual by Kikkuli that has a number of Sanskrit words, including the numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikkuli
CTH 284 consists of four well preserved tablets or a total of 1080 lines. The text is notable for its Mitanni (Indo-Aryan) loanwords, e.g. the numeral compounds aiga-, tera-, panza-, satta-, nāwa-wartanna ("one, three, five, seven, nine intervals",[11] virtually Vedic eka-, tri-, pañca- sapta-, nava-vartana. Kikkuli apparently was faced with some difficulty getting specific Mitannian concepts across in the Hittite language, for he frequently gives a term such as “Intervals” in his own language (somewhat similar to Vedic Sanskrit), and then states, “this means…” and explained it in Hittite.
I'll note that we are told that "Indra" is rendered "Indara" in the Mitanni treaty, so tera- <--> tri should not be surprising.
But Witzel constructs a whole theory based on aika- versus eka-.

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni-Aryan
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

csaurabh wrote:Something which really bugs me about the AIT: According to it, the Aryans were a group of Sanskrit ( or 'Proto-Indo-European' ) speakers that came from Caucasus mountains region and brought their language and culture to the lands of Europe, Greece, Syria, Iran, India, etc.

But only in India do historians assume an "Aryan invasion" , caste , etc. No one is talking about an Aryan invasion of Germany, Aryan invasion of Russia, Aryan invasion of Iran, etc. So do they really believe in the AIT?
In the original story the Europeans were The_Aryans so there was no invasion of Europe. It was the origin. And as we all know the "Aryan" idea did not die till 1945. After the defeat of Germany, Europeans no longer claimed to be Aryans. The language - that used to be called "Indo-Aryan" was redefined as Indo-European. But by this time it was too late. Indians has already swallowed the Aryan story hook line and sinker so for us it was a question of accepting or fighting the idea of whether Aryans came or did not come. We have been fighting windmills. There were no Aryans so the Aryans could not have "brought language to India"

The only question is whether the language was "brought to India", and if so who brought it and when

If Sanskrit existed in India before 2000 BC then the whole structure of "Indo-European" language migration/spread collapses because current theories need horses and chariots to spread out of steppe from 2500 BC and arrive later in Europe and finally India by 1500 BC. Earlier evidence of Sanskrit will kill this carefully cooked up theory where every single structure/branch has been written about with suitable cooking up (like cooking up of entire Avestan language) to support this story.

All across the western world historians, linguists and others will fight tooth and nail against all people Indians or non Indians who show presence of Vedas before 1500 BC because it will, mark my words, revolutionize all India-European language spread theories. Thousands of papers and books will have to be discarded - so don't hold your breath.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by sudarshan »

shiv wrote:There were no Aryans so the Aryans could not have "brought language to India"
This statement is the key. There is no such thing as an "Aryan race." In one of my books (unpublished of course) I came up with a new theory of my own, called the "Gentleman Invasion Theory." In English literature, we can see multiple references to the word "Gentleman" to describe a man of manners, culture, refinement, chivalry, etc. We also see references to the "Plebians" of the British Isles. So my theory was that there was an original race of Gentlemen, who invaded the British Isles and displaced the earlier Plebian culture. The Gentlemen were the ones who brought culture and refinement (such as it was) to Britain, after massacring the Plebians (though not fully, of course, some Plebian stock still survived in Britain).

This was a tongue-in-cheek theory to illustrate just how stupid this notion of an "Aryan race" was, cooked up as it was from faulty understanding of the word "Arya" in the Vedas and other Indian literature.

Of course, in the case of the British isles, this theory is rather moot, since these islands really were subjected to wave after wave of invasions, destroying the original and building new racial stock - Welsh and Celts replaced by Romans, then by Jutes, Angles and Saxons, then by Normans. So what's one more "Gentleman invasion" on top of that? The British might actually be fine with the notion of a "Gentleman invasion" and might actually vie with each other to be "descended from the original Gentlemen" :P.

Like I keep saying, the Aryan invasion displacing Dravidians, with an earlier Dravidian invasion displacing aboriginals, etc. - that theory is basically the history of the British isles, superimposed on India.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

sudarshan wrote:
shiv wrote:There were no Aryans so the Aryans could not have "brought language to India"
This statement is the key. There is no such thing as an "Aryan race." In one of my books (unpublished of course) I came up with a new theory of my own, called the "Gentleman Invasion Theory." In English literature, we can see multiple references to the word "Gentleman" to describe a man of manners, culture, refinement, chivalry, etc. We also see references to the "Plebians" of the British Isles. So my theory was that there was an original race of Gentlemen, who invaded the British Isles and displaced the earlier Plebian culture. The Gentlemen were the ones who brought culture and refinement (such as it was) to Britain, after massacring the Plebians (though not fully, of course, some Plebian stock still survived in Britain).

