On Wed, 11 Dec 2002 03:10:01 -0000, "vishalsagarwal
<
vishalagarwal@...>" <
vishalagarwal@...> wrote:
>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski > Elst does not
>explain why the IEs found Europe, of all places, so irresistibly
>attractive; or why they did not migrate into southeast Asia, Arabia
>or anywhere else except along the route usually believed to have been
>followed by the Aryas travelling in the opposite direction.
>
>VA: Southeast Asia was inaccessible as the gangetic plains were
>heavily forested, and IA languages could not penentrate the coastal
>areas because of Vindhyas and dense forests. It could be easier to
>cross the Khyber, go to Oxus, and move among that river to Caspian
>(as is well known Oxus flowed into Caspian till around 600 BCE). It
>was only late that Iranians pushed militarily into Eastern Iran,
>Armenia etc.
>
>Similary, the Central Iranian depression offered a formidable barrier
>to movement of IE speakers into Mesopotamia. Arabia could not be
>reached except along the coast of Makran, Iran because long distance
>sea travel had not been invented along that route yet.
It's hard to tell which route would have been the most likely one for
Out-of-India migrants to have taken, once they had crossed the obvious
Khyber pass. I'm aware of only one historical precedent, the
migration of the Gypsies out of North-Western India into Iran,
Mesopotamia and then coming to Europe in two waves: one through
Anatolian into the Balkans, the other through Egypt and North Africa
to Spain. So the only known historical precedent took a wholly
different route.
The lack of historical precedent is probably the most important
non-linguistic objection against the OIT. If we look at historically
recorded movements across the Khyber pass, it was crossed west to east
by Persians, Greeks, Sakas, Parthians, Kushans (Yue Chi), White Huns,
Arabs, Ghaznavid Turks -> Delhi Sultanate, Mongols/Timurids ->
Moghuls, and Afghans. It was crossed east to west by the Mauryas, the
Guptas, and the British (the Gypsy crossing --which we know must have
happened-- is itself not recorded). So if we look at history, there's
at least a 3:1 chance that the Indo-Europeans crossed the Khyber from
the west into India, rather than from the east out of India, and there
is no historical precedent for a migration India -> Central Asia ->
Pontic-Caspian steppe -> Europe.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...