Re: [tied] Re: Why India?

----- Original Message -----

From: vishalsagarwal

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 5:39 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Why India?

> --- In cybalist@......, "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@......> wrote:

> > as is the fact that nearly all the major rivers of Afghanistan flow into Hamun-e Helmand, which therefore fully deserves the designation <samudrá-> 'the meeting of waters' (*som-udró-).

> VA: Really? Harirud does not flow into the Hamum. Nor does the only LARGE RIVER of Afghanistan, the Oxus.

 

Oh, so there are two exceptions? Let me help you -- the Kabul is another. Still, Hamun-e Helmand drains nearly the whole area of Afghanistan, and since the Amu Darya does not, strictly speaking, flow _through_ Afghanistan, the Helmand and the Arghandab, with their numerous tributaries, form the most important river system in the country. The Farah Rud, the Harrut Rud, the Khash Rud, the Khuspas and several lesser rivers flow into Hamun-e Helmand as well.

> Is the 'Sarasvati' attestation earlier or is Haraxvaiti earlier? What are the 'Aryan' features of the culture in Helmand basin? Except for one report that mentions horse bones (just a mention), ALL OTHER EXCAVATION reports clearly state that no horses are found in the region at those archaeological levels.

 

What do you mean by "Aryan"? The Avestan Iranians were as Aryan as the Vedic Indo-Aryans, and the whole area had probably been "Aryanised" by the early second millennium BC. If no distinctively Indian traits are visible at that stage, it's quite simply because the Indo-Aryan culture as we know it developed in India as a synthesis of the local and Aryan traditions, with subsequent cultural innovations. However, if there are no Indian elements in the early local cultures of Afghanistan, that must be a real problem for any "Out of India" scheme.

 

Since you ask, in terms of actual material attestation, <haraxWaiti:> is older than <sarasvati:>. We find OPer. harauvati- in Xerxes' list of Persian provinces; it's also mentioned in Babylonian sources. The Rigveda and the Avesta are both old and respectable sources. My contention is that both names are _equally_ old: they are in fact the same name in two rather closely related languages.

 

> And when compared to even Ravi (the smallest river of the Indus system, contributing only 3.5% of the total water flow of the system), even Helmand is a stream.

 

So what? Can't a "stream" be famous? Will you say that the Indus is a mere stream just because it could be dwarfed by the Nile or the Amazon? The Helmand is still the largest and the most important river of southern Afghanistan. The French consider the Loire (the longest river of France) important, and its exactly the same length as the Helmand -- 1400 km. The Seine and the Rhône, also famous rivers, are little more than half that length. The Ravi, incidentally, is still shorter.

> BTW, why would Indo-Iranians wait to reach Helmand before coining the word 'Samudra', when Ural Sea, Caspian, Balkash were much larger 'samudras'?

 

<samudra-> is a common noun, and there is no reason why it should not have been applied to the Aral Sea etc. There is no textual documentation of such usage merely because the Rigveda is the oldest surviving Indo-Aryan composition.

 

> And, don't you think that going from Central Asia to Helmand (on Iran/Afghanistan border), and then move up the Helmand valley, and then make a right turn through Bolan into forbidding Baluchi areas, cross the trans Indus desert, and then cross Indus, and then manage to transform all language X speakers over an area of 2 millions sq km, without leaving any proof, or even a mention in their religious corpus, is asking for too much??

It didn't happen all at once. The linguistic Indo-Aryanisation of India began in the late second millennium in the upper reaches of the Indus system and in the Gangetic Plains, reaching Bihar for good by the seventh century BC. And don't you see that going out of India covering your tracks and shedding any strictly Vedic cultural traits, then expanding from Ireland to Xinjiang (perhaps some 15,000,000 sq km, if not more) and imposing your language on all sorts of peoples all over the place means asking a bloody good deal more?

Piotr