Dear Koenraad,
I do not intend to comment on your latest update of the "Out-of-
India" ethnogenetic perspective you have presented in the post I am
replying to since this update is apparently based on Shrikant
Talageri's forthcoming book, which you (as you recently revealed to
us on this List) have proofread, but which is not in print yet.
Your argument seemingly mainly rests on the following thesis, which
I quote verbatim from your post:
> ...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 [sic! -- Francesco]
> 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...
...which constitute a complete reversal of what Vedic scholars (the
greatest majority of them) have been maintaining for the last
hundred years -- up to very recent times, with adding on new and
more detailed analyses of the geography of the Rigveda. I guess the
scenario sketched in your post rests on Talageri's new book,
especially when you sum up the chronology of Rigvedic hymns in the
following manner:
> old: book 6,3,7;
> middle: 2,4;
> late: 5,1,8,9,10.
This is, however, yet to be proved, and we will see the reactions
to, and the reviews of Talageri's new book when it comes out.
In the meantime, please allow me to express my provisional (?)
profound skepticism toward such "revolutionary" statements as the
following one:
> The Vedic heartland was on the eastern border of the Harappan
> cities [viz., in Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh -- Francesco].
As for the dates of early iron in South Asia, about which you state:
> [The Rigveda] 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
Even conceding that archaeologist Rakesh Tewari's dates for iron
working in the Ganges valley at c. 1800 BCE are correct (which I
doubt), from this it doesn't descend that the Rigvedic Aryans knew
of iron. It is well known that South Asian archaeological cultures
of the second millennium BCE are markedly regional, with little or
no trade going on among the discrete regional cultures of the
subcontinent. If you don't manage to convince me that the Vedic
heartland was NOT situated in the nothwestern part of the
subcontinent (as I continue to think based on the mainstream
scholarly paradigm of Vedic philology), the hypothesized (by Tewari)
existence of one or more cultures that knew how to smelt iron in the
early second millennium Gangetic plains will not suffice to persuade
me that the Rigvedic Aryans too were familiar with iron smelting --
simply because the cultures of the early second millennium BCE
Greater Panjab (where iron started to be around 1000-900 BCE
according to G.L Possehl and P. Gullapalli's 1999 article) are not
known to have entertained any trade or cultural relations with the
coeval culture(s) of the Gangetic plains...
Reference:
G.L. Possehl & P. Gullapalli, "Early Iron Age in South Asia," in V.
Pigott (ed.), _The Archaeometallurgy of the Asian Old World_,
Philadelphia, The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania,
1999, pp. 153-175.
Kindest regards,
Francesco