> The linguistic ancestor to all Iranian and Indian IE languages
split into a
> certain number of branches :
> Among which we can identify :
> - Eastern Europe Iranian
> - Eastern Europe Indian (substrate to Mordvin)
> - Mittani "Indo-Aryan"
> - Persian Iranian
> - Indian Indic
>
> Whatever and Whenever Mittani indo-Aryan was,
> This has *NO* relevance *WHATSOEVER* with India and Indic.
>
> Rg Veda can be dated thru internal examination of what Rg Veda is.
> Nobody cares what Mittani indo-aryan was, when it comes to Rg Veda.
>
> Even if Mittani was totally unknown, that would not change a single
letter
> of what we understand about Rg Veda.
>
> Arnaud
>
Agreed. Except that the Mitanni evidence may well externally
corroborate the internal chronology of the Rg-Veda.
While Out-of-India theorizing has been captured lately by people with
little understanding of IE scholarship, one exception has kept on
doing serious work, at a steadily improving level: bank clerk
Shrikant Talageri, whose previous linguistic work was limited to a
monograph on Konkani. In particular, he has learned a lot from the
criticisms directed against him by M. Witzel and S. Farmer, whose
data he has managed to turn around and fit into his own
reconstruction and chronology, in his forthcoming book.
Smug invasion theorists are welcome to laugh out loud, but this may
well be what future generations will be taught about Indo-Iranian:
The proto-Iranians were originally inhabitants of northern India
originally, in the pre-Rg-Vedic period, of the Kashmir region, and
later, in the early Rg-Vedic period (books 6, 3, 7), of the Panjab.
Near the end of the early Rg-Vedic period, conflict with the Vedic
king Sudas and his immediate successors led to large-scale migration
of the Iranians towards the West. Good for them, for from there they
could expand mightily. In the Middle (books 2 and 5) and Late (books
5, 1, 8-10) Rigvedic period, the Iranians were largely settled in
westernmost Panjab and in Afghanistan, but were still in interaction
with the Vedic Aryans. The Avesta was composed in the Late Rigvedic
period, and the joint "Indo-Iranian" culture common to the two texts
represents this Late period, and not a pre-Rg-Vedic period.
Yes, that creates a few complications with the sequence of linguistic
changes, but those are far from insurmountable. Thus, Talageri is
not the first one to have pointed out that the preservation of the
Vedic text easily allows for limited phonetic changes (say, mazdha to
medha) between the time of composition and ultimate editing, without
upsetting recitation, just as Virgil was recited in the middle ages
with changed pronunciation (e.g. Caesar: from Kaisar to Sezar).
A very important element corresponding with the successive periods of
Vedic composition are the name-types and the constituent parts of
names, of which Talageri gives a complete catalogue. The personal
names in the Avesta definitely show a cultural environment in common
with the Rg-Veda. But the common trends in Avestan names are not in
common with the Rg-Veda as a whole, but common exclusively with the
*late* parts of the Rg-Veda, which makes the Avesta and its culture
contemporaneous with the texts and culture of the late Rg-Veda, and
definitely posterior to the texts and culture of the early and middle
Rg-Veda.
The massive evidence of the personal names in the Avesta and the Rg-
Veda points in one sense only: that the development of the common
Indo-Iranian culture represented in the two texts, the Rg-Veda and
the Avesta, took place in the period of the Late Books (5, 1, 8-10);
and that the period of the Early Books (6, 3, 7) and even the period
of the Middle Books (4, 2) predates the development of this common
culture.
Also referring to the common culture of the late-Rg-Vedic and Avestan
period are the Mitanni (and Kassite) names. After the emigration of
the Iranians (and before them, of other early-IE-speaking groups),
more groups from fertile and densely-populated North-India, now all
speaking Indo-Aryan, kept on finding their way westwards, where they
disappeared as such but left traces of their vocabulary as far away
as Ukraine but mostly in West-Asia, in Kassite (-16th c.) and Hurrian
(-15th c.)
Therefore the culture of the speakers of the original proto-Mitanni
IA language, which left some tell-tale words in the attested Hurrian
language, was a culture which developed in northwestern India in the
period of the Late Books of the Rg-Veda (which was, after all, very
much a product of the Indian soil, in spite of contrived attempts to
place parts of it in Afghanistan, parts which on closer analysis turn
out to be late ones within Rg-Vedic chronology); and these proto-
Mitanni speakers must have migrated from India after the development
of this common culture. Since they must have been established in West
Asia by the eighteenth century BC, they must have set out on their
migration from India even earlier, by the beginning of the second
millennium BC at the latest.
Having proofread Talageri's work, I am of course not going to give
away his elaborate evidence here. Except that I've already given
away the basic idea, which allows all of you to do the exercise for
yourselves. Apart from the personal names, there are other elements
that can be matched to the internal chronology of the Rg-Veda, such
as geographical data which show no west-to-east sequence as the AIT
implies, but exactly the reverse.
Talageri has also considered recently-launched findings such as the
appearance of the spoked-wheeled chariot, and fits them in nicely,
without anywhere trying to negate or explain away any hard data. His
absolute chronology of the Rg-Veda is not as high as that of those
OIT-wallahs who posit the post-Vedic Mahabharata war in the 32nd
century BC. Rather, it puts the Rg-Veda largely in the 3rd
millennium. Having worked on the astronomical data for chronology
myself (against the philologers' cavalier attitude of ignoring or
twisting them, vide ch.7 of my book Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan), I
find them to be broadly in agreement with Talageri's estimates.
Fresh from reading his latest book, I feel it is unanswerable, but
having been through a few rounds of this debate already, I realize
well enough that few arguments are that definitive. So I am looking
forward to the reactions. And as I said, with the essentials I've
already divulged, you can all do the exercise for yourselves.
Kind regards,
KE