Several decades ago an Indo-Aryan group was found to have settled in the kingdom of the Mitanni, roughly the upper regions of the Euphrates now within the borders of Syria.
No such settlement was found.
The key point is that the linguistic clues suggested an Indo-Aryan association, not an Iranian one. When you explain this to a lay audience often the first response is that someone how a group of Aryans traversed Persia from their homeland in the upper Indus valley and settled in Syria. But there are problems with this hypothesis, because the linguistic fragments show no evidence of familiarity with terms that are distinctive to Indo-Aryan due to the encountering of objects and creatures local to India. To top it off, the Mitanni dialect exhibits archaisms that suggest it predates the Sanskrit variant of Indo-Aryan found in the Rig Veda. This is plausible since the Mitanni tablets date from 1600-1500 BCE, and at this point the Indo-Aryan dialect was likely used for ritual or formalistic purposes and so preserved a more ancient manner of speech.2 The Rig Veda was certainly fixed after 1500 BCE, though before 1000 BCE, and its language was a living tongue which was still evolving.
The circular logic is clear in this article.
The key problem is that the Aryan elements found in Mitanni are purely Indic with no traces of Iranian or proto IIr found in them. ie a distinct Indian Aryan language was formed before the historians would agree that Indic aryans entered India. This would go against the theory that there is a proto IIr branching off to Iranian and Indic paths before the Aryans entered the subcontinent.
in fact, the very thesis that there is a proto language has emanated because of the similarities of languages and even today, the only evidence that points to the common origin is purely linguistic. With the above paragraph, even this evidence seems to be destroyed and there is no common language called IIr. The following solution is nonsense anyway and just trying to fit the circumstances, so as to keep the common origin theory of all IE' alive. Frankly, i think PIE is finished.
However, the last point (no 4) is interesting The IA were autochthonous to the entire subcontinent including Iran. Rajesh Kochchar gets confused only because of this and tries to fix the homeland of RV vedics at Afghanistan . The persians (Iranian speaking) have come to Iran at a later time, superstratifying the ethnic Indo Aryans, who are as attested by Mitanis , daiva worshipers.. t This is supported by two factors:
1. The Iranians talk of an Original Home land. The Indic aryans have no such concept . For all practical purposes, they are autochthonous to the subcontinent. Hence, the Iranians are immigrants whereas the Indo Aryans are not. The similarities are mostly borrowings.
2.the iranians were superstratem in the area - converting or killing all the Daiva worshippers. all over Iran and Afganistan.
The "solution" to this mystery is rather simple, it seems likely that both the Iranian and Indian Aryans derived from what is termed the Andronovo Cultural Complex, which existed in the late Bronze Age around the Caspian steppe and further east into northern Central Asia. When the original Indo-Iranians dispersed from this region it is likely that they spread out in multiple directions, and there was already some differentiation between the "Indo"-Aryan and Iranian tribes prior to this dispersal.3 Some of the Indo-Aryan groups settled in India, and gave rise to the languages spoke by 3/4 of modern Indians. Others seem to have become absorbed into the milieu of the Middle Eastern cultures, disappearing from history. The Iranian speaking groups eventually dominated the Persia plateau as well as the Central Asian river valleys, but, some of them also migrated to the steppes to the north of the Black Sea and further west. Because linguistic distributions are a palimpsest these patterns and migrations have been obscured by the spread of Turkic languages in Central Asia (with Tajik and a few other Iranian languages as holdouts), breaking the continuity between the southern and northwestern Iranian tongues (Ossetian is a relict in the Caucasus of the western Iranian dialects). The extinction of all Indo-Aryan dialects outside of India also has resulted in the fact that that clade of the Indo-European languages is modified by the term Indo, when prior to the historical period its distribution was possibly far less geographically constrained.4
The same caution extends to many terms which have geographical origins, the classification of "Italic," Latin and its derivates + all the Indo-European non-Latin languages (Umbrian, Oscan, etc.). Or "Iberian" for the extinct language of the Tartessians of southern Spain, which might have a relationship with other dead languages of Western Europe or North Africa.
I have placed a small map for illustrative purposes below the fold.
1 - Philosophically this was a view espoused to some extent by the later Wittgenstein and championed today by many "Post-Modernists." I believe that modern cognitive science has falsified this view.
2 - The preservation of Mitanni Indo-Aryans terms relating to horsemanship is not surprising since it is hypothesized that Indo-Europeans introduced many elements of horse culture into the Middle East. As a point of comparison, Latin was preserved in Byzantine culture the longest in the military and the legal profession, two areas where Western Roman culture could compete with the Greeks.
3 - This idea of pre-dispersal differences and identities for various groups is a neat solution to why the Tocharians, the Indo-Europeans who settled along the northern rim of the Tarim basin in modern Turkestan (it seems likely that the southern rim of the basin had an Indo-Iranian population) are classed with the "western" centum clades of Indo-European, Celtic, Italic and Germanic, as opposed to the "eastern" satem groups, Greek, Armenian, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian. Though some scholars dispute the salience of the centum-satem distinction, other points of evidence do suggest that there was an association of the pre-Tocharian tribes with groups that later founded the western branches of the Indo-European language family (in particular the Celtic branch). This association likely occurred in the Proto-Indo-European homeland, possibly the grasslands of southeastern Europe and north-central Asia.
4 - One model holds that in fact the Persian plateau was dominated by Indo-Aryans, and the Iranians were latecomers who divided the continuity of Indo-Aryan groups which settled in India, Persia and the Middle East. It is interesting to note that the archaic Indo-Iranian languages, Sanskrit and Avestan, tend to exhibit an inversion of some terms, for example Indo-Aryan daeva has positive divine associations, but in Iranian it is a negative term (hence, devil). The same inversion is found in the term asura, a race of anti-gods in Indian mythos, but on the side of the good God in Iranian tradition.
Please correct the terminology in my post.
kishore patnaik
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and within the reach of every hand.
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