--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fournet.arnaud"
<fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "kishore patnaik" <kishorepatnaik09@...>
>
> > 4. It is rather strange that the defenders of the 'Aryan
invasion
> > theory', who have neither archaeological nor literary documents
to prove
> > their assumption, demand detailed proof for the non-invasion
and refuse
> > to
> > admit the evidence available.
>
> =========
> Rg Veda supports the invasion scenario.
>
No, it does not.
It is a bronze-age text that doesn't know of iron. But iron
implements were already produced in Uttar Pradesh, bordering on the
Yamuna-Saraswati heartland of the RV, from at least 1800 BC onwards:
http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/tewari/tewari.pdf
I have no astronomical data from the RV itself (the Orion myth used
by Jacobi and Tilak to date it to 4000 BC is not compelling
evidence), but in post-RVedic literature a number of astronomy-based
dates can be established for the late 3rd and middle 2nd millennium
BC. Most explicit is the Vedanga Jyotisha, in Paninian post-Vedic
Sanskrit, dated by astronomically illiterate philologists to 200 BC,
which explicitly dates itself to ca. 1350 BC (astronomer Narahari
Achar has argued for another interpretation, but that would date the
VJ to 1800 BC!). Likewise another astronomical treatise, the
Parashara Samhita, lost but reconstructed from quoted fragments,
dates to the same period. All this reasonably pushes the RV to
beyond 2000 BC, into the Harappan age.
That doesn't mean the (probably multi-lingual) Harappan civilization
was Vedic. They existed in the same time-bracket, but not in the
same place. The Vedic heartland was on the eastern border of the
Harappan cities' area, in the westernmost part of the monsoon area, a
different milieu in climatic and agricultural respects.
The message of the geographical data in the RV is crystal-clear, on
condition that we apply the philological insights (mainly due to
Oldenberg) in its internal chrnology. Save for a handful of hymns
convincingly shown to be later interpolations, the internal sequence
is as follows:
old: book 6,3,7;
middle: 2,4;
late: 5,1,8,9,10.
This chronological distinction makes a lot of difference in
interpreting the historical data mentioned in the hymns. Thus, it is
routinely claimed that "the RV knows the horse-drawn chariot with
spoked wheels", hence must postdate the invention or importation
thereof. But in fact, only the late books know this technology. The
early references (3:53:17 ff.) are clearly about the bullock cart,
those to chariot races and to the fabrication process of the chariot
are all in the late books. (Note that the several references to the
fabrication process exclusively mention *indigenous* Indian trees as
material for the axle, the chariot body etc., whereas the Egyptians
when importing chariot technology from Syria also continued to import
the needed wood from Syria.) At least half the RV predates the
chariot.
When we tabulate the names of rivers, mountains, lakes, flora and
fauna and group them according to old, middle and late period, we see
a totally consistent picture of a shift from east to west. The old
books know of Ganga and Yamuna, not of the Indus and the rivers to
its west. The middle books are centred on the Saraswati and know of
the Panjabi rivers. But only the late books know of Afghanistan and
its flora and fauna: sheep, camels, boars.
In the Aryan Invasion scenario, we should expect exactly the reverse:
first Afghanistan, later inner India. But that is not what we get in
the RV. Not at all.
We also see the Indian origin of the Iranians, the Vedic people's
western neighbours from the beginning, located in Panjab, or then
rather Sapta Sindhu (their own Hapta Hendu, enumerated as on of the
16 lands of the Iranians themselves) and later on in Afghanistan.
Book 1, late period, describes the Varshagira battle between the
Vedic people, let by Sahadeva, Somaka and Rjashva, against the
Iranians, which took place west of the Indus near the Bolan pass
(which leads to the Helmand/Haraxvaiti valley where Zarathushtra
flourished). Shrikant Talageri in his forthcoming book (and to some
extent already in his 2000 book The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis)
shows how the Avestan culture coincides in time with the *late* Rg-
Vedic period, e.g. by the preference in verse form or by the type of
personal names. Thus, the old period has no animal-referring names,
these are typical of the late period, such as the above-mentioned Rj-
ashva, and they are also common among the Avestan protagonists, e.g.
Zarath-ushtra and his patron Visht-aspa. The late name-types are
also the typical IA names in the Mitanni and Kassite records.
The Aryan invasion theory could only handle these data with special
pleading: first, in Central Asia, the proto-Indo-Iranians, the common
ancestor of Vedic, Avestan and Mitannic people, had these name-types,
the latter two groups preserved this name system, the early Rg-Vedic
people lost it, and then a few centuries later reinvented it.
Occam's razor applies: the simpler explanation is the OIT. In the
late-Vedic period, the Iranians, linguistic cousins who shared some
cultural developments with their Vedic eastern neighbours, and the
pre-Mitannic Indo-Aryans, who were a branch of the Vedic people
themselves, migrated westward. Since leftovers of Indo-Aryan
vocabulary in Mesopotamia, attested at a time when Indo-Aryan already
was no living language there anymore, have been securely dated to the
17th (Kassite) and 15th (Mitanni) century BC, their origin in India
must be dated to the preceding centuries, and this clearly pushes the
RV-period into the 3rd millennium BC.
Since India was obviously an emigration country, it is perfectly
likely that more Indo-Aryan groups went westward and ended up
elsewhere. Without committing myself to these hypotheses, I would
think this could explain the presence of Indo-Aryan in the Pontic
region (Sindoi) and, as I learned on this list, in Mordvin and other
Uralic languages.
Likewise, the Iranians need not have been the first emigrants. NW
India was a demographic power-house without parallel. Archaeologists
have remarked on the stability and relative peacefulness of the
Harappan civilization. This must have led to constant population
growth and emigration pressure, quite unlike anything within reach of
the Pontic region or other purported Urheimats. So, other IE tribes
may have their origin in India in the 4th millennium BC. The RV
carries a memory of the victory of one Mandhatr over the Druhyu
tribe, another cousin people of the Vedic Pauravas. The Puranas give
the whole story, with Mandhatr, a Ganga-based brother-in-law of the
Paurava dynasty, coming to help them against the troublesome Druhyus,
who ended up driven westward, leaving for foreign lands and setting
up kingdoms there. Of course, the Puranas are an intractable mix of
Dichtung und Wahrheit (fabulation and truth), but in this case they
may be on to something.
At any rate, while many types of evidence remain to be discovered or
properly understood (deciphering the Indus script, if it is a script,
would be helpful), and while scholars must be able to live with the
uncertainty of conflicting or incomplete evidence, we must face the
pieces of evidence that we already have. One of these is the
geographical information in the RV, which is plentiful and
consistently points in only one direction: the RV people were
familiar with the western Ganga plain (Uttar Pradesh), had settled
between Yamuna and Saraswati (Haryana), and later expanded into
Panjab and ventured beyond the Indus into Afghanistan.
Aryan Invasion diehards could still argue that the Aryans had invaded
from the west in 5000 BC or so and then in the RV period moved
westward again. But that would be a scenario radically different
from the AIT as we know it. And so far it has no evidence to support
it.
Kind regards,
Koenraad Elst