--- Francesco Brighenti <
frabrig@...> wrote:
> I cannot remember why the author excludes that the
> Iranian river-
> names and daeva-names he takes as evidence of an
> earlier presence of
> Indo-Aryans on the Iranian plateau were inherited
> from common Indo-
> Iranian. Could you kindly look into the book and
> elucidate me on
> this point, George?
>
> Best wishes,
> Francesco
****GK: [My source was not a book but an article :T.
Burrow, "The Proto-Indoaryans", The Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland,
1973, pp. 123-140. He refers (once) to his larger work
on Sanskrit, published in 1955.]
A. As to river names. B. rejects the IIr origin of
Iranian [hara(x)vaiti:) and Indic [Sarasvati] (the
only other rn analyzed are [sarayu] and Oxus] because
he feels that the IIr no longer existed as a
collectivity when these rn were established in Iran
and India. The split between Iranians and Indics
occurred,he believes, at the latest by 2000 BCE,in the
Central Asian steppes. In other words, when they moved
into Iran,they did so as Indics and Iranians, not as
IIr. He believes the Indics moved first,hence the
river in Iran was first called [Sarasvati] and was
renamed when the Iranians arrived (pp. 125, 126-7).
B. As to the daeva-names. B. believes that gods such
as Indra, Varuna, Nasatya,Sarva, Vishnu, Savitr,
Pushan etc.., "demonized" by the Zoroastrians, were
never part of the Iranian pantheon (even before Zor.)
and were strictly Indic religious innovations. What
was IIr acc.to him? Terms such as "daiva", "asura",
and "baga" (of these only "asura" was strictly IIr).
He doesn't say which of these was the "common" IIr
"god name", if there was one. He insists that the
notion of two sets of IIr gods, one of which went
Indic (the devas) and the other Iranic (the ahuras),
is false. His main argument is that Indic demonization
of the asuras was a late and completely independent
process, and that the common Iranian pre-Zoroastrian
"god word" was "baga". Anything more specific you'd
like me to check on?
BTW Burrow cites Gray favourably and quotes the
passage from Gray,p. 439 in extenso on his own p. 133.
He corrects Gray on three points however: (1) "baga"
rather then "ahura" was the original Iranian god
word(as above); (2) "daivas" were only made evil by
Zoroastrian propaganda. He agrees with Gray that they
were the gods of Indics,not common IIr gods; (3) The
Iranians did not drive out the Indics from Iran. They
arrived after the latter had basically out-migrated,
dominated their remnants, and borrowed some terms from
them as they eventually assimilated them.****
>
>
>
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