This was a tongue-in-cheek theory to illustrate just how stupid this notion of an "Aryan race" was, cooked up as it was from faulty understanding of the word "Arya" in the Vedas and other Indian literature.
Europeans are totally and completely hooked on to the concept of "conquering hordes" and cannot imagine anything different. Maybe this is some hangover from the militant spread of Christianity and the subsequent Islamic hordes. These buggers are hung up on history that goes back just 2000 years and know only that. For them "ancient history" is Alpine "Ice Man" or "Pete (peat) Bog" man preserved in peat and Stonhenge (Flintstones). Their sense of superiority over the rest of the world will never allow them to accept anything radical like 8-10,000 BC especially when they have a retinue of loyal sepoys to do the fighting for them.

Tell me this. How much do you care about Britain of 10,000 BC? Why on earth would anyone care about India of 10,000 BC unless there was something there that was scraping the skin off one's own European balls. That is what the language issue does. Accepting black Hindoos as the owners of an Indo-European language that is 10,000 (or even 6000) years old is intolerable. You have seen the kind of people who come on here and fight with zero facts, plenty of rhetoric and total bhakti towards history as currently recorded.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Gus »

shiv wrote:All across the western world historians, linguists and others will fight tooth and nail against all people Indians or non Indians who show presence of Vedas before 1500 BC because it will, mark my words, revolutionize all India-European language spread theories. Thousands of papers and books will have to be discarded - so don't hold your breath.
Not to mention the Dravidian parties in TN - who still rely on this theory to project TN as a special rebel state that needs its guardians against big bad aryans of naarth.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

Gus wrote:
shiv wrote:All across the western world historians, linguists and others will fight tooth and nail against all people Indians or non Indians who show presence of Vedas before 1500 BC because it will, mark my words, revolutionize all India-European language spread theories. Thousands of papers and books will have to be discarded - so don't hold your breath.
Not to mention the Dravidian parties in TN - who still rely on this theory to project TN as a special rebel state that needs its guardians against big bad aryans of naarth.
Ironically Tamizh history itself will become older - but Dravdian parties are in for a cognitive dissonance shock that will take 100 years to abate
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prasad »

One doesn't need to connect Syria to India overland. Sea trade was enormous as evidenced by presence of indian objects in the ME. Lothal port end came about around 3500BP (1500 BC) with harappan pottery around the end was seen from digging trenches etc.(Very interesting stuff from Satellite imagery on mapping dried up river bed north of Lothal & river mouth around Lothal - http://www.igu.in/8-1/5khadkikar.pdf) Confirms Lothal died out due to aridity, which evidence shows in the form of vegetation and soil composition. And the Mittani text is dated to a 100 years after this.

Ports like the Kuwaiti Failaka are as old as 2000BC that could've done the sea-land trade between syria & india to carry trade. Sail down oxus. Sail down Sarasvati/Indus. Sail across the ocean. Back up the Tigris to Syria. Heck here's proof that they did indeed trade - https://www.archaeology.org/issues/79-1 ... ur-traders
There the Danish team excavated an ostrich egg, a shell ladle of Indian manufacture, and pottery similar to that found in what is today Pakistan. These discoveries attest to a vibrant mercantile business run by Mesopotamians themselves, rather than Dilmunite middlemen. The most telling artifacts were four cylinder seals of the type used by scribes to identify Mesopotamian traders and their goods during the end of the third millennium b.c. These seals, found within the building, demonstrate the port’s importance during this first era of global trade. “This is not just a fishing village,” says team director Flemming Hojlund. Instead, the team’s work suggests that Mesopotamians, far from being passive consumers of foreign goods brought by distant seafarers, were active participants in the sea trade.
Even minimal contact before full fledged ports could spread enough religion perhaps.
Last edited by Prasad on 18 Sep 2017 23:51, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by syam »

@shiv ji, I am reading a book written by Dr. Raja Ram Mohan Roy .

I found something amazing,
Alexander, being impressed with the current report that Semiramis had effected her escape from India with about twenty men and Cyrus with about seven, was ambitious, though aware of the difficulties and dangers of the enterprise, to conduct his large army through the same country in safety and triumphantly.
According to the author, above incident was described by Strabo.

