Piotr wrote
<<What I mean is, was it consistently the Dravidians who sold things and the
Indo-Aryans who bought them? The question is not rhetorical -- I simply don't
know if the traditional occupations of the peoples of India warrant such an
idealised scenario.>>
That's valid. Although the regional occupations of ancient India can perhaps
be deduced from what was produced, what was consumed and what was traded from
where to where, and in prehistoric times this is fundamentally archaeological
and I'm not really familiar with the details of what has been found.
I do know, however, that there is good evidence of well-developed trade
networks between urban and non-urban areas as far back as Harrapan. (The
Harrapan seals themselves are often associated with transport and trade.)
I also am aware of evidence that India was a textile exporting powerhouse as
we enter historical times, and that this industry appears to have been
centered on cotton. (I recall that Pliny describes what seems to be huge
trade deficit rung up by the Roman Empire, apparently thanks to Indian
textile imports.) Such an developed industry would demand a regular supply
of raw cotton, and I believe that cotton required a rather high ratio of
land use to finished product. Early cotton production climatically also
would indicate the production was centered in more southern India. So, the
line of distribution from raw product to finished product could possibly have
been rural-to-urban, sedentary farmer-to-transporter (via pack animal) or
south-to-north, at that time.
As to occupations, a textile industry has many of them, but a vital one would
be cotton growing and a large textile industry would take a lot of cotton
growers to support it and a lot of transporters to move it. A problem with
such cash crops is that they are not edible and that takes labor and land
away from the production of food, which puts even more resource demands on a
cotton-growing-based society. (Creating a situation like that in the old
American South where "cotton was king" in that every aspect of life revolved
around it.)
So, the scenario may be a guess, but it isn't without some foundation.
Though I'd demur to anyone more informed about better evidence of how this
ancient economy actually worked. By the way, India also seems to have had an
big advantage in clothing dyes also, which would have involved even more
intensive raw material gathering and production.
<<As an additional complication, the pattern of replacement is not the same
everywhere -- the South Dravidian languages and some of the South-Central
ones (e.g. Telugu) either have retained the inherited set or replace some of
the higher numerals only variably, while the remaining languages have already
replaced the 4-10 (or at least 8-10) series with Indo-Aryan items.>>
And of course this might be dependent on a lot of different factors,
including local exchange and shipping practices and the degree of local
integration with the raw product/finished product economy.
<<Anyway, if the vague notion of "prestige" is substituted with something
more concrete like the "economic dominance" of the Indo-Aryan speakers (which
would be the case if most of the moneyed customers belonged to that
linguistic group), I don't mind.>>
Just a word about economic "dominance." The scenario I gave doesn't
necessitate dominance. It only needs a degree of "economic integration,"
that is integrated economies whose languages are otherwise different.
The US firm I mentioned earlier was not being dominated. In fact, some
protectionist-oriented Japanese might see such practices as accounting in Yen
as a tricky American attempt to infiltrate the Japanese economy. However, a
free market economist would say the optiminum situation between buyers and
sellers is an equilibrium. And we might well expect to see limited
terminological (linguistic) integration between the two in that situation
over time. (E.g., is the I-A word for cotton from "Dravidian?" I don't know,
but that might indicate a kind of equal and mutual integration.)
Economic "dominance" would come from one side or the other getting market
leverage. E.g., one of the causes of the American Revolution might have been
England's policy discouraging the growth of American manufacturing. That
policy was for America to sell raw materials ONLY to Britain and buy its
manufactured goods ONLY from Britain, a institutionalized economic dominance.
But a seller of raw goods can also be dominant. The South African diamond
monopoly produced a seller's dominance in that market. A drug dealer may be
an extreme but clearer example. A manufacturing economy may become heavily
dependent on raw materials. Which way word borrowings would go under those
circumstances isn't clear, but to the extent the economies are really
integrated, we might still expect some sharing of commercial terms between
them, including the words for numbers.
Steve