--- "wtsdv" <liberty@...> wrote:
> ... misapprehensions ... that soma was electrum, ...
There are various lines of evidence (linguistic, archaeological)
recently found that show that soma is an extract of a particular
plant. I am not saying which plant. It is not the same plant as the
various well-known abused drugs.
Admittedly later Indian literature equates Soma with the moon etc.
Likely by then Indian priests had stopped using Soma and people were
forgetting what Soma was. Rigveda 10:34 (probably a late hymn)
describes Soma as Maujavata = "coming from the land of the Mu_ja
people". Someone told me that that is the Pamir mountains. It could
be that the expense of importing is one reason why they stopped using
it in India.
In the big article, many of the quoted words seem to be Dravidian.
Enough to fit in with opinions that the SSVC's main language was
Dravidian.
The Sanskrit words quoted in the long article with them may be
Sanskrit loanwords from Dravidian. To check that, find how many of
those words appear in other IE languages.
The presence of Elamite and Brahui in the Dravidian and related
family may show that Dravidian or related once was spoken in parts of
Persia, and if so, Iranian languages may contain Dravidian loanwords:
is that so?
Some say that the SSVC collapsed before the alleged Aryan invasion.
That could have been due to a long drought, due to over-use of the
land and deforestation and overgrazing, or from some other cause,
like the long drought that put an end to the Old Kingdom of Egypt. I
suspect that before Man and his livestock and fires came, the Indian
monsoon and forest supported by it went much further into the
northwest of India including the Indus plain, and the lower part of
the River Sarasvati got plenty of water in the wet season from local
rain regardless of what the upper Sutlej and Yamuna flowed into.
Rigveda 2:12 verse 11 seems to say that the Indian god Indra had to
search in the high northwest frontier mountains many years to find
and slay Vrtra the dragon-spirit of drought and similar demons.
(Security forces in the southeast of modern Afghanistan know well
what it is like looking for bandits in that sort of country.) That
sounds to me like thanks for rain coming at last after many years of
drought, rather than an ordinary winter drought.