So Ctesias account of Semiramis is true. And here Cyrus also mentioned. Cyrus battle also must be there in Ctesias' Persica. Only two people tried to invade India before Alexander. Both of them failed. But Herodotus says Persians had India as one of their satrapy. No wonder Ctesias disagree with Herodotus.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Agasthi »

A_Gupta wrote:
Think about it:
1. If Sarada was the only thing dating Indian history, then, see, all of a sudden, around five additional centuries turn up. It may even be as much as the 660 or so years that Vedveer Arya postulates.
2. Why does Vedveer Arya need his 660 years or so? It is required because of the clash between the traditional Indian chronologies and the anchoring of Indian historical dates via Ashoka and Alexander the Great.
3. IMO, Vedveer Arya makes a mistake in e.g., trying to push back Muhammad the Prophet by 660 years, and so on. There is simply too much outside-of-India evidence to do any such thing.
4. IMO, the point is a good one that "Maka" in the Ashokan inscriptions likely refers to a Bactrian land that is mentioned in the Behistun inscription of Darius rather than Magas of Cyreniaca (ruled 276-250 BC) - Cyreniaca is the eastern coastal region of Libya. But why would "Maka" a place-name be mentioned along with people's names in the inscription? I think some further scrutiny here may be helpful.
5. IMO, even Aryan Invasionists like Hermann Jacobi who nevertheless placed the RgVeda to before 2000 BC, or Sten Konow who believed that the Mitani treaty mentions Indian gods, not gods of the postulated earlier period of Aryan (i.e. Indo-Iranian) unity or of an even earlier Indo-European period, need that five hundred-six hundred years, pushing back from the usual 1500 BC of the Aryan Invasion Theory.

I think where I'm getting to is that regardless of whether you are an indigenist or an AITer, there is a suggestion that there are centuries missing in the cross-linkage of Indian historical dates and the rest-of-the-world that can't be dismissed out of hand.

So when the historians say the earliest evidence of zero was in this manuscript from 800AD or so they made an "assumption" because of another "assumption" that the sarada script is from the 8th - 12th century. This was 'fact' for over a 100 years until now!

Anybody know if historians like Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar analyse these documents and test them for antiquity, access the sources and then write histories or is it just a regurgitation of Mueller and Marx. These people are the prescribed authors on indian history and millions of ours read these. And, is any indian historian or otherwise verifying Oxford's results. Why did they test this manuscript now? what was the motive? Wonder how much of our historical proofs are locked up in Britain preventing us from connecting the dots of our ancient past. Maybe the key to deciphering the indus script sits somewhere in the India Archives in London. So many questions!
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

syam wrote:@shiv ji, I am reading a book written by Dr. Raja Ram Mohan Roy .

I found something amazing,
Alexander, being impressed with the current report that Semiramis had effected her escape from India with about twenty men and Cyrus with about seven, was ambitious, though aware of the difficulties and dangers of the enterprise, to conduct his large army through the same country in safety and triumphantly.
According to the author, above incident was described by Strabo.

So Ctesias account of Semiramis is true. And here Cyrus also mentioned. Cyrus battle also must be there in Ctesias' Persica. Only two people tried to invade India before Alexander. Both of them failed. But Herodotus says Persians had India as one of their satrapy. No wonder Ctesias disagree with Herodotus.
Ctesias' accounts mention two very interesting things about Semiramis efforts and the land
1. It does not rain in "India" but the river is full. This is true of the Oxus/Amu Darya ("Vakshu") river fed from Pamir snow-melt
2. That the attackers found it difficult because of the mountainous terrain.
Clearly the "India" of Semiramis and Ctesais was Afghanistan and the same mountian terrain posed a problem to the Soviets and now US forces against the Taliban

But the Greeks themselves did not like what Ctesias said and willy-nilly destroyed much of his writings.

