Bharat Rakshak

shiv wrote:

RajeshA wrote:Something that I would welcome is an etymology dictionary of Persian words with their Sanskrit counterparts and origins.

Question is whether Persian or Iranian can themselves be considered a Prakrit.

That way, Iranians can themselves be seen as an extension of Indic, at least linguistically, and hence one does not need this artificial separation between Indian groups and Iranian groups among Indo-Iranians. The question is why should Parthians, Baloch, Bactrians, etc. be considered Iranian and not Indian?

Rajesh that totally cooked up name of a language "Avestan" is a prakrit.

Let me first explain by what cunning linguists are saying

First there was Avestan, then Old Persian, then Middle Persian and finally modern Persian (with much Arabic influence)

Students who know Sanskrit will understand "Avestan" straight off.

Old Persian is in the Behistun texts - it sounds bit like Sanskrit

The only thing I know about "middle Persian" is that the Parsi Holy book "Venidad" existed as a middle Persian text and it was transcribed in Brahmi script around 1300 AD by a Sanskrit scholar Naryosang Dhaval. All of what linguists call Avestan has been inferred/cooked up using comparisons with Sanskrit from this text which is itself 2300 years later than Linguists dates for "Avestan". A lot of things could have changes in 2300 years - but linguists claim that nothing changed and that the language they cooked up is Avestan. It could just as well be Sanskrit.

I suspect the original language of the Parsis was a Prakrit and may have been similar to what cunning linguists call Avestan - although they have cooked up the entire language and claim that is it a sister language of Sanskrit that existed 2300 years earlier

Parsis took an essentially Indic culture to Persia and preserved it until they were defeated by the Greeks a thousand years later. I am convinced that the Sindhu-Hindu, sapta-hepta went into the Greek language from a Sanskrit original via the Parsis.

The oldest evidence of old Greek is much much later than Rig Vedic Sanskrit - but linguists have forced the date of Rig Veda to 1200 BC to bring it closer to old Greek.

RajeshA wrote:

RajeshA wrote:Triglavi means Three heads.

The Slavic word "Glava" which means head most probably derives from "grīva" which means neck, as in Hayagrīva (हयग्रीव).

So

Triglavi <= Trigrīva

The comparative example of the Avestan and Rig-Vedic (Sanskrit) languages above demonstrate that the languages are so close that they are for all practical purposes dialects of the same language. They are nevertheless not identical. At the time of their writing, the people of the old Avesta and Rig Veda were likely close neighbours. A conclusion by extrapolation is that at an earlier time the two people shared a common language named by linguists as Proto Indo-Iranian. This is a deduction. There are no known examples of the presumed Proto Indo-Iranian language. Proto Indo-Iranian would have been the language of the ancient Aryans before their separation into the Avestan and Rig Vedic groups.

We are also grateful to Vaibhav Niku, for bringing to our attention a book by Prof. Hermann Brunnhofer titled Urgeschichte der Arier in Vorder- und Centralasien (Prehistory of the Aryans in West- and Central-Asia), 1893. On pages 1 and 2 of his Introduction Prof. Brunnhofer quotes Prof. H. Kern's book [from his book Over het woord Zarathustra (About the Word Zarathustra), p. 16, (1867)] as stating, "the Bactrian (i.e. Avestan) is so (greatly) related to the Old-Indian language (Vedic), and in particular, that of the Vedas, that without exaggeration it can be called a dialect thereof." By way of an example, Brunnhofer then quotes Yasna 10.8 in Avestan and follows the verse with what it would read like in Vedic Sanskrit (in much the same way as we have done above with Yasna 72.11) Click here for the Vedic-Sanskrit equivalent for Yasna 10.8 according to Brunnhofer and Bartholomae.

Yasna 10.8 (Portion) - Avestan with its Vedic equivalent

The example below furnished courtesy Vaibhav Niku, is a further demonstration of the closeness of the Avestan and Vedic languages. He adds that the languages are so close that the Vedic can be "read-off" from the Avestan.

Avestan Yasna 10.8 Transliterated in Roman Script

[Based on Karl F. Geldner's Avesta, the Sacred Books of the Parsis, Stuttgart (1896).

