--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "kishore patnaik"
<kishorepatnaik09@...> wrote:
> Those who think Aryans have come from Urals or somewhere else seem
> to be getting into more and more soup, not palatable one at that.
>
> To start with, one would be tempted to say that the horse
> sacrifice of Altai Turks of the Urals is a pre runner of Aryan
> aswamedha.
The reverse appears true: it was the Altaic-speaking nomadic peoples
of the Eastern Central Asian steppes who borrowed their horse-
sacrifice traditions from the Indo-Europeans. See Victor Mair's
paper at
http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/Mair.horse.sacrifices.pdf
> MW would want us to believe that Br Up's Dadhici and Aswin's story
> is a replay of a long tradition in Urals when the man is
> sacrificed and his head is replaced with that of a horse.
It is not Michael Witzel alone who put forward this thesis.
http://www.silk-road.com/artl/horsemyth.shtml
"At Potapovka, near Samara on the Sok River [on the mid-Volga
steppe], excavations conducted from 1985-1988 exposed four burial
mounds, or kurgans, dated about 2200-2000 B.C. Beneath kurgan 3, the
central grave pit contained the remains of a man buried with at
least two horse heads and the head of a sheep, in addition to
pottery vessels and weapons. After the grave pit was filled, a human
male was decapitated, his head was replaced with the head of a
horse, and he was laid down over the filled grave shaft. This unique
ritual deposit provides a convincing antecedent for the Vedic myth."
"In the Vedic religion, madhu as a cultic drink was connected with
the Asvins, the divine twins 'possessing horses', who function as
charioteers and saviours from mortal danger... The Satapatha-
Brahmana (14,1,1) relates a myth in which the Asvins leam the
secret 'knowledge of the madhu' which enables its possessor the
revive a dead person [the earlierst reference to this myth is found
in RV 1.116.12 -- Francesco]. They learn it from the demon Dadhyanc,
whom the god Indra had forbidden to reveal the secret to anyone,
threatening to cut off the head of the offender. The Asvins,
however, promised to revive Dadhyanc after he had taught them the
secret, and replaced the head of their teacher with the head of a
horse. After Indra in punishment had cut off Dadhyanc's horse head,
the Asvins replaced it with the original one and revived him. This
myth seems to be connected with an earlier form of the Vedic horse
sacrifice, in which a young warrior and a horse were beheaded, and
their heads swapped in a ritual of 'revival'... The Vedic tradition
seems to have a predecessor in the mid-Volga region in the beginning
of the second millennium BC: a grave belonging to the Potapovka
culture which succeeded the Abashevo culture and possessed the horse-
drawn chariot, was found to contain a skeleton which was otherwise
human except for the skull which belonged to a horse..." (A. Parpola
& Ch. Carpelan, "The Cultural Counterparts to Proto-Indo-European,
Proto-Uralic and Proto-Aryan," in E.F. Bryant & L.L. Patton, eds.,
_The Indo-Aryan Controversy_, Routledge, 2005, p. 115).
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/AryanHome.pdf
"Most tellingly, perhaps, at the site of Potapovka..., a unique
burial has been found. It contains a human skeleton whose head has
been replaced by a horse head; a human head lies near his feet,
along with a bone pipe, and a cow's head is placed near his knees.
This looks like an archaeological illustration of the Rgvedic myth
of Dadhyanc, whose head was cut off by Indra and replaced by that of
a horse. The bone pipe reminds, as the excavator has noted, of the
RV sentence referring to the playing of pipes in Yama's realm, the
world of the ancestors (Gening 1977)."
> So long it is fine, before you are stuck with a Dravidian language
> in Urals. Would you want to say that even that is a pre runner of
> Indian Dravidian languages? Not very comfortable question to
> answer, right??
Dravidians in the Urals (?) have nothing to do with the above (horse
sacrifices, horse burials).
Regards,
Francesco