5.3.1. Tracing the Aryan
migrants
Though die
question of Aryan origins was much disputed m the 19th century, the Aryan
invasion theory has been so solidly dominant in the past century that
attempts to prove it have been extremely rare in recent decades (why prove
the obvious?), until the debate flared up again in India after
1990.In his attempt to prove the Aryan invasion,
Bernard Sergent uses the archaeological record, which, paradoxically, is
invoked with equal confidence by the non-invasionist school.18
The crux of the matter is: can archaeologists trace a population
migrating through Central Asia and settling down in India? There
seems to be new hope to pin down this elusive band of migrants: “Today,
thanks to the extremely rich findings in Central Asia in the past twenty
years, the discovery of the ‘pre-Indian Indians’ has become
possible.”19
Before
discussing his evidence, let us consider the apparent lack of evidence for
the opposite itinerary: India to Central Asia. So far, Indian
scholars have been on the defensive, busy refuting the AIT but not
elaborating an India-centred alternative scenario of IE expansion.
Indeed, some of them just deny the existence of an IE language family, so
that no expansion needs to be reconstructed. In the absence of an
archaeological Saraswati-to-Volga trail, I suppose that established
archaeologists would readily point to important differences between
pre-Harappan culture of ca. 5,000 BC and the contemporaneous Central-Asian
cultures, e.g. the higher degree of sophistication and incipient
urbanization in northwestern India, or the much more intense use which was
made of the horse in Central Asia and in the Pontic region by 4,000
BC.
My layman’s
reply would be as follows. The fact that there are differences
between Central-Asian cultures and (pre-)Harappan culture hardly disproves
the possibility of migrations from India to Central Asia. To an
extent, it is perfectly normal that the itinerary cannot be traced by
archaeology alone: when people move from an urban environment in a hot
climate to a steppe region with bitterly cold winters, their material
culture changes. Iranian having developed into a distinct branch of
Indo-Iranian by Zarathushtra’s time, we may surmise that Iranian emigrants
from India must have been settled in Bactria for quite some time by the
end of the Harappan city culture, long enough to have differentiated a lot
from their pre-Harappan Indian mother culture.
For the sake of
comparison, the Dutch Afrikaners in Transvaal gradually lost touch with
the European world and its technological progress; for their metalwork, a
routine affair in Holland, they had to go to Zulu blacksmiths, having lost
the skill themselves. The European trappers in North America
returned to an almost prehistorical lifestyle during their stays in the
forests. In antiquity, with communications being so much more
limited, this effect must have been much stronger: Harappan immigrants in
Central Asia soon adopted the material culture of their new environment,
forgetting the most advanced and complex elements of Indian
culture.
Nonetheless, it
remains possible for archaeologists to ascertain the Dutch presence in
19th-century Transvaal or that of French fur-hunters in 18th-century
Canada, e.g. by discovering remains of non-indigenous rifles. So,
Indian archaeologists should come out of their defensive position and see
for themselves what evidence there may be for the presence of Indian
colonists in Central Asia and for an India-to-Europe migration. It
is quite possible that such evidence is already on the table but that no
one has interpreted it correctly due to the widespread AIT
bias.
5.3.2. The Bactrian
culture
Bactria, the
basin of the Amu Darya or Oxus river, now northern Afghanistan plus
southeastern Uzbekistan, is historically the cradle of Iranian
culture. In an Indian Urheimat scenario, the Iranians left India
either after or, apparently more in line with scriptural evidence, before
the heyday of the Harappan cities. The next waystation, where they
developed their own distinct culture, was Bactria.In
that framework, it is entirely logical that a separate though
Harappa-related culture has been discovered in Bactria and dated to the
late 3rd millennium BC. However, Bernard Sergent identifies this
Bronze Age culture of Bactria, “one of the most briliant civilizations of
Asia”20, as
that of the Indo-Aryans poised to invade India.
Though not
figuring much in the development of his own theory, evidence for
similarities in material culture between Harappa and Bactria is
acknowledged by Bernard Sergent, e.g. ceramics resembling those found in
Chanhu-Daro. This Harappan influence oh the Bactrian culture proper
is distinct from the existence of six fully Harappan colonies in
Afghanistan, most importantly Shortugai in Bactria,“a settlement completely Harappan in character on a tributary
of the Amu Darya (…) on the foot of the ore-rich Badakshan range (…) with
lapis lazuli, gold, silver, copper and lead ores. Not one of the
standard characteristics of the Harappan cultural complex is missing from
it.”21
Logically, the close coexistence of Harappan colonies and Bactrian
settlements was a conduit for mutual influence but also a source of
friction and conflict.Indian-Iranian conflict has
been a constant from the Bronze Age (with the replacement of Harappan with
Bactrian culture in Shortugai ca. 1800 BC)22
through Pehlevi, Shaka and Afghan invasions until Nadir Shah’s sack of
Delhi in the 18th century.
Sergent notes a peculiarity of the Bronze Age Bactrian culture:
“in contrast with all the neighbouring cultures, the settlements of this
culture are characterized by a very feeble accumulation: they were
constructed in haste, apparently on the basis of a pre-established plan,
and have not been occupied for very long”.23 That
such makeshift settlements have produced such “brilliant” culture,
indicates to me that they already had a brilliant cultural heritage to
start with. And isn’t precisely the Harappan culture known for its
proficiency in urban planning?
Sergent cites Akhmadali A. Askarov’s conclusion that the
Harappan-Bactrian similarities are due to “influence of northwestern India
on Bactria by means of a migration of Indus people to Central Asia after
the end of their civilization”.24 The
acknowledgment of a Harappa-to-Bactria movement is well taken, but this
poses a chronological problem (unless we assume that the Iranians
themselves were Harappans, refugees from the debris of a crumbling
civilization).Sergent himself solves the
chronological problem by pointing out that Askarov and other Soviet
scholars who first dug up the sites in Margiana (eastern Turkmenistan) and
Bactria, used an obsolete form of C-14 Carbon dating, and that newer
methods have pushed the chronology of these sites back by
centuries.25 For
Sergent, this chronological correction is essential: if the Bactrian
culture was that of the Indo-Aryans who brought down the Indus
civilization, it is necessary that they lived there before the end of the
latter.