Ýô ýatha puthrem taurunem
Haomem vañdaêta mashyô
Frâ âbyô tanubyô
Haomô vîsâite baêshazâi

Vedic-Sanskrit Equivalent for Yasna 10.8 according to Brunnhofer and Bartholomae

Without accents:
yō yathā putram taruṇam
sōmam vandēta martyaḥ
pra ābhyas tanūbhyaḥ
sōmō viśatē bhēṣajāya

यो यथा पुत्रम् तरुणम्
सोमम् वन्देत मर्त्यः
प्र आभ्यस् तनूभ्यः
सोमो विशते भेषजाय

With accents:
yṓ yáthā putrám táruṇam
sṓmam vandēta mártyaḥ
prá ābhyas tanū́bhyaḥ
sṓmō viśatē bhēṣajā́ya

यो यथा॑ पु॒त्रम् तरु॑णम्
सोम॑म् व॒न्दे॒त॒ मर्त्य॑ः
प्र आ॒भ्य॒स् त॒नूभ्य॑ः
सोमो॑ वि॒श॒ते॒ भे॒ष॒जाय॑

A_Gupta wrote:This would be like saying that there is Indian English and British English and though they are virtually identical they are nevertheless not the same language. At the time of this writing, they were not even close neighbors - separated by several thousand miles. There was proto-English prior to the separation of the peoples of India and Britain, etc.

A_Gupta wrote:Shiv,
There is Avestan in old Persian-type script from around the beginning of the common era or so, written right to left; but as this article notes, http://www.ancientscripts.com/avestan.html , it is very, very close to Sanskrit. The analogy I think of is, e.g., the variation in Hindi of "v" <--> "b" across north India.

Also note this:
http://www.heritageinstitute.com/zoroas ... languages/

The comparative example of the Avestan and Rig-Vedic (Sanskrit) languages above demonstrate that the languages are so close that they are for all practical purposes dialects of the same language. They are nevertheless not identical. At the time of their writing, the people of the old Avesta and Rig Veda were likely close neighbours. A conclusion by extrapolation is that at an earlier time the two people shared a common language named by linguists as Proto Indo-Iranian. This is a deduction. There are no known examples of the presumed Proto Indo-Iranian language. Proto Indo-Iranian would have been the language of the ancient Aryans before their separation into the Avestan and Rig Vedic groups.

This would be like saying that there is Indian English and British English and though they are virtually identical they are nevertheless not the same language. At the time of this writing, they were not even close neighbors - separated by several thousand miles. There was proto-English prior to the separation of the peoples of India and Britain, etc.

Avesta received an unlooked-for light from the poems of the Indian Rishis, and the long-forgotten past and the origin of many gods and heroes, whom the Parsi worships and extols without knowing who they were and whence they came, were suddenly revealed by the Vedas.

The language and religion of the Avesta record but a moment in the long life of the Iranian language and thought, so that we are unable to understand them, unless we know what they became and whence they came. What they became we learn directly from tradition, since the tradition arose from the very ideas which the Avesta expresses; whence they came we learn indirectly from the Vedas, because the Vedas come from the same source as the Avesta. Therefore it cannot happen that the tradition and the Veda will really contradict one another, if we take care to ask from each only what it knows, from one the present, and the past from the other.

The comparative school developed Indo-Iranian mythology. Roth showed after Burnouf how the epical history of Iran was derived from the same source as the myths of Vedic India, and pointed out the primitive identity of Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of Iran,

Satya_anveshi wrote:

A_Gupta wrote:This would be like saying that there is Indian English and British English and though they are virtually identical they are nevertheless not the same language. At the time of this writing, they were not even close neighbors - separated by several thousand miles. There was proto-English prior to the separation of the peoples of India and Britain, etc.

This is brilliant analogy Gupta ji. Namaskaram for thinking this.

shiv wrote:What students who read linguists works today will never realize unless they dig really deep is the manner in which linguists have taken Sanskrit on the one hand, and they have taken a cooked up language on the other hand and called them "sister languages' descended from an earlier "Indo-Iranian" language. I repeat for clarity that the language cooked up by linguists is Avestan. It has been "reconstructed" using a 12th century text by Neryosang Dhaval and existing Gujarati texts.

Any Sanskrit scholar who compares Parsi Gathas with the Atharva Veda can see the similarities. I am no scholar but I can name two people who did that and said exactly that
1. James Darmeister
2. Jatindra Mohan Chatterji http://www.avesta.org/chatterj_opf_files/slideshow.htm

shiv wrote:Nilesh I think I have both a manual of Kshnoom and a pdf of JM Chaterji. If I do I will make sure you get it.

panduranghari wrote:Nilesh ji,
Your 'When did MBH war actually happen' has found a lot of traction amongst HSS UK. You will be contacted sometime soon by someone very influential. I hope you did not mind me giving this person your email address.

panduranghari wrote:None sir. There is no movement. I will try chasing it up again.

Nilesh Oak wrote:RajeshA,

(My searching abilities within BRF are limited).

