Re: 'dyeus' chronology

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "shivkhokra" <shivkhokra@...> wrote:

>
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@> wrote:
> >
> > Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@> wrote:
> >> shivkhokra wrote:
> >
> >> I am saying that if dyaus is mentioned for the first time on the planet earth
> >> in 2000 BC in Rg Veda and then 800 years later in 1200 B.C he is mentioned
> >> again as Zeus with similar functions on Linear B tablets in Crete,
> >> many thousand miles away, why is it necessary to assume that Greeks
> >> and Rg Vedic people had a common ancestor? Does'nt Occam's razor apply?
> >
> > We already need a common (linguistic) ancestor for Greek and Sanskrit. Occam's
> > razor says we shouldn't multiply entities *without reason*.
>
> Can you please explain what you mean?

We already have the linguistic connection between the Greeks and the Indo-Aryans. We should not propose another connection without good reason.

> > We do have an alternative connection - Mitanni Aryans.

> But were'nt Mitanni aryans from India?

How far west do you consider India to extend? (Would a Bactrian origin count as a draw between AIT and OIT?) There seems to be reasonable evidence that the split between Iranians and Indo-Aryans did not occur along anything most of use would recognise as an Indian border. In particular, there is evidence that Indo-Aryans were in Iran before the Iranians.

I'm not persuaded that the Mitanni Aryans were actually Indo-Aryan. The evidence seems weak to me, but the case is plausible.

> The reason that these Gods are mentioned in the treaty is not
> a random choice on the part of the scribe. Instead it
> is because one of the functions assigned to these gods
> by RgVeda deals with treaties as in RV 1.136.3 where
> "Mitra and Varuna cause people to make mutual agreements".

I'll not dispute that the patterns tie up, or that the Rg Veda helps. However, the evidence that Varuna is mentioned in the treaty is not as clear as one would like - see http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/58220 . There is quite a discussion at the time of that post about the precise affiliations of the Mitanni Aryans.

Richard.