Re: Urheimat

Dear John,

I think you mixed up me and Gerry. It is I who believed in the
burushashki origin of the Indus civilisation.

>
> 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.

I never read the Rgveda, but aren't the 'seven rivers' (that is the
Indus and its affluents) a recurrent theme in the RV ? Are the names of
the places in Afganistan that you cite as such prsent in the Rgveda
(and could you give more precise referrences if possible)

>
>
> 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).

Although this has nothing to do with our current discussion, I don't
agree with all of this. Sumerian religion was directly loaned into
judaism (via the ancestral form of judaism, ugaritic religion). As for
paradise, well, OK, that is persian, but does this word exist in hebrew
? It existed only in greek and then in latin, in my opinion
(paradei~sos, paradisium); anyway by that time, many jews spoke only
greek.

>
> 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.

Well, this is even older than the tibetan work I was talking about. I
read parts of the Shah-name some time ago, but I can't remember any
references to brusha people. Anyway, there exist a e-text translation
of Shah-name, so it is easy to search for 'brusha' or anything
appraoching.
Anyway, any information regarding the prehistory of brusha people would
quite interest me.

>
> 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.
>

I agree on that. I do believe that aryans arrived step by step in the
Indus valley, as there are aryan ritual objects (as fire altars) found
in ;ohenjo-daro. See http.//harappa.com, the interview of a tamil who
is trying to decipher the indus script. There is also an interesting
review of Parpola's work.

Guillaume