I recall that in old OIT thread, there was a mention (either by RajeshA or someone else) of some reference to Zaratushtra for ~6000 BCE (from some other book).

RajeshA wrote:
The historians like to treat Iranians as a separate people than Indians, and perhaps we too did split off at some point in time. But Iranians origin is also India.
So on linguistic grounds, we should not allow historians to divide between Indian and Iranian languages. We need to get rid of the hyphen here, and treat these languages as Indian as well.

The word Chabahar comes from the Hindustani word, char, which means four, and bahar, which means spring. True to its name, it is an all-season but cool port located in Baluchistan and Sistan province of Iran. The 10th century scholar and historian, Al-Beruni, identifies Chabahar from its earlier name, Tiz, which is the starting point of old India.

The word Chabahar comes from the Hindustani word, char, which means four, and bahar, which means spring. True to its name, it is an all-season but cool port located in Baluchistan and Sistan province of Iran. The 10th century scholar and historian, Al-Beruni, identifies Chabahar from its earlier name, Tiz, which is the starting point of old India.

JE Menon wrote:Speaking of ancient India, and the antiquity of it and the knowledge of it, here's a link that throws up some intriguing possibilities:

https://books.google.nl/books?id=POxJAw ... le&f=false

Amhara, of course, is an area now in Ethiopia, whose language is still called Amharic...

shiv wrote:Nilesh I think I have both a manual of Kshnoom and a pdf of JM Chaterji. If I do I will make sure you get it.

JE Menon wrote:Speaking of ancient India, and the antiquity of it and the knowledge of it, here's a link that throws up some intriguing possibilities:

https://books.google.nl/books?id=POxJAw ... le&f=false

Amhara, of course, is an area now in Ethiopia, whose language is still called Amharic...

Indus era 8,000 years old, not 5,500; ended because of weaker monsoon

Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey | TNN | May 29, 2016, 01.37 AM IST

KOLKATA: It may be time to rewrite history textbooks. Scientists from IIT-Kharagpur and Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) have uncovered evidence that the Indus Valley Civilization is at least 8,000 years old, and not 5,500 years old, taking root well before the Egyptian (7000BC to 3000BC) and Mesopotamian (6500BC to 3100BC) civilizations. What's more, the researchers have found evidence of a pre-Harappan civilization that existed for at least 1,000 years before this.

The discovery, published in the prestigious 'Nature' journal on May 25, may force a global rethink on the timelines of the so-called 'cradles of civilization'. The scientists believe they also know why the civilization ended about 3,000 years ago — climate change.
"We have recovered perhaps the oldest pottery from the civilization. We used a technique called 'optically stimulated luminescence' to date pottery shards of the Early Mature Harappan time to nearly 6,000 years ago and the cultural levels of pre-Harappan Hakra phase as far back as 8,000 years," said Anindya Sarkar, head of the department of geology and geophysics at IIT-Kgp.

The team had actually set out to prove that the civilization proliferated to other Indian sites like Bhirrana and Rakhigarrhi in Haryana, apart from the known locations of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in Pakistan and Lothal, Dholavira and Kalibangan in India. They took their dig to an unexplored site, Bhirrana — and ended up unearthing something much bigger. The excavation also yielded large quantities of animal remains like bones, teeth, horn cores of cow, goat, deer and antelope, which were put through Carbon 14 analysis to decipher antiquity and the climatic conditions in which the civilization flourished, said Arati Deshpande Mukherjee of Deccan College, which helped analyse the finds along with Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad.

The researchers believe that the Indus Valley Civilization spread over a vast expanse of India — stretching to the banks of the now "lost" Saraswati river or the Ghaggar-Hakra river - but this has not been studied enough because what we know so far is based on British excavations. "At the excavation sites, we saw preservation of all cultural levels right from the pre-Indus Valley Civilization phase (9000-8000 BC) through what we have categorised as Early Harappan (8000-7000BC) to the Mature Harappan times," said Sarkar.

While the earlier phases were represented by pastoral and early village farming communities, the mature Harappan settlements were highly urbanised with organised cities, and a much developed material and craft culture. They also had regular trade with Arabia and Mesopotamia. The Late Harappan phase witnessed large-scale de-urbanisation, drop in population, abandonment of established settlements, lack of basic amenities, violence and even the disappearance of the Harappan script, the researchers say.
"We analysed the oxygen isotope composition in the bone and tooth phosphates of these remains to unravel the climate pattern. The oxygen isotope in mammal bones and teeth preserve the signature of ancient meteoric water and in turn the intensity of monsoon rainfall. Our study shows that the pre-Harappan humans started inhabiting this area along the Ghaggar-Hakra rivers in a climate that was favourable for human settlement and agriculture. The monsoon was much stronger between 9000 years and 7000 years from now and probably fed these rivers making them mightier with vast floodplains," explained Deshpande Mukherjee.

