----- Original Message
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Sent: Thursday, April
11, 2002 12:27 AM
Subject: [tied] Re:
Why India?
> VA: The Oxus actually arises in the
Wakkhan corridor, WITHIN Afghanistan. Its drainage area is the most well endowed
agricultural land, even within Afghanistan (and of course outside it).... What
proportion of Afghanistan's population lives in the Helmand basin? What is the
agricultural output of the area as a proportion of the total
output?
I'm not talking about the Pamirs, or the
Regestan desert, or even the entire length of the Helmand, but about the area
south west of the central highlands, containing in particular the historical
province of Arachosia, but extending into Drangiana and Areia as well; and the
people I'm talking about are not sedentary farmers but predominantly transhumant
pastoralists.
> Now, could you tell me the ancient names of these rivulets and let
us know whether their names were transferred to N Indian topography or
not?
They have quite respectable Iranian names, several of
them reflected in the geography of the Avesta, and occasionally in Indian
hydronymy as well. Apart from <haraxWaiti:> : <sarasvati:> we have
<harae:uua> : <sarayu-> (the Harirud belongs to the area in
question). Incidentally, the names are on the whole complimentary: the Harrut is
<xWar&naNWaiti:> (*xWarnah-vati:-) 'abounding in nourishment', the
Khuspas is <huuaspa:-> (*hu-aspa:-) '(the river of) good horses', the
Farah is <fradaþa-> 'prosperity'.
> OK, what are the Avestan
features there? Where are the horse bones? Chariots? Did the Indo-Aryans borrow
the name for Saraswati from Avestans?
The geography of the region is described in the Avesta; it was next door,
so to speak, to Zarathushtra's home country. The deficiency of archaeological
findings is at least partly due to the generally neglected condition of Afghan
archaeology in recent decades. The distribution of the subbranches of
Indo-Iranian suggests that the Indo-Aryans expanded southwards earlier than
the Iranians. <haraxWaiti:> is therefore secondary -- an Iranian calque of
<sarasvati:>.
> Is harauvati found in Avesta? Is there any evidence to link
Anahita to Harauvati, and to Sarasvati?
<harauvati> is the Old Persian counterpart of Av. haraxWaiti:, from
which the satrapy of Arachosia took its name. The goddess <arduui: su:ra:
ana:hita:> of the archaic litany in Yas^t 5 belonged to the
pre-Zarathustran Iranian pantheon and was associated with abundance and
prosperity. She was connected with rivers, holy watersprings and celestial
waters in general, prototypically perhaps with the Volga (<raNha:>), in
the Avesta more likely with the Oxus, but the association may have differed
according to the local conditions.
> The RV Sarasvati is a large,
mighty and a prominent river, celebrated as the greatest river in the Vedic
literature, along whose banks 'the five peoples dwell and grow barley', 'along
whose banks, the kings live', 'which is high/resplendant as a chariot'....,
which flows along with the Drishdvati and the Apaya, where we find the sites of
'Manusha' etc. ...
I attribute that to a merger of local and immigrant traditions, with the
already half-legendary local river renamed as <sarasvati:> (borrowed from
the immigrants' idealised reminiscences of the largest river of their former
home region).
> You are unnecessarily setting up straw men and
associating me with OIT? Curiously, I sent out the text of a weboage to some
people for review and in that I CLEARLY state that there is no archaeological
proof for OIT.
Aye, there's the rub. What shall I associate you with, Vishal? I'd like to
know what your views really are, and in particular if you have any ideas at all
about the origin, spread and distibution of IE. I'd also appreciate a sketch of
_your_ favourite scenario explaining the relationship between Indo-Aryan and
Iranian, and how they came to be spoken in the areas where we find them.
> The mention of Kikata clearly tallies with the story about migration
of Vishvamitras to E India in the Aitareya Brahmana. This event is therefore
much before 700 B.C. The exact time when the IA languages spread in E India is
totally based on speculations - again no proof is offered by you why IA
languages spread to Bihar only by the seventh century and not earlier.
I wrote "by" meaning "not later than" for obvious reasons (the rise of
Magadha). It could be earlier of course, the question is only how much
earlier.
> What do you mean by 'Aryanization' BTW?
Linguistic Indo-Aryanisation, in the Indian context.
> As for the absurdity in migrations out of India, the conventional PIE
homeland theories conceive ALL IE tribes migrating in ALL directions and
imposing their language over speakers of umpteen language speakers, cultures...
Is that less ridiculous?
Not my problem. I'm not that conventional. I don't believe in such a
simplistic model of explosive expansion in all directions. The reason why I
favour a Danubian homeland over the usual Pontic one is that one does not have
to postulate conquests and "imposed" languages and cultures. Here I go part of
the way with Renfrew, though with reservations.
> You have mentioned Xinjiang
above. Note that the region has had many close contacts with India for several
millennia now. Many historians actually equate it to the 'Uttarakuru' of
Aitareya Brahmana. The Tukhar are mentioned in dozens of Indian
texts.
"Several" meaning how many? Tocharian, at
any rate, is only a very distant cousin of Indo-Iranian and shows no Indic
influence older than Buddhist Sanskrit. BTW, Gk. tokHaroi, Lat. tochari, Skt.
tukHa:ra- anad Chinese tu-ho-lo refer to a people living in or near Bactria,
probably an Iranian tribe. The identification of that name with the Tocharians
was inferred from a reference to <toxri> as the source language of the Old
Uygur _Maitrisimit_ (Maitreyasamiti). The identification has been
abandoned, but the name has stuck anyway. We still don't know for sure what the
Tocharians called themselves and their language.
Piotr