Sergent then
mentions a number of similarities in material culture between the Bactrian
culture and some cultures in Central Asia and in Iran proper, e.g.
ceramics like those of Namazga-V (southern Turkmenistan).Some of these were loans from Elam which were being
transmitted from one Iranian (in his reconstruction, Indo-Iranian)
settlement to the next, e.g. the so-called “Luristan bronzes”, Luristan
being a Southwest-Iranian region where Elamite culture was located.
Some were loans from the “neighbouring and older”26
culture of Margiana: does this not indicate an east-to-west gradient for
the Indo-Iranians?
Well, one effect of Sergent’s chronological correction is that
what seem to be influences from elsewhere on Bactrian culture, may have to
be reversed: “From that point onwards, the direction of exchanges and
influences gets partly reversed: a number of similarities can just as well
be explained by an influence of Bactria on another region as one of
another on Bactria.”27 So,
even for the relation between the Bactrian culture and its neighbours, the
proper direction required by the AIT has not been demonstrated, let alone
a movement all the way from the northern Caspian region to India.
And if there was transmission from other cultures to Bactria (as of course
there was), this does not prove that the Bactrians were colonists
originating in these other cultures; they may simply have practised
commerce.
At any rate, all
the sites related in material culture to the Dashli settlement (except for
the Harappan sites) are in present-day Tajikistan, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan, Afghanistan or Iran proper, and are without exception places
which were Iranian at the time they made their appearance in written
history in the last millennium BC (or earlier if that source was the
Avesta). While migrations are obviously possible, it seems to me
that this says something about the burden of proof. It is entirely
reasonable to accept as a starting hypothesis that the Dashli settlement,
like its sister settlements, was n. Those who insist it was something
else, should accept the burden of proving that Dashli was different, that
migrations took place in which the Indo-Aryans there made way for Iranians
whose presence there was certified a few centuries later, and if possible
also to explain why those things happened.
5.3.3. Bactria vs.
Harappa
A new insight based on archaeology and detrimental to the
stereotypical Harappan/Aryan opposition, is that the Harappans were not
matriarchal pacifists after all, that they did have weapons and
fortifications, “just like” the Aryans.28This has even been argued by Prof. Shereen
Ratnagar, a virulent critic of all Indocentric revisions of the Aryan
question.29
Incidentally, the Dravidians, often identified with the Harappans, were
not all that peace-loving either: in the context of research into the
identity of the megalith-builders in South India in the 2nd millennium
BC.Asko Parpola sees a connection between the
glorification of war in Old Tamil poetry and the findings of weaponry in
Megalithic graves.30 in the
jungle of the human world, purely pacifistic civilizations would not be
viable except as a pipe-dream.
Yet, at this
point, Sergent insists on the old picture: relatively unarmed mercantile
Harappans versus heavily armed Aryans preparing their invasion in
Bactria. It is not a contrast between martial and pacifist, but at
least one between more martial and less martial. The Bactrian
settlements abound in metal weaponry, and this does present a contrast
with the relative paucity of weapons in Harappa. The latter was a
well-ordered mercantile society, while Bactria seems to have been a
frontier society.
However, this
need not indicate an ethnic or linguistic difference: at the time of
writing, English law prohibits nearly every form of private possession of
firearms, while American law allows every citizen to carry firearms and
most American families do indeed possess some. A different situation
and history can account for a different attitude to weaponry, even within
the same speech community. On the other hand, to pursue the
comparison, British and American English have grown somewhat apart; in the
absence of modern communication, they might have been close to
differentiating as much from each other as Iranian did from
Indo-Aryan. Would the latter difference not neatly fit the relation
between Harappan and Bactrian societies: related but sufficiently
distinct?
The emphatically
martial culture of Bactria as compared with the relatively peaceful
culture of the Indus-Saraswati civilization reminds us of a contrast
between Iranian and Indian in the historical period. In
pre-Alexandrine Iranian royal inscriptions, we come across truly shameless
expressions of pride in bloody victories, even defiantly detailing the
cruel treatment meted out to the defeated kings. By contrast, in
Ashoka’s inscriptions, we find apologies for the bloody Kalinga war and a
call for establishing peace and order. Far from being a purely
Buddhist reaction against prevalent Hindu martial customs, Ashoka’s
relative pacifism presents a personal variation within a broader and more
ancient tradition of AhiMsA, non-violence, best expressed in some
sections of the Mahabharata. Though this epic (and most explicitly
its section known as the Bhagavad Gita) rejects the extremist non-violence
propagated by Mahatma Gandhi and also by the wavering Arjuna before the
decisive battle, Krishna’s exhortation to fight comes only after every
peaceful means of appeasing or reconciling the enemy has been
tried.
True, the Vedas
seem to be inspired by the same martial spirit of the Iranian
inscriptions, but in the Indocentric chronology, they predate the high
tide of Harappan civilization, belonging to a pre-Harappan period of
conquest, viz. the conquest of the northwest by the Yamuna/Saraswati-based
Puru tribe. Their westward conquest was part of a larger westward
movement including the Iranian conquest of Central Asia.By way of hypothesis, I propose that AhiMsA was a
largely post-Vedic development (though it has been argued that Vedic
ritual rules to minimize the suffering of the sacrificed animals already
prove the existence of the AhiMsA spirit, a concern equally present in
Zarathushtra’s hymns)31, and
that the Iranians missed its more radical phase, sticking instead to the
more uncivilized glorification of victory by means of force. This
would concur with the finding of a more military orientation of Bactrian
culture as compared with the post-Vedic Harappan
culture.
