>11. Vedic culture, including the Sanskrit language and its relatives,
>was spread by various sages, kings and merchants from India,
>sometimes with migrating bands of people who followed the Vedic
>principle to make the entire world Arya (dharmic). There were
>expansions both by land and sea and in all directions, not only north
>and west but also east and south.
I was looking for more specific linguistic and archaeological evidence. If
you're going to stick to scripture, citations would help. But as the
crumbling of Biblical claims of a great Solomonic kingdom has shown,
scripture alone can be very problematic. I'm far from dismissing it as a
source, but it does have its own ethnic, dynastic and even class agendas,
like any written source.
What I was wondering, though, was whether Indian-origin IEists had
addressed the problem of a theorized European migration out of India from a
linguistic standpoint. Where did the the Semitic loanwords in PIE come
from? When do they think these migrations out of India happened, and what
route/s did they take? How to account for the massive differentiation of
European IE languages, compared to the IIr ones, or the lexical problems
referred to earlier?
>12. Ancient European Aryas like the Celts and the Greeks were part of
>a cultural diffusion and migration of peoples from the northwest of
>India and Afghanistan at an early period. The Europeans called
>themselves 'Danavas', the sons of the Goddess Danu.
Danava is an Indian term, but you must be thinking of the Tuatha De Danann,
people of the goddess Danand or Danu. As far as I can see, there are two
main strands in the Danu-names: rivers or water deities (demonized in the
Vedas) and (especially in the Irish account) peoples conquered by IE
settlers. Not the IE settlers themselves, but Others. (In the case of the
Danaids, the Greeks were very clear that they came from north Africa.) The
kind of muddled picture you get when a superceded religion is mixed up with
historical legends.
Rg Veda demonizes Danu and her offspring, but besides that, are the Danavas
at all treated as peoples in Vedic accounts? It's often been said that
various legions of demons referred to ancient historic peoples who were
enemies of the Aryas, and colonized by them. That would seem to explain the
Dravidian, Munda and other substrates that show up in analysis of Vedic
language.
Max