From: koenraad_elst
Message: 58841
Date: 2008-05-25
>The essence of it is already in his book The Rigveda, a Historical
> 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, whichI am perfectly aware that the thesis I presented is supported by a
> 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 theIt is in expectation of the reactions that I sent in this little
> 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 (?)As you have pointed out in a later post, I didn't originally think so
> 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:BC
>
> > [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
> > onwards:the
> >
> > 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
> early second millennium Gangetic plains will not suffice topersuade
> me that the Rigvedic Aryans too were familiar with iron smelting --Let's say I am aware that archaeological evidence is hard to
> 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.
>