5.3.4. The Bactrian
tripura
In the principal
Bactrian site of Dashli, a circular building with three concentric walls
has been found.The building was divided into a
number of rooms and inside, three fireplaces on platforms were discovered
along with the charred remains of sacrificed animals. In this
building, its Soviet excavator Viktor Sarianidi recognized an Iranian
temple, but Sergent explains why he disagrees with him.32 He
argues that the Vedic Aryans were as much fire-worshippers as the
Iranians, and like the early Iranians (prior to the establishment of
Zarathushtra’s reforms), they sacrificed animals, so that the excavated
fire altars could be either Indo-Aryan or Iranian.
Of course, India
and Iran have a large common heritage, and many religious practices,
mythical motifs and other cultural items were the same or closely similar
in both. But that truism will not do to satisfy Sergent’s purpose,
which is to show that the Bactrian culture was not generally Indo-Iranian,
and definitely not Iranian, but specifically Indo-Aryan. There is
nothing decisively un-Iranian about the Dashli fire
altars.
On the contrary,
there may well be something un-Indic and specifically Iranian about
it. First of all, roundness in buildings is highly unusual in Hindu
culture, which has a strong preference for square plans (even vertically,
as in windows, where rectangular shapes are preferred over arches), in
evidence already in the Harappan cities. Moreover, Sergent notes the
similarity with a fire temple found in Togolok, Margiana.The Togolok fire altar has gained fame by yielding traces of
a plant used in the Soma (Iranian: Haoma) sacrifice:
laboratory analysis in Moscow showed this to be Ephedra, a
stimulant still used in ephedrine and derivative products.33Asko Parpola tries to turn the Togolok temple into
an Indo-Iranian and possibly proto-Vedic one citing the Soma sacrifice
there as evidence: the Rg-Vedic people reproached their Dasa (Iranian)
enemies for not performing rituals including the Soma ritual, so Parpola
identifies the former with the “Haumavarga Shakas” or Soma-using
Scythians mentioned in Zoroastrian texts.34
However, every testimony we have of the Scythians, including the
Haumavarga ones in whose sites traces of the Soma ceremony have
been found, is as an Iranian-speaking people. It is possible that
the sedentary Iranians included all nomads in their term Shaka,
even the hypotheticalVedic-Aryan nomads on their way to
India, but it is not more than just possible. The use of Soma was a
bone of contention within Mazdeism, with Zarathushtra apparently
opposing it against its adepts who were equally Iranian.35
And even if Thomas Burrow were right with his thesis that the
Mazdean religion originated in a sustained reaction against the
Indo-Aryans present in Bactria and throughout the Iranian speech area
(making the non-Zoroastrian faction in Greater Iran an Indo-Aryan foreign
resident group)36, it
remains to be proven that these dissident Indo-Aryans made way for
Zoroastrian hegemony in Iran by moving out, and more specifically by
moving to India, somewhat like Moses taking the Israelites out of
Egypt. There is neither scriptural nor archaeological evidence for
such a scenario: the normal course of events would be assimilation by the
dominant group, and the only emigration from Iranian territory (if it had
already been iranianized) by Indo-Aryans that we know of, is the movement
of the Mitannic and Kassite Indo-Aryans from the southern Caspian area
into Mesopotamia and even as far as Palestine.
In the Dashli building, Asko Parpola recognized a tripura such as
have been described in the Vedic literature as the strongholds with three
circular concentric walls of the Dasas or Asuras (Asura/Ahura
worshippers), which Parpola himself has identified elsewhere as
Iranians.37 So,
chances are that the Soma-holding fire-altars, like the tripura
structures around them, in both Togolok and Dashli, were Iranian.Parpola makes this conclusion even more compelling when he
informs us that a similar building in Kutlug-Tepe “demonstrates that the
tradition of building forts with three concentric walls survived in
Bactria until Achaemenid times”38 - when
the region was undoubtedly Iranian.
Moreover, Parpola points out details in the Vedic descriptions of
the tripura-holding Dasas and Asuras which neatly fit the Bactrian
culture, the Rg-Veda “places the Dasa strongholds (…) in the mountainous
area”39, which
is what Afghanistan looks like to people from the Ganga-Saraswati-Indus
plains; it speaks of “a hundred forts” of the Dasa, while the Vedic Aryans
themselves “are never said to have anything but fire or rivers as their
‘forts’. The later Vedic texts confirm this by stating that when the
Asuras and Devas were fighting, the Asuras always won in the beginning,
because they alone had forts. (…) The Rg-Vedic Aryans described their
enemy as rich and powerful, defending their cattle, gold and wonderful
treasures with sharp weapons, horses and chariots.This description fits the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological
Complex in Bactria, with its finely decorated golden cups, weapons with
ornamental animal figurines including the horse, and trumpets indicative
of chariot warfare.”40
This may pose a chronological problem to those who consider the
Rg-Veda as pre-Bronze Age, or perhaps not, e.g. Parpola notes that the
term tripura was “unknown to the Rg-Veda” and only appears later,
“in the Brahmana texts”41 which
non-invasionists date to the high Harappan period, contemporaneous with
the Bactrian Bronze Age culture.At any rate, it
affirms in so many words that the Bactrian Bronze Age culture was Dasa or
Asura, terms which Parpola had identified with “the carriers of the Bronze
Age culture of Greater Iran”.42 It
also constitutes a challenge to those who make India the Urheimat of IE or
at least of Indo-Iranian: if the presumed tripuras are a distinctly
Dasa/Iranian element, identified as such in Vedic literature, and if the
Vedic Aryans fought the Dasas in India, should we not be able to find some
tripuras in India too? Or did the Iranians only develop them
after leaving India but while still waging occasional wars on the Indian
border?
5.3.5. Were the Bactrians
Indo-Aryans?
