Dear Gerry and Guillaume
Guillaume wrote
> > > Gerry:
> > > Then are you saying that since the Indus civilization wasn't
Aryan but
> > > was Burushaski an invasion actually took place? And where did the
> > > Burushaski march in from? Or were they indiginous to north of the
> > Indus
> > > Valley? Were they hill people?
Gerry replied
> > no, they were indigenous to south Indus valley,from the greater
centers
> > of tht Indus civilisation. They were forced to the North because of
> > aryan encroachment in their country. If you don't have a copy of
> > Bernard Sergent's book in your library, I will loan it again from
mine
> > and explain more in detail the arguments.
Guillaume asked
> Gerry: So you're saying the Aryan invasion was from the south and
> forced the Burushaski to the north? Not only do I not have Sergent's
> book in my library I have no access to a library. Thanks anyhow for
the
> offer. Do you know if Sergent perhaps has excerpts on the web?
Gerry I wonder about Indo Aryan being indigenous to the south of the
Indus. I have seen analyses that suggest the earliest IE of which we
have record, the Rg Veda shows a sophisticated understanding of the
Kabul and Kunnar Rivers that flow through the Khyber pass, as well as
the Indus Punjab, but show very little knowledge of the Sind, Gujerat,
Bolan Pass or Indus mouth, which they would have preserved if they had
come from the south. The question about "indigenality" if the Urheimat
of PIE is not the Indus region (which I doubt exceedingly) is that
Indo-Aryan must have come from somewhere outside India at some time.
It then becomes a question of "when" (revisionist Indian historians
here in Questioning the 1,500 BCE Aryan Invasion would have just
succeeded in pushing the date backwards)
Gerry again wrote
> > I think a good point to test this theory would be searching for a
> > burushaski substrate in Indo-aryan that does not exist in iranian.
> > Toponymy of course can be also useful.
> >
> > However we lack of historical records on brusha people. The
earliest I
> > know id the tibetan record of the bru-zha people (see Toung Bao,
1912,
> > B. Laufer). He gives a little text in the 'bru-zha language' -- it
> > looks like gibberish rather than burushaski so I think it is a
> > invention by tibetan clerks (they were fond of such things, to make
> > their books look 'mysterious' an all).
> > Are there records of them in Iranian chronicles ?
Iranian chronicles of Eastern Iran are fairly late. Zaehner suggested
that Zarathshtra could be placed in Eastern Iran roughly
contemporaneously with the Medes, and that in that case King Vitaspa
was a monarch who had built a confederation of Eastern Iranian tribes
into a loose kingdom in the area of Ariana ("homeland of the Aryans").
This confederation was fairly shortlived, as it was (within a
generation or two) quickly absorbed within the great Persian Empire of
Kurush (Cyrus the Archaemenid). Zaehner then suggests that either then
or shortly before there was a migration of peoples (possibly even
refugees from Vitaspa's aggrandising tendencies) north, from Ariana to
Kwarazim and the mouth of the Oxus as it flows into the Aral Sea (in
the vacinity of Urgenj).
Aggrandising monarchs are always on the lookout for ideologies which
will justify and legitimate their power. Monotheisms are particularly
good at doing that. Athough Zoroastrianism has a reputation of being a
dualistic religion - the battle between dark and light etc - Zaehner is
fairly convincing when he shows that the original message of
Zarathshtra was in fact a monotheistic one. Thus it was readily adapted
into the belief system of the Persian royal line - a fact which made
Cyrus capable of being seen as the promised messiah by the Jewish
exiles of Babylonia, especially when he allowed the newly reformed and
monotheistically purged Jewish elite to return to Zion from their
Bablyonian captivity to rebuild their temple. In this way, a great
number of Babylonian-Persian beliefs entered into Judaism (eg Eden =
Edin (Sumerian for garden), Paradise (from the Persian), winged angels,
the mother of all living (Eve) being made out of Adam's rib (from the
Sumerian pun = Ninti), the story of Ruth and Esther (Persian for
Ishtar) etc).
Apart from the Elamites to the south west, there is no reference in the
Iranian mythos to my knowledge of any indigenous or "foreign" peoples
until the Shah Namah of Ferdausi. In his stories of the struggles of
Rustam, the central theme is of the irreconcilable and eternal struggle
between Iran and Turan (urkic Altaic peoples) in North Eastern Iran.
And Ferdausi composed his great Epic in the late courts of the last
Samanid monarch and later of Mahmud of Ghazna - far too late for your
purposes her Gerry.
What can we assume from this? Firstly that Indo-Iranian languages were
well established throughout northern and eastern Iran from a very early
time. The linguistic shift from *s to *h (eg *Soma (Indian) to *haoma
(Ianian), *Asura (Indian) to *Ahura (Iranian)) shown in the very
earliest Zaraoastrian Gathas occurred very early. If we are to abolish
the theory of the Aryan invasion, then the earliest that Indo-Aryan can
have appeared in India would have been sometime in the early formative
period of the Indus civilisation - 2,500 to 2,000 BCE. If they were
present in the Indus civilisation period (as Hindu revisionist
historians argue) then that civilisation - like Mesopotamia - must have
been multiethnic, in which a unitary culture transcended linguistic
differences.
Hope this helps
John