It appears to me that if an archaeological dig shows remains of a turd in what used to be an ancient kitchen historians will use that as evidence that people use to shit in their kitchens back in those days. Then they will carbon date the shit and say exactly when people used to do that.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prasad »

So another doubt, if the gents here will kindly excuse - Lack of mention of iron in the RV is supposed to signify that the 'aryans' didn't know iron working and it was later developed/encountered after entering India. The earliest iron working sites in India are after 2000BC. Sarasvati civ sites contain copper/bronze artefacts and no iron. We see iron predominantly after 1500 BC within India in sites like Gufkral. So how do they state both together without making any sense? If these so called aryans didn't know iron working, neither did the harappans whom they supposedly displaced/replaced when they died out and iron working began after that. So there was no existing iron working knowledge these charriot riding aryans encountered and learned.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

Prasad wrote:So another doubt, if the gents here will kindly excuse - Lack of mention of iron in the RV is supposed to signify that the 'aryans' didn't know iron working and it was later developed/encountered after entering India. The earliest iron working sites in India are after 2000BC. Sarasvati civ sites contain copper/bronze artefacts and no iron. We see iron predominantly after 1500 BC within India in sites like Gufkral. So how do they state both together without making any sense? If these so called aryans didn't know iron working, neither did the harappans whom they supposedly displaced/replaced when they died out and iron working began after that. So there was no existing iron working knowledge these charriot riding aryans encountered and learned.
Excuse my saying this.

There were no horse riding Aryans - so a discussion of whether they used iron or not or whether they washed their bottoms or used toilet paper is moot. The people who claim that there were horse riding Aryans know damn well there were no Aryans and there is no proof that horse riders rode in chariots from Steppes. That conclusion was reached by mistranslating ONE single Rig Veda sentence to mean "horse burial" The evidence against that is overwhelming. In fact I have found a paper that has dated all those horse graves in Sintashta. They are not 2500 BC. They are around 1600 BC.

That language spread theory is going to see a huge kick up its butt in the next few years...

Here is the article
https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index ... d/3226/pdf

But here it is important to follow the method advised by Rajiv Malhotra. It is no use saying "Rig Veda is 10000 years old" etc. It is important first to falsify and take down the current theories with proof. After taking them down the next step is to present proof of the new theory and dates
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prasad »

Upon further reading, Malhar in Chandauli district UP (right next to Benares btw) upon the Karmanasa river has massive iron furnaces denoting large scale iron smelting, with iron arrowheads, tools etc. Dated to 1800BC. That far east. So atleast around 2000BC iron working knowledge was present near present day benares. Much earlier than the saraswati civilisation appears to have seen iron in such quantities.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prasad »

Agreed sir. Just saying.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by syam »

shiv wrote: But the Greeks themselves did not like what Ctesias said and willy-nilly destroyed much of his writings
Sir, Greeks did not like Ctesias because he exposes something they tried desperately to hide.

Semiramis tried to invade India and failed. But she came back to her Empire and ruled it till her end days. Assyrian empire didn't fall. Same thing can be said about Cyrus. He also tried to invade India and failed. But he didn't lose his empire and Persia didn't fall.

Now lets come to Alexander. He tried to invade India and lost. In the process, his whole empire imploded. His generals fought among themselves. Which proud Greek accepts this fact. They had to discredit Ctesias. They didn't want the past to overshadow their Hero.

And the thing is Greeks also not guilty here. Only few glorified Historians are guilty. Historians who helped the next generation of historians to build new narrative.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

Prasad wrote:Upon further reading, Malhar in Chandauli district UP (right next to Benares btw) upon the Karmanasa river has massive iron furnaces denoting large scale iron smelting, with iron arrowheads, tools etc. Dated to 1800BC. That far east. So atleast around 2000BC iron working knowledge was present near present day benares. Much earlier than the saraswati civilisation appears to have seen iron in such quantities.
Can you provide some links because they will be useful to squeeze a few recalcitrant balls
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

syam wrote: Sir, Greeks did not like Ctesias because he exposes something they tried desperately to hide.

Semiramis tried to invade India and failed. But she came back to her Empire and ruled it till her end days. Assyrian empire didn't fall. Same thing can be said about Cyrus. He also tried to invade India and failed. But he didn't lose his empire and Persia didn't fall.

Now lets come to Alexander. He tried to invade India and lost. In the process, his whole empire imploded. His generals fought among themselves. Which proud Greek accepts this fact. They had to discredit Ctesias. They didn't want the past to overshadow their Hero.

And the thing is Greeks also not guilty here. Only few glorified Historians are guilty. Historians who helped the next generation of historians to build new narrative.
That is very interesting ..
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by syam »

shiv wrote: That is very interesting ..
Check this one sir,
One of his most famous achievements was at the outbreak of the Second Punic War, when he marched an army which included war elephants from Iberia over the Pyrenees and the Alps into Italy.
This is from Hannibal wiki. Somehow he got hands on war elephants. He was commander. Most of Carthage military were hired people. With so much power and military might, I fail to understand why another war on India didn't happen.