Other artefacts in Dashli have the same Iranian/Indo-Aryan
ambiguity with a preference for the Iranian alternative. A vase in
Dashli shows a scene with men wearing a kind of shirt leaving one shoulder
uncovered. In this, Sergent recognizes the upanayana
ceremony, in which a youngster is invested with the sacred shirt or
thread.43 But
this is both a Vedic and a Zoroastrian ritual, with the latter resembling
the depicted scene more closely: in India, only a thread is given, but
among Zoroastrians, it is an actual shirt.
Some vases
display horned snakes or dragons carrying one or more suns inside of them:
according to Sergent, this refers to an Indo-Iranian dragon myth, attested
in slightly greater detail in the Rg-Veda than in the Avesta(but what else would you expect, with Vedic literature being
much larger, older and better preserved than the Avestan corpus?),about Indra liberating the sun by slaying the dragon Vrtra,
or in the Avesta, Keresaspa killing the snake Azhi Srvara, “the homed
one”.44 The
sources which drew his attention to this picture, both Soviet and French,
are agreed that it is specifically Iranian.45
What Sergent adds is only that, like with the fire cult, it could just as
well be indo-Aryan; but that does not amount to proof of its Indo-Aryan
rather than Iranian identity.
Several
depictions (statuettes, seals) of a fertility goddess associated with
watery themes have been found. Sergent points out that they are
unrelated to Mesopotamian mythology but closely related to the
“Indo-Iranian” goddess known in India as Saraswati, in Iran as
Anahita.Which shall it be in this particular case,
Iranian or Indian, Avestan or Vedic? Sergent himself adds that the
closest written description corresponding to the visual iconography in
question is found in Yasht 5 of the Avesta.46
Of course we
must remain open to new interpretations and new findings. In this
field, confident assertions can be overruled the same day by new
discoveries. But if Sergent himself, all while advocating an
Indo-Aryan interpretation of the known Bactrian findings, is giving us so
many hints that their identity is uncertain at best, and otherwise more
likely Iranian than Indo-Aryan, we should have no reason to disbelieve
him. On the strength of the data he offers, the safest bet is that
the Bactrian Bronze Age culture was the centre of Iranian
culture.
This happens to
agree with the evidence of Zoroastrian scripture, which has dialectal
features pointing to the northeast of the historical Iranian linguistic
space (i.e. including Iran proper, which was in fact a late addition to
the Iranian speech area), meaning Bactria, and which specifically locates
Zarathushtra in Bahlika/Balkh, a town in northern Afghanistan or
Bactria. It tallies with the list of regions in the opening chapter
of the Vendidad, corresponding to Bactria, Sogdia, Margiana, southern
Afghanistan and northwestern India, which happens to put Balkh practically
in the geographical centre.Iran proper was
iranianized only well after Zarathushtra’s preaching. As Sergent
notes, in ca. 1900 BC, the Namazga culture in Turkmenistan changes
considerably taking in the influence of the then fast-expanding
Bactria-Margiana culture:47 the
Iranians were moving from their historical heartland westward into the
south-Caspian area. From there, but again only after a few more
centuries, they were to colonize Kurdistan/Media and Fars/Persia, where
their kingdoms were to flourish into far-flung empires in the 1st
millennium BC.
It is only
logical that the dominant religious tradition in a civilization is the one
developed in its demographic and cultural metropolis: the Veda in the
Saraswati basin, the Avesta in the Oxus basin, i.e. Bactria. That
Bactria did have the status of a metropolis is suggested by Sergent’s own
description of its Bronze Age culture as “one of the most brilliant in
Asia”. Though provincial compared with Harappa, it was a worthy
metropolis to the somewhat less polished Iranian
civilization.
5.3.6. Clarions of the
Aryan invaders
Another
distinctively Aryan innovation attested in Dashli was the trumpet:
“Bactria has yielded a number of trumpets; some others had been found
earlier inTepe Hissar and Astrabad (northeastern
Iran); Roman Ghirshman proposed to connect these instruments with the use
of the horse, with the Iranian cavalry manoeuvring to the sound of the
clarion. (…) In ancient India, the trumpet is not mentioned in the written
sources”.48 Would
it not be logical if the same type of cavalry manoeuvres had yielded the
Aryans both Iran and India? In that case, we should have encountered
some references to clarions in the Vedas. But no, as per Sergent’s
own reading, the Rg-Veda, supposedly the record of Aryan settlement in
India, knows nothing of trumpets; though post-Harappan depictions of
riders with trumpets are known.
All this falls
into place if we follow the chronology given by K.D. Sethna and other
Indian dissidents: the Rg-Veda was not younger but older than the Bronze
Age and the heyday of Harappa. So, the trumpet was invented in the
intervening period, say 3,000 BC, and then used in the subsequent Iranian
conquest of Bactria, Margiana and Iran.
The
comparatively recent migration into Iran of the Iranians, who supposedly
covered the short distance from the Volga mouth to Iran in the 3rd or 2nd
millennium BC (losing the wayward Indo-Aryans along the way), has not been
mapped archaeologically, in contrast with the successive Kurgan expansion
waves into Europe. Jean Haudry reports optimistically: “Since the late 3rd
millennium BC, an undecorated black pottery appears in Tepe Hissar
(Turkmenistan), together with violin-shaped female idols and esp. with
bronze weapons, the horse and the war chariots, and -a detail of which R. Ghirshman has demonstrated the
importance - the clarion, indispensable instrument for collective chariot
maneuvers. We can follow them from a distance on their way to the
south.”49 But as
we shall see, this is not necessarily the entry of “the” Iranians into
Iran, and even if it is, it does not prove the Kurgan area to be the
starting-point of their journey.
In the account
of Roman Ghirshman and Jean Haudry, the proto-Iranians with their clarions
travelled “to the south”. Rather than Indo-Iranians on their way
from South Russia to Iran and partly to India, these may just as well be
the Iranians on their way from India, via the Aral Lake area, to Iran and
Mesopotamia, where they show up in subsequent centuries. Indeed,
viewed from Iran, entrants from Russia and from India would come through
the same route, viz. from the Aral Lake southward. A look at the map
suffices to show the improbability of any other route from India to Iran:
rather than to go in a straight line across the mountains, substantial
groups of migrants would follow the far more hospitable route through the
fertile Oxus valley to the Aral Lake area, and then proceed south from
there.
