Re: [tied] Why are Horses Vedic Again?

----- Original Message -----
From: <x99lynx@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 4:43 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Why are Horses Vedic Again?



> Thirdly, what is your dating based on? If you are saying Vedic culture started with RigVeda, that's fine. But if you are in anyway talking about the pre-literate IE in India, you have no proof for any absolute dating prior to that.

Steve, leaving the horse question aside, is there a compelling reason for assuming the existence of any form of pre-Vedic IE in India? Early Indic had close genetic connections with Iranian and more distant connections with the rest of IE. The dating of its origins must be consistent with the larger picture. For example it's quite impossible to claim that Indic was already a distinct branch in, say, the fourth millennium BC, as there are good reasons to believe that the split of Indo-Iranian into smaller groups took place about 2000 BC, and that the differentiation had something to do with the historical migrations of the Indo-Iranian peoples, well documented from the mid-second millennium BC on.

We know of a language with Indic features (but in some respects more archaic than Vedic) that came into contact with Mitanni Hurrian about 1400 BC. This suggests that pre-Indo-Aryan was spreading across the region alongside early forms of Iranian. If we are talking about the most likely scenario, one that doesn't force us to jumble up the partly done jigsaw puzzle and start from scratch, I'd be really surprised to find Indo-Aryan (or any other form of Indo-Iranian) in the subcontinent earlier than the middle of the second millennium. The Indus Valley civilisation flourished approximately between 2500 and 1700 BC, so in absence of some really solid evidence to the contrary I'm reluctant to accept that it may have been Indic or Indo-Iranian speaking. The only thing that would convert me at once would be the successful decipherment of the Harappan script as a form of Indo-Iranian.

> In fact, for all you know, Harappan culture might have adopted IIr just like the Normans adopted French. And more importantly, you don't know when horses became "familiar things" in "pre-Vedic" culture and just how much of "pre-Vedic" culture was in fact continuous with Harappan.

If we are to err, it's prudent to err on the side of caution, but among all the Indo-Aryans and the Iranians do appear to have been the horsiest set. The horse is a prominent element of the Vedic and Avestan cultures and mythologies, and the 'horse' word occurs in lots of names meaning 'having such-and-such horses' in both groups. The fact that the Anatolian term for 'horse' and the Hurrian horse-training terminology are Indo-Iranian is also a piece of indirect but suggestive evidence.

All this squares well with the usual theory that the Indo-Iranians came from the Eurasian steppes via Central Asia -- a theory that accounts for the distribution of the Indo-Iranian languages, their genetic and areal affinities within IE, early contacts with Finno-Ugric, etc. There were no wild horses in southern Asia, and the indubitably IIr. word *aCwas < *ek^wos referred specifically to horses, not to asses or hemiones (for which they had different terms). Of course if the Indo-Iranians arrived from what is known to be one of the major early centres of horse domestication, there's nothing controversial in crediting them with having helped to introduce the domesticated horse in new areas, from the Near East to India.

I believe the above to be a relatively balanced interpretation of the available evidence, circumstancial as it is. I don't exclude other interpretations a priori, but I'd like to see some positive evidence for them first, rather than the tired mantra about absence of evidence not being evidence of absence.

What I do not believe in is a special, shall I say mystical, connection between IE in general and horse-keeping plus chariotry. While the the domestication of the horse has not yet been dated with much precision, it seems to be later, perhaps considerably later, than PIE proper. I see no ground for believing that the IEs were the only or the first linguistic group involved in horse domestication. Horses may have been imported by the Harappans whatever language they spoke (and note that the Dravidians have their own 'horse' word).

For reasons which are not quite clear, horse bones are rare in many areas where we could reasonably expect to find them. Perhaps some taphonomic factors have not been taken into account, but that's something that had better be left to the archaeologists. At any rate the apparent non-attestation of horses in the archaeological record is not terribly significant in itself.

Piotr