Prem Kumar wrote:Not always true. When the Brishits ruled over India, they didn't adopt titles of "Maharajah". Nor did they walk around with Indian trappings. When the Spanish conquered South & Central America, they didn't call themselves the descendants of the Sun God. They imposed their language and culture.
Poor argument.
Both the examples you provide are of European colonial empires in the post-renaissance period. By this time, European countries had evolved the concept of the linguistic nation-state to the extent of using it as a driving force of supremacism. The Spanish and British believed they were destined to rule the territories they colonized by virtue of the fact that they were Spanish or British, respectively (and secondarily, as representatives of a “civilizing Christendom”).
When we talk about “Out of India” we’re talking about the ancient world, when none of these concepts was operational.
I have provided FOUR examples in this post of how elite dominance in this era involved the incoming, conquering elites adopting the language and cultural tropes of the conquered populace in order to govern more effectively. There is no question that the pattern for elite dominance by an incoming settler population in the ancient world followed this template.
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We are talking 2 different things here. I was referring to the Mitannis and you're talking about the Hittites. The Mitanni rulers had late Rig Vedic names, which Talageri demonstrated. They also had the famous Suppiluliuma-Shattiwaza Treaty treaty, which invoked Vedic Gods. But the native population was non-IE speaking. Clearly indicates an elite dominance
An observation like this can as easily be fit into the Aryan Migration hypothesis— by claiming that the names in the Mitanni treaty hail from a time before Aryan culture became established in India at all. And indeed this is how the AMT/AIT backers explain it. Simply stating that an ambiguous data point “clearly indicates” XYZ does not make it so.
In fact the AIT/AMT backers claim that the “elite dominance” was of Steppe charioteer/mercenaries who took over the Mitanni kingdom and used these Steppe-origin names in their royal families and religious invocations. I believe that is a bogus argument, for reasons described above—elite dominance is not attested in this way. But by the exact same token, using it as a pro-“OIT” argument is equally bogus.
I mentioned Sanskrit just in jest. I know it was not written in Sanskrit, any more than the Gathas are. But try understanding the horse training manual without knowing Sanskrit!
What exactly do you mean?
There are literally millions of vegetable vendors all over India who understand and use the term “kilo”, i.e. “kilogram” as a measure of weight in English, further derived from the Greek “kilo” for “one thousand”. Do you claim that all these vegetable vendors can understand Greek because they know this term?
Likewise, I myself happen to know about ten words in Tamizh. This does not mean I can speak or understand Tamizh, not by a long shot. I cannot make sense of someone speaking to me in Tamizh or express my own ideas in that language. Moreover, even if I took the time to mug up 100 Tamizh words, that STILL would not make me someone who “understands” Tamizh.
So the claim that someone had to “understand Sanskrit” in order to follow Kikkuli’s horse-training manual goes absolutely nowhere. For that matter, Kikkuli’s own name is not even of Indo-European origin (so much for “elite dominance”).
My point still stands: if the Mitanni rulers were late Rig Vedic contemporaries & their horse training manual contains Sanskritic technical terms, it does indicate elite dominance. And a fun-fact: its a horse-training-manual - the much maligned horse, which supposed Indo-Aryans didn't know about. Yet, their language is the one that's used to describe technical terms to train a horse. This shows that the IA-speaking people were the true domesticators of the horse & pioneers in chariotry. At the very least, it indicates that the IA-speakers took the horse domestication/training to the next level, which helps OIT (they used horses, wagons & chariots in their world dominance)
You are digging yourself deeper and deeper into Steppe/AIT origins by using this type of argument. It fits in perfectly with the idea that Sanskrit evolved in the Steppe (where horses were common) rather than India (where they were clearly not). In all the fossil record, there is only ONE instance of horse (Equus caballus) remains in the Indus Valley Civilzation (Surkotada) as compared to huge numbers in the Steppe.
Even Talageri admits that the horse (Equus caballus) was an extremely rare animal in India during the early Rigvedic period, and only introduced as an elite mount during the later Rigvedic period. In fact, his evidence shows that “asva” in the RigVeda probably referred to the Onager, a species of wild donkey. Only later, when domesticated donkeys were also introduced to India, did the semantics of Sanskrit drift— the term “gardhaba” came to be used for donkeys, while “asva” came to mean horse specifically.
The only OIT data-point in the case of horses is the following: Armenian uses the term “es” (a cognate of Sanskrit “asva”) for “donkey”, while it uses the term “ji” (a cognate of Sanskrit “haya”) for “horse”. If indeed the Armenians came from India that would coincide with the semantic evolution of the words “Asva” and “haya”. “Haya” in Sanskrit refers to a “superior form of steed”… which could correspond to the horse, as compared to the onager, after it was introduced into India from outside.
The Druhyu-Druid connection is an agreed upon one in linguistics. Additionally, RV talks about the Druhyu migration as a distant memory. Its enough of a base for a hypothesis. We are building the OIT picture here and Talageri's work gives a solid framework. Instead, what you are asking for is: "where is the final picture?" & dismissing any framework-building efforts as "mere speculation".
Of course framework-building without a shred of physical evidence is mere speculation. As indeed, any hypothesis without supporting evidence is also mere speculation. What is more inaccurate? My referring to it as speculation, or you trying to pass it off as “proof” of OIT?
*Any* homeland theory will involve tribes traveling 1000s of miles, many times across inhospitable terrain. You are saying that Indians somehow could not have crossed the Hindu-Kush and gone North & West. While the Steppe people could have made the reverse trip?
You were talking about the pollination of Uralic languages with Indo-European terms. For these terms to have gone “Out of India”, you need to show how the people who used them ended up in the vicinity of the Urals. The Steppe on the other hand is already in the immediate vicinity of the Ural mountains. The application of Occam’s razor is obvious to anyone looking at a map.