Indus Valley evolved even as monsoon declined

They took their dig to an unexplored site, Bhirrana — and ended up unearthing something much bigger. The excavation also yielded large quantities of animal remains like bones, teeth, horn cores of cow, goat, deer and antelope, which were put through Carbon 14 analysis to decipher antiquity and the climatic conditions in which the civilization flourished, said Arati Deshpande Mukherjee of Deccan College, which helped analyse the finds along with Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad.
The researchers believe that the Indus Valley Civilization spread over a vast expanse of India — stretching to the banks of the now "lost" Saraswati river or the Ghaggar-Hakra river — but this has not been studied enough because what we know so far is based on British excavations. "At the excavation sites, we saw preservation of all cultural levels right from the pre-Indus Valley Civilisation phase (9,000-8,000 years ago) through what we have categorised as Early Harappan (8,000-7,000 years ago) to the Mature Harappan times," said Sarkar.

The late Harappan phase witnessed large-scale de-urbanisation, drop in population, abandonment of established settlements, violence and even the disappearance of the Harappan script, the researchers say. The study revealed that monsoon started weakening 7,000 years ago but, surprisingly, the civilization did not disappear.

The Indus Valley people were very resolute and flexible and continued to evolve even in the face of declining monsoon. The people shifted their crop patterns from large-grained cereals like wheat and barley during the early part of intensified monsoon to drought-resistant species like rice in the latter part. As the yield diminished, the organised large storage system of the Mature Harappan period gave way to more individual household-based crop processing and storage systems that acted as a catalyst for the de-urbanisation of the civilization rather than an abrupt collapse, they say.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/indi ... 485332.cms

The successive cultural levels at Bhirrana, as deciphered from archeological artefacts along with these 14C ages, are Pre-Harappan Hakra phase (~9.5–8 ka BP), Early Harappan (~8–6.5 ka BP), Early mature Harappan (~6.5–5 ka BP) and mature Harappan (~5–2.8 ka BP (8,17,18,20,34)).

The Ghaggar (in India)-Hakra (in Pakistan) river, referred to as mythical Vedic river ‘Saraswati’ (Fig. 1A) originates in the Siwalik hills, ephemeral in the upper part with dry river bed running downstream through the Thar desert to Rann of Kachchh in Gujarat3. More than 500 sites of Harappan settlements have been discovered in this belt during the last hundred years.

It is difficult to point to one single cause that drove the Harappan decline although diverse suggestions from Aryan invasion, to catastrophic flood or droughts, change in monsoon and river dynamics, sea-levels, trade decline2,3,73,74,75,76,77,78,79 to increased societal violence and spread of infectious diseases26 have been proposed. The continued survival of Harappans at Bhirrana suggests adaptation to at least one detrimental factor that is monsoon change.

A_Gupta wrote:^^^^ The people shifted their crop patterns from large-grained cereals like wheat and barley during the early part of intensified monsoon to drought-resistant species like rice in the latter part.

Rice is drought-resistant?

shiv wrote:
More seriously - I Googled and found that the Green revolution encouraged the spread of rice varieties that were less drought resistant, and efforts are now on to "turn back the clock" and breed drought resistant varities
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep14799

johneeG wrote:....
Genetic dating is based on rate of mutation. Rate of mutation is
a) assumed
b) based on evolution theory.

...

peter wrote:

johneeG wrote:....
Genetic dating is based on rate of mutation. Rate of mutation is
a) assumed
b) based on evolution theory.

...

This is a fair point I think.

JE Menon wrote:Speaking of ancient India, and the antiquity of it and the knowledge of it, here's a link that throws up some intriguing possibilities:

https://books.google.nl/books?id=POxJAw ... le&f=false

Amhara, of course, is an area now in Ethiopia, whose language is still called Amharic...

peter wrote:

johneeG wrote:....
Genetic dating is based on rate of mutation. Rate of mutation is
a) assumed
b) based on evolution theory.

...

This is a fair point I think.

shiv wrote: It may be "fair" but point "b" is still complete nonsense.

peter wrote:

shiv wrote: It may be "fair" but point "b" is still complete nonsense.

How so?

1. The cow can be tied to a coconut tree to restrict its freedom
2. Coconut trees can restrict the freedom of cows
3. The name coconut milk is designed to promote coconuts and devalue cow's milk.
4. Coconut trees are the natural enemies of cows.