>> [Piotr:] I haven't seen any Harappan chariots as yet;
> [Dean:] It depends on the definition of ratha.
Could you
please define it? And where can I see a real Harappan ratha?
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>> [Piotr:] ... the presence or absence of horses is really
irrelevant inasmuch as
horses don't speak Indo-Aryan or PIE ...
> [Dean:] LOL!
I mean what I say. If you excuse the figure
of speech, the "Harappan horse" is a red herring. The presence of horse bones at
Harappan sites doesn't prove the presence of Indo-Aryan speakers. There is no
evidence that the earliest horse-breeders were IE-speaking, and I don't
subscribe to the old romantic theory that it was the horse-and-wagon technology
that made the IE _languages_ so successful, even if the Indo-Iranians in
particular were "horsey" people. The chariot, which is too late an invention to
have anything to do with PIE, may nevertheless have been important to the
Indo-Iranians (note their role as racing-horse trainers among the Hurrians), but
that's a separate question. The Dravidian languages have their own "horse"
words, not borrowed from Indo-Aryan; so do the Turkic and Mongolic languages of
Central Asia. I'm sure other linguistic groups, especially in Central Asia,
played a role in the domestication of the horse, and even if India had no native
caballine equids (palaeontological evidence suggests it didn't), horses may have
been imported from the north by the Indus Valley Civilisation a thousand years
before the coming of the Indo-Aryans.
On the other hand, the _absence_ of horse bones is not very important
either (the rarity or near-absence of horse representations in Harappan art is
perhaps of more relevance). Here I disagree with Witzel who considers the horse
to be the "leitfossil" of the Indo-Iranians. Archaeological evidence is
inevitably incomplete, and taphonomic considerations must always be kept in mind
when we discuss it. Horse bones don't preserve well. If a culture doesn't
practise ritual horse burials, archaeologists will rarely find anything but some
loose teeth and limb bones, with a little bit of luck. On the philological side,
the textual evidence of horses and chariots in the Rigveda is incontrovertible;
on the archaeological side, horse bones are rare even in Central Asia; none have
been discovered so far in the BMAC. Does it mean that there were no horses in
that area? Does it prove that the BMAC can't have been Indo-Iranian? Well, I
should expect that _some_ horses will eventually be found all over the place (as
well as in the Indus cities), given sufficient time, patience, research funding
and political stabilisation (especially in Afghanistan, where the primary
concern of the national archaeological museum for the past three decades was not
how to enlarge their collections but how to protect them from looting or
destruction).
To sum up, the horse question looms large in the ritual squibbles between
the Harvard Indologist team and the Indian autochthonists, but most outsiders,
including, I suppose, a large number of Indo-Europeanists, contemplate the
debate with feelings close to incredulity.
Piotr