About the elephants he used,
Carthage seems to have fielded a formidable cavalry force, especially in its North African homeland; a significant part of it was composed of light Numidian cavalry. Other mounted troops included North African elephants (now extinct), trained for war, which, among other uses, were commonly used for frontal assaults or as anticavalry protection. An army could field up to several hundred of these animals, but on most reported occasions fewer than a hundred were deployed.
The so called North Elephants only existed in that period and immediately gone extinct after that. :D

Edit: this one too,
"He (Antiochus) crossed the Caucasus and descended into India; renewed his friendship with Sophagasenus the king of the Indians; received more elephants, until he had a hundred and fifty altogether; and having once more provisioned his troops, set out again personally with his army: leaving Androsthenes of Cyzicus the duty of taking home the treasure which this king had agreed to hand over to him". Polybius 11.39

We focus too much on Horses, all the while ignoring elephant in the room.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prasad »

shiv wrote:
Prasad wrote:Upon further reading, Malhar in Chandauli district UP (right next to Benares btw) upon the Karmanasa river has massive iron furnaces denoting large scale iron smelting, with iron arrowheads, tools etc. Dated to 1800BC. That far east. So atleast around 2000BC iron working knowledge was present near present day benares. Much earlier than the saraswati civilisation appears to have seen iron in such quantities.
Can you provide some links because they will be useful to squeeze a few recalcitrant balls
Rakesh Tewari - http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/tewari/tewari.pdf Current DG ASI.
Also this - NIAS journal http://eprints.nias.res.in/756/1/2015-S ... ations.pdf

Another key finding being pgw & harappan co-existing at Alamgirpur.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ary_Report

Another interesting thing wrt language and scripts was the Porunthal excavation. They found an urn/jar with rice that was carbon dated to 490-450BC. What is interesting is that it was 2kilos of rice and there is tamil brahmi script writing on the jars found there pushing back date for a written brahmi script beyond the earlier upper limit of ashokan brahmi in 3rd century bc.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

syam wrote:
Edit: this one too,
"He (Antiochus) crossed the Caucasus and descended into India; renewed his friendship with Sophagasenus the king of the Indians; received more elephants, until he had a hundred and fifty altogether; and having once more provisioned his troops, set out again personally with his army: leaving Androsthenes of Cyzicus the duty of taking home the treasure which this king had agreed to hand over to him". Polybius 11.39

We focus too much on Horses, all the while ignoring elephant in the room.
Hannibal's elephants are well known - but the horse debate is critical to the "language spread theory". Where does the elephant fit in?
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by shiv »

Prasad wrote: Rakesh Tewari - http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/tewari/tewari.pdf Current DG ASI.
Also this - NIAS journal http://eprints.nias.res.in/756/1/2015-S ... ations.pdf

Another key finding being pgw & harappan co-existing at Alamgirpur.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ary_Report

Another interesting thing wrt language and scripts was the Porunthal excavation. They found an urn/jar with rice that was carbon dated to 490-450BC. What is interesting is that it was 2kilos of rice and there is tamil brahmi script writing on the jars found there pushing back date for a written brahmi script beyond the earlier upper limit of ashokan brahmi in 3rd century bc.
Thanks. Useful papers
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by syam »

shiv wrote: Hannibal's elephants are well known - but the horse debate is critical to the "language spread theory". Where does the elephant fit in?
That's supposed to be half pun and half exclamation.

I checked two threads. You guys didn't discuss any about Seleucid Empire. This empire had close ties with their Indian counterpart. They had marriage alliance at the start of it. And then whenever they had problem, their indian counterpart sent help. Antiochus loses power and comes to India. Indian king gives him so many elephants.

Do you believe this story? How come Indian king gave away so much military power to some foreign dude? A power enough to revive empire.
I want to say this empire is not Greek but Indian. Then critics will rip it new one.

I am decided to stick to my theory. It is Indian empire.Not Greek.
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Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

Post by Prasad »

shiv wrote: Another interesting thing wrt language and scripts was the Porunthal excavation. They found an urn/jar with rice that was carbon dated to 490-450BC. What is interesting is that it was 2kilos of rice and there is tamil brahmi script writing on the jars found there pushing back date for a written brahmi script beyond the earlier upper limit of ashokan brahmi in 3rd century bc.
Thanks. Useful papers[/quote]
Also http://www.insa.nic.in/writereaddata/Up ... ekaran.pdf
& https://books.google.co.in/books?id=ddR ... on&f=false

on wootz steel making in TN at Kodumanal (on the muziris-east coast trade route).
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