Steppe people are claimed to have moved in several directions, consistent with their having been a nomadic pastoralist population with well-established migration routes spanning thousands of miles, and attested by the widespread occurrence of Kurgans or burial grounds.
There is, on the other hand, no evidence that Indus Valley people (or their predecessors) built any structure-- or left any archeological trace of their settlement (as opposed to mere trade commodities) outside India.
Moreover, there is a great deal of evidence supporting out-migration of Steppe peoples into more hospitable climes of the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, Southern and South-western Asia throughout history… from the Sakas/Hunas to the Turco-Mongols. This typically happened because periodic climate events in the Steppe imposed outward migration pressures into more hospitable climes. Conversely, there is no evidence that people would depart from the already hospitable climate and fertile lands of India to go anywhere else in the ancient world.
This is special pleading and failing the Occam's razor test: you have to make an additional assumption to explain one-way Uralic borrowings using AIT. But you don't need to make that extra assumption with OIT.
No, you have to make ten additional assumptions. You have to insist that just once in history, for some reason, Indians left the fertile riverine plains of India, crossed the Hindu-Kush/Caucasus/Pamirs, went into the dry cold Steppe, arrived 1000s of miles away at the base of the Ural mountains with their language and culture somehow intact, and then taught it to the Uralic tribes.
Exceptional events do take place in history, and indeed RigVeda suggests that the outmigration of Anus and Druhyus following the Dasarajna war did occur. But again— your contention is that we are “close to proving” OIT, and not even one of the arguments you have provided comes anywhere near supporting that contention.
Special Pleading - again. No, they cannot be Dravidian words. Shail Vyas specifically did a cognate comparison with Dravidian words and it turned up empty. Not only are these Sanskrit (or proto-Sanskrit words), many of them have deeper word-roots that can only be explained via Sanskrit or Indo-Aryan, but not Dravidian. The most interesting conclusion from Shail Vyas' preprint is the fact that these attested words are circa 2600-2100 BCE and these are Sanskrit (or at the least, Indo-Aryan) words. This gives a kick in the nuts of AIT & strengthens OIT because the latter theory alone permits such early dates for Sanskrit.
This is a strawman argument if I ever heard one. Who says that any pre-Indo-European language spoken in India had to be “Dravidian”? Even among the AIMT proponents, only a few (e.g. Akso Parpola) contend such a thing. All that is known about the ISVC language is that it hasn’t been deciphered. It could just as easily have belonged to some language family that has since become extinct. The extinction of language families that were widely spoken has been recorded in history—one example being Etruscan, which dominated South-Central Europe before the arrival of Latin.
Shail Vyas’ claims of Indo-Aryan words in West Asia during the 2600-2100 BCE period can be as easily coopted into AIMT as the Mitanni nomenclature of kings and deities. The AIMT people claim these were traces left during the southward/eastward migration of PIE (which by 2500 BCE had evolved into proto-Indo-Iranic) into India and Iran.
If this is not true you have to show that the terms were unquestionably of Indian origin. Otherwise, the burden of proof for those who wish to claim “out of India” origins for these words has not become one gram lighter.
The whole discussion of Mesopotamia happened because you asked if there was evidence of Indians migrating further West than Iran. And the answer is yes.
Sorry, if you claim that a mitochondrial DNA allele is proof that “Indians migrated” further West than Iran then by the exact same token you have to accept that "Steppe people migrated into India” per the Vagheesh Narasimhan paper of 2019.
Relying on a single allele, that too a Y-chromosomal or mitochondrial allele (which is notoriously susceptible to distortion by founder effects) is really grasping at straws. Narasimhan has not shown a significant influx of Steppe population into India in his study, and neither have Chaubey et al demonstrated this convincingly for a migration of Indian population into West Asia.
IVC influence on Mesopotomaia itself doesn't directly impact AIT or OIT because they are different language families. But it does show a few things:
1) Indians were seafarers, explorers & exporters. Helps the mental maps of many Indians, whose history books have taught them that we only import & get invaded
2) Shail Vyas' evidence of Sanskritic terms into Mesopotamia, with a very early attestation, anchors Sanskrit/IA to a much earlier date that OIT can accommodate but AIT can't.
Regarding (1), Indians need to come out of their mindset whether OIT is proved or not, for their own sake. We cannot wait for OIT to be proven before insisting on the rejection of a colonized mindset.
BUT meanwhile, putting up half-baked notions of OIT as “proof” does not help the matter in any way. In fact, when such feeble attempts at “proof” are easily demolished (as they will be), the consequences of that exposure will be all the more damaging to the Indian psyche.
If we call something “evidence” when it is merely conjecture, the only thing that will end up suffering is our own credibility when we are exposed.
Regarding Shail Vyas’ list (again)—as I mentioned, AIT linguistics does very much allow for proto-Indo-Iranic to exist post 2500 BCE. So it can accommodate such words in West Asia in that timeframe.
Out-migration of people has strong circumstantial evidence in the form of
1) Artisans building IVC style artifacts with local materials
This is still explicable as the setting up of local manufacturing facilities by ISVC merchants at West Asian trading posts. Local artisans would have used local materials to make ISVC-style artifacts at these locations. Nothing about this is necessarily consistent with out-migration of Indian-origin populations.
2) References to Meluhhans in Sumerian texts
There are also references to Atlantis in many texts. This in itself proves nothing.
3) Mittani rulers in a place where IVC artifacts are also found
Artifacts from all kinds of places are found in Northern Syria from that period, the bulk of them NOT from IVC. And the “elite hypothesis” explanation is special pleading of the sort that can be very easily turned over to support Aryan invasion, as I have shown above. If it doesn’t work for them, it cannot work for us.