On the other
hand, migrations from Iran northward are also attested. Against the
theory of a southward migration of the Iranians from the Aral-Caspian area
into Iran, P. Bosch-Gimpera proposes that the Iranians came from South
Russia via the Caucasus into Iran and thence to what is now
Turkestan:“The acknowledged penetration of the
Iranians into Turkestan, where they arrived as far as Khorezm (…) must
have taken place, on the contrary, from Iran itself, around 1000
BC.”50While he is wrong in describing the group migrating
northward from Iran as “the” Iranians, the migration to which he draws
attention confirms that Central Asia was a vast space which nomadic
groups, mostly Iranian-speaking, crisscrossed in all directions.51
Thus, in the 3rd century BC, there was a Parthian migration which
resulted in the enthronement of the Parthian Arsacid dynasty in Iran,
where they became formidable enemies to the Roman armies.52 From
Chinese as well as Roman sources, it has been deduced that the Parthians
had been living in the Syr Darya and Amu Darya regions. In
present-day Turkmenistan, the Parthian town of Nisa has been excavated,
which bears testimony to their impressive culture. If only for the
sake of colourfulness, I would like to draw attention to the theory of
Philip Lozinski, who considers the Nisa area but a stage in a much
longer migration: “All this leads me to suggest that the seat of the
Parthians, first recorded in written sources, the Parthau-nisa, was
in the region of the upper Irtysh river in Siberia. The whole region
must have been well populated, flourishing and highly civilized. The
archaeological remains recorded in modem times give ample evidence to this
effect. Furthermore the very close parallel between the actual finds
and the description of the Western, barbarians by the Chinese makes it
highly likely that this was the region the Chinese had in mind.They were remarkably accurate: their descriptions of gold
mines, irrigation systems, iron bridges, glass in the windows of palaces,
the jewelled personal decorations of the aristocracy, and other regalia
which caught their attention, correspond to actual remains in
Siberia.”53
Such a migration
from Siberia to western Iran, all within the Iranian speech area,
certainly gives an idea of what migrations could take place within the
vast expanse of Central Asia. This type of migration has occurred
many times in the preceding millennia (as well as in the subsequent
centuries with the Turkic and Mongol conquests); it would be very easy for
archaeologists to mistake such an intra-Iranian migration for the
momentous entry of the Aryans. There is as yet no firm
archaeological proof for the original migration of the first Iranians and
Indians in any direction through Central Asia, at least it has not been
identified in the relative wealth of separate archaeological findings
attesting numerous different migrations. Even in Bernard Sergent’s
erudite book, I have not found any data which compel us to accept that a
particular culture can be identified with the very first Indo-Iranian wave
of migrants; nor any data which are incompatible with the scenario of an
original Iranian migration from India via the Oxus basin to the Caspian
area and Iran proper.
5.3.7. Bactrian invasion
into India
Thus far, the
archaeological argument advanced by some scholars in favour of an Aryan
invasion into India has not been very convincing.
Consider e.g.
this circular reasoning by Prof. Romila Thapar: “In Haryana and the
western Ganga plain, there was an earlier Ochre Colour Pottery going back
to about 1500 BC or some elements of the Chalcolithic cultures using
Black-and-Red Ware. Later in about 800 BC there evolved the Painted
Grey Ware culture. The geographical focus of this culture seems to
be the Doab, although the pottery is widely distributed across northern
Rajasthan, Panjab, Haryana and western U.P. None of these post-Harappan
cultures, identifiable by their pottery, are found beyond the Indus.Yet this would be expected if ‘the Aryans’ were a people
indigenous to India with some diffusion to Iran, and if the attempt was to
find archaeological correlates for the affinities between Old Indo-Aryan
and Old Avestan.”54
Firstly, if no
common pottery type is found in Iran and India in 1500-800 BC, and if this
counts as proof that no migration from India to Iran took place, then it
also proves that no migration from Iran to India took place. In
particular, the Painted Grey Ware, long identified with the Indo-Aryans,
cannot be traced to Central Asia; if it belonged to Aryans, then not to
Aryan invaders. So, if substantiated, Prof. Thapar’s statement is
actually an argument against an Aryan invasion in ca. 1500
BC.
Secondly, if the
absence of migration in either direction in the period from 1500 BC
onwards is really proven, then this only disproves the Aryan migration if
one stays with the assumption that the Aryan migration (whether into or
out of India) took place around 1500 BC. But that assumption is
precisely part of (the textbook version of) the AIT which Prof.
Thapar has set out to prove. The archaeological data which she
mentions, assuming they can prove the absence of migrations in 1500 BC and
later, are not at all in conflict with the theory that Indo-Europeans
emigrated from India anytime between 6000 and 2000 BC.
In spite of the
impression created in popular literature, archaeology has by no means
demonstrated that there was an Aryan immigration into India.Even the new levels in accuracy do not affect the following
status quaestionis of the Aryan Invasion theory: “The question of
Indo-European migrations into the subcontinent of India can, at best, be
described as enigmatic.”55 Thus,
among those who assume the Aryan Invasion, there is no consensus on when
it took place, and some AIT archaeologists alter the chronology so much
that the theory comes to mean the opposite of what it is usually believed
to mean, viz. an affirmation of Aryan dominance in Harappa rather than an
Aryan destruction of Harappa:“[This] episode of
elite dominance which brought the indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European
family to India (…) may have been as early as the floruit of the Indus
civilization (…)”56
Enter Bernard
Sergent. He builds on a corpus of findings (some of them already
used by Asko Parpola) pertaining to the apparent entry of elements from
the Bactrian Bronze Age culture into late- and post-Harappan northwestern
India. He also offers a theory of how these Bactrians may have
caused the downfall of the Harappan civilization, parallel with the
contemporaneous crisis in civilizations in Central and West
Asia.
