--- Dean_Anderson <
dean_anderson@...> wrote:
> (citing)
> SL: "I don't think that anyone recently arguing here
> against an
> Indian origin on this list has mentioned horses.
> (DA)You may not agree with Witzel et al. but to lump
> them with Atlantis,
> etc. is inappropriate. So based on that and other
> statements you
> made, I concluded that you were not aware of the
> centrality of horses
> to the debate among Indologists, at least; and thus
> you had not read
> the Indological literature.
*****GK: Does this literature advance the issue beyond
the following comments in Mallory (1989, p.45-46):
"Vedic hymns commemorate or invoke divine support for
the destruction of their enemies and the storming of
their citadels. This is to be accomplished with the
assistance of their horses and chariots, a technique
of warfare apparently unknown to the Indus
civilization... / ...although [the horse] has
occasionally been recovered from Harappan sites... no
one would credit the earlier Harappan culture as
exemplifying the horse-centred culture of the Vedic
Aryans.../// ...the very character of Indian society
reflected in the earliest Vedic literature renders it
highly unlikely that the Indus civilization was the
product of Indo-Aryans... It is illiterate, non-urban,
non-maritime, basically uninterested in exchange other
than that involving cattle, and lacking in any forms
of political complexity beyond that of a king whose
primary function seems to be concerned with warfare
and ritual."******
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