5.3.8. Why Harappa suffered
decline
Civilization and
urbanization are closely related to commerce, exchange, colonization of
mining areas, and other socioeconomic processes which presuppose
communications and transport. When communication and transport
cease, we see cultures suffer terrible decline, e.g. the Tasmanian
aboriginals (exterminated by the British settlers), living in splendid
isolation for thousands of years, had lost many of the skills which
mankind had developed in the Stone Age, including the art of making
fire. One of the reasons why the Eurasian continent won out against
Africa and the Americas in the march of progress, was the fairly easy and
well-developed contact between the different civilizations of Europe,
Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China. So, one can force decline on a
culture by cutting off its trade routes, a tactic routinely used for short
periods (hence only with limited long-term effect) in wartime, but which
seems to have troubled the ancient civilizations in ca. 2000 BC with
devastating effect for several centuries. It was in reaction to this
destabilization of international trade links that the civilizational
centres started budding empires by the mid-2nd millennium, e.g. the
Kassite empire in Mesopotamia where there had been city-states (Ur, Uruk,
Isin, Larsa, etc.) prior to the great crisis.
Or so Sergent
says. Dismissing the thesis of a climatological crisis (proposed in
the case of the Harappan decline but also in the case of West-Asian
cultures),he argues that only an economic crisis can
explain the simultaneous decline of cities in widely different locations,
some near rivers and some on hills, some in densely populated
agglomerations and some overlooking thinly populated steppes or mountain
areas, some in hot and some in colder areas. The ones to blame are -
who else? - the Aryans. They, and “specifically
Indo-Aryans”57,
played a role in the Hurrian and Kassite invasions disrupting Mesopotamia
(while the IE or non-IE identity of the Guti and Lullubi invaders remains
unknown, though attempts are made to link the Guti with the Tokharians);
and from Bactria, they by themselves disrupted the economy of the
Indus-Saraswati civilization.
They didn’t physically destroy the Harappan cities, as Mortimer
Wheeler and others of his generation thought: “No trace of destruction has
been observed in these cities.”58 But by
creating insecurity for the travelling traders, they bled and suffocated
the economy which made city life possible; and thus forced the Harappans
to abandon their cities and return to a pre-urban lifestyle. The
declining and fragmented Harappan country and society then fell an easy
prey to the Indo-Aryan invaders from Bactria.
This scenario has been attested in writing in the case of
Mesopotamia. Sergent quotes other experts to the effect that “from
ca. 2230 BC, (…) the Guti had cut off the roads, ruined the countryside,
set the cities on fire”59 etc.,
that the Assyrian trade system was disrupted by the Mitannic people,
etc. But is there similar evidence for the Indus-Saraswati
civilization?
Sergent cites findings that in the final stage of Mohenjo Daro, we
see the large mansions of the rich subdivided into small apartments for
the poor, the water supply system neglected, the roads and houses no
longer following the plan.60 This
certainly marks a decline, the rich losing their power and the powerful
losing their control and resources. Same story in Harappa, Chanhu
Daro, Kalibangan, Lothal: a great loss of quality in architecture and
organization in the last phase.Moreover, all traces
of long-distance trade disappear (just as in Mesopotamia, all signs of
commerce with “Meluhha”/Sindh disappear by 2000 BC), and trade is the
basis of city life. So, “these cities didn’t need to be destroyed:
they had lost their reason for existing, and were vacated”.61 But
that doesn’t bring the Bactrians or Indo-Aryans into the
picture.
5.3.9. Aryan settlements in
India
To Bernard
Sergent, the “strategic” key to the Aryan invasion puzzle has been
provided by the discovery, by a French team in 1968, of the post-Harappan
town of Pirak, near the Bolan pass and near Mehrgarh in Baluchistan.
Pirak was a new settlement dating back only to the 18th century
BC.Culturally it was closely related to the
societies to its north and west, especially Bactria. Sergent sums up
a long list of precise material items which Pirak had in common with those
non-Indian regions, and specifies in some cases that the artefacts are
attested earlier in other sites than in Pirak.62 So,
this was a settlement of foreign newcomers bringing some foreign culture
with them.
Sergent will certainly convince many readers by asserting that in
Pirak, “the horse makes its appearance in India, both through bones and in
figurines”, and this “connotes without any possible doubt the arrival in
India of the first Indo-European-speaking populations”.63 That
depends entirely on how much we make of the limited but real evidence of
horses in the Harappan civilization. Note moreover that while the
horse was important to the Indo-Aryans, the Bactrian two-humped camel was
not; but in Pirak, both camel and horse are conspicuous, both in skeletal
remains and in depictions.
If the Bactrian
culture and those to its west were Iranian-speaking, which is likely, then
Pirak is simply an Iranian settlement in an Indian border region, a
southward extension of the Bactrian culture. Indo-Iranian borders
have been fluctuating somewhat for millennia, while different groups of
Iranians down to Nadir Shah have again and again tried to invade India, so
the Iranian intrusion in Pirak (which may have ended up assimilated into
its Indo-Aryan environment) need not be the momentous historical
breakthrough which it is to Sergent. It would only be that if it can
be shown that the Pirak innovations are repeated in many North-Indian
sites in the subsequent centuries, where we know that the dominant culture
was Indo-Aryan.
A related culture is the Cemetery H culture on the outskirts of
Harappa itself. Sergent offers a detail which is distinctly
non-Vedic and Mazdean (Zoroastrian): “The dead, represented by unconnected
skulls and bones, were placed, after exposure, in big jars”.64
Exposure to birds and insects is still the first stage in the Zoroastrian
disposal of the dead. Sergent also reports that the influence of the
native Harappan civilization is much greater here than in Pirak. So,
as the Iranian invaders moved deeper inland, they soon lost their
distinctiveness. Considering that Afghan dynasties have ruled parts
of India as far east as Bengal, using Persian and building in a West-Asian
style, this post-Harappan Iranian intrusion as far as the Indus riverside
is not that impressive.
Indeed, from the
Indus eastwards, we lose track of this Bactrian invasion. Sergent
himself admits as much: “For the sequel, archaeology offers little
help. The diggings in India for the 2nd millennium BC reveal a large
number of regional cultures, generally rather poor, and to decree what
within them represents the Indo-Aryan or the indigenous contribution would
be arbitrary.If Pirak (…) represents the start of
Indian culture, there is in the present state of Indian archaeology no
‘post-Pirak’ except at Pirak itself, which lasted till the 7th century BC:
the site remained, along with a few very nearby ones, isolated.”65 So,
the Bactrian invaders who arrived through the Bolan pass and established
themselves in and around the border town of Pirak, never crossed the
Indus.
This confirms the statement by the
much-maligned (by Sergent, that is)66
American archaeologist Jim Shaffer that “no material culture is found to
move from west to east across the Indus”67, or
more academically, that the demographic eastward shift of the Harappan
population during the decline of their cities, i.e. an intra-Indian
movement from Indus to Ganga,“is the only
archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populations in
South Asia before the first half of the first millennium BC”, while the
archaeological record shows “no significant discontinuities” for the
period when the Aryan invasion should have made its mark.68 The
Aryan invasion of India has somehow gone missing from the archaeological
record.
5.3.10. Scriptural
evidence
To fortify his
reconstruction of the Aryan invasion, Bernard Sergent repeates some
well-known scriptural references. Indian authors are right in
pointing out that this is systematically the weakest part in AIT
argumentations, as the knowledge of Vedic literature among Western
scholars is either too limited or too distorted by AIT
presuppositions.Sergent’s arguments at this point
repeat well-known claims about the contents of the Vedas. Thus, the
Rg-Veda was written by foreigners because it doesn’t know the tiger nor
rice nor “the domesticated elephant which existed in the Harappan Indus
culture”.69
As for the
tiger, it is often said that India was divided in a lion zone in the west
and a tiger zone in the rest. This image persists in the symbolism
of the civil war in Sri Lanka: the Sinhalese, originating in Gujarat (the
last place in India where lions exist even today), have the lion as their
symbol, while the separatists among the Tamils, originating in
southeastern India, call themselves the Tigers.However, to judge from the Harappan seal imagery, tigers did
originally exist in the Saraswati and Indus basins as well, overlapping
with the lion zone. As Sir Monier Monier-Williams notes, in the
Atharva-Veda, “vyAghra/tiger is often mentioned together with the
lion”.70 It is
simply impossible that the Rg-Vedic seers, even if they were unaware of
the Ganga basin (quod non), had never heard of
tigers.
As for the
domesticated elephant, if it was known in Harappa, does anyone seriously
suggest that it was not known in the same area in subsequent
centuries? While regression in knowledge and technology does
sometimes happen, there is no reason whatsoever why people who could
domesticate elephants would have lost this useful skill, which is not
dependent on foreign trade or urbanization, when the Harappan cities
declined. If the Vedic Aryans had settled in India, it is impossible
that they didn’t know domesticated elephants; they need not have mentioned
everything they knew in their Vedic hymns.At any
rate, the actual reading of Vedic information has so far been the weakest
arrow in the invasionists’ quiver, and I wouldn’t take their word for it
that the domesticated elephant is indeed absent from the Rg-Veda.Isn’t the specification “wild elephant”71 an
indication that they also knew non-wild elephants? Isn’t the mention
of how “the people deck him like a docile king of elephants”72 a
reference to the Hindu custom of taking adorned domesticated elephants in
pageants?
Rice, according to Sergent himself, made its appearance in the
Indus basin in the late Harappan period, and was known to the Bactrian
invaders in Pirak.73 He
identifies those Bactrian invaders as the Vedic Aryans, so why haven’t
they mentioned rice in their Rg-Veda? One simple answer would be
that the Rg-Veda is pre-Harappan, composed at a time and in a place where
rice was not yet cultivated. This chronological correction solves a
lot of similar arguments from silence. Thus, there was cotton in
Harappa and after, but no cotton in the Rg-Veda.Bronze swords were used aplenty in the Bactrian culture and
in Pirak, but are not mentioned in the Rg-Veda (a short knife can be made
from soft metals like gold or copper, but a sword requires advanced bronze
or iron metallurgy).74 Camels
were part of the Bactrian culture and its Pirak offshoot, but are not
mentioned in the Rg-Veda except for its rather late 8th book, which
mentions Bactria, possibly in the period when the early Harappans were
setting up mining colonies there such as Shortugai. It all falls
into place when the Rg-Veda is considered as
pre-Harappan.
For a very different type of scriptural evidence, Sergent sees a
synchronism between the archaeologically attested settlement of Pirak and
the beginning of the Puranic chronology, which in his view goes back to
the 17th century BC, in “remarkable coincidence” with the florescence of
Pirak.75Reference is in fact to Kalhana’s Rajatarangini,
which starts a dynastic lists of kings of Kashmir in 1882, i.e. the early
19th century BC.76 But if
Kalhana can be a valid reference, what about Kalhana’s dating the
Mahabharata war to the 25th century BC? If Puranic history is any
criterion, Sergent should realize that its lists of Aryan kings for other
parts of India than Kashmir go way beyond 2,000 BC.
Another classic scriptural reference concerns everything relating
to the enemies of the Vedic Aryans, such as the “aboriginal” Dasas. Very
aptly, Sergent identifies the Dasas and the Panis as Iranians, and the
Pakthas (one of the tribes confronting the Vedic king Sudas in the Battle
of the Ten Kings) as the Iranian Pathans.77 Yet he
doesn’t identify these tribes with the Bronze Age Bactrians, arguing that
in Alexander’s time, Greek authors locate the Parnoi and Dahai just south
of the Aral Lake. But that was almost two thousand years after the
heyday of the Bactrian Bronze Age culture and arguably even longer after
the Rg-Veda. The only mystery is that these ethnonyms managed to
survive that long, not that during those long centuries, they could
migrate a few hundred miles to the northwest - centuries during which we
know for fact that the Iranians expanded westward from their Bactrian
heartland across rivers and mountains to settle as far west as
Mesopotamia.
Moreover, the Vedas locate the confrontations in the prolonged
hostility between Indo-Aryans and Iranians not on the Saraswati (which
could in theory be identified as the homonymous Harahvaiti/Helmand in
Afghanistan)78, but
on the riverside of the Parushni/Ravi and other Panjab rivers,
unambiguously in India. This is only logical if the Vedic Aryans
were based in the Saraswati basin and their Iranian enemies were based in
an area to their west (western Panjab, Khyber pass): they confronted
halfway in eastern Panjab. So not only did these Iranian tribes move
from Bactria to the Aral Lake area in 2000-300 BC, but they had started
moving northwestward centuries earlier, in the Rg-Vedic period, in
Panjab.
With every
invasionist attempting to strengthen his case by appealing to the
testimony of Hindu scripture, the collective failure becomes more
glaring.
5.3.11. Comparison with
archaeological reconstruction in Europe
The westward
expansion of the Kurgan culture has been mapped with some degree of
accuracy: “If an archaeologist is set the problem of examining the
archaeological record for a cultural horizon that is both suitably early
and of reasonable uniformity to postulate as the common prehistoric
ancestor of the later Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and possibly some
of the Indo-European languages of Italy, then the history of research
indicates that the candidate will normally be the Corded Ware
culture. At about 3200-2300 BC this Corded Ware horizon is
sufficiently early to predate the emergence of any of the specific
proto-languages. In addition, it is universally accepted as the
common component if not the very basis of the later Bronze Age cultures
that are specifically identified with the different
proto-languages.Furthermore, its geographical
distribution from Holland and Switzerland on the west across northern and
central Europe to the upper Volga and middle Dniepr encompasses all those
areas which [have been] assigned as the “homelands” of these European
proto-languages.”79
This is a very
important insight for understanding the large common (partly pre-IE
substratal) element in the European IE languages, distinguishing them
collectively from Anatolian, Tokharic and Indo-Iranian: “The study of the
lexicon of the Northern European languages, especially Germanic and
Baltic, reveals that a large number of terms relevant to the ecology of
the habitat of the early populations of the area and to their
socioeconomic activities have no plausible Indo-European etymology.
(…)it is possible to ascribe to the
pre-Indo-European substrate in the Baltic area a number of names of
plants, animals, objects and activities characteristic of the Neolithic
cultures.”80 Many
of these terms also extend to Celtic, Slavic and sometimes Italic and
Greek.
Examples include
the words barley, Russian bor (“millet”), Latin far
(“spelt”); Irish tuath, Gothic thiuda, “people”, whence the
ethnic names Dutch/Deutsch; German wahr, Latin verus, Old
Irish fir, “true”; Latin granum, Dutch koren, English
grain and corn; Lithuanian puodas, Germanic
fata, whence Dutch vat, “vessel”; Dutch delven,
“dig”, Old Prussian (Baltic) dalptan, “piercing-tool”; Old
Irishland, Old Prussian lindan, Germanic land; Latin
alnus (elksnis, “alder”,
also related to Greek aliza, “white poplar”; Dutch smaak, “taste”,
Gothic smakka, “fig, tasty fruit”, Lithuanian smaguricu,
“sweet, treat”; from an ancient form *londhwos, Dutch
lenden, Latin lumbus, “waist”.Likewise, the Germanic words fish, apple, oak, beech,
whale, goat, elm, (n)adder have counterparts in other European
languages, e.g.Latin piscis, Old Irish
aball, Greek aig-ilops or krat-aigos (possibly
related to Berber iksir, Basque eskur)81, Latin
fagus, squalus, haedus, ulmus, natrix, but they have no attested
counterparts in the Asian IE languages.82
Archaeology and
linguistics reinforce each other in indicating the existence of a second
centre of IE dispersal in the heart of Europe, the Corded Ware culture of
ca. 3000 BC, whence most European branches of IE parted for their
historical habitats.
Even earlier demographic and cultural movements have been mapped
with convincing accuracy. The sudden apparition of full-fledged
Neolithic culture in the Low Countries in about 5,100 BC can clearly be
traced to a gradual expansion of the agricultural civilization through
Hungary (5700 BC) and southern Germany (5350 BC), from the Balkans and
ultimately from Anatolia.83 It is
this gradual spread of agriculture and its concomitant changes in
life-style (houses, tools, ceramics, domesticated animals) which the
leading archaeologist Colin Renfrew has rashly identified as the
indo-europeanization of Europe, but which Marija Gimbutas and many others
would consider as the spread of the pre-IE “Old European”
culture.
It remains
possible that in some outlying regions, the early Indo-Europeans arrived
on the scene in time to capture this movement of expanding agriculture,
but it did not originate with them, because Anatolia and the Balkans were
demonstrably not the IE Urheimat. On the contrary, in the
northeastern Mediterranean, the presence of pre-IE elements in the
historically attested IE cultures and languages (Greek, Hittite) is very
strong, indicating that the Indo-Europeans had to subdue a numerous and
self-confident, culturally advanced population. It is this Old
European people, known through towns like Catal HLyLk and Vinca, which
gradually spread to the northwest and civilized most of Europe before its
indo-europeanization.
An even earlier
case of demographic-cum-cultural expansion has been identified: “One is
astonished by the cultural coherence which manifests during the Middle-
and Late-Magdalénien (12,000 to 10,000 BC) in a large area reaching
from Spain (the Valencia region) to central Czechoslovakia.
Everything indicates that this culture has spread fast starting from
southwestern France, either by migrations or by cultural exchange between
autochthonous tribes.Should one - since at that
socio-economic stage there can be no question of political unity - not
consider the possibility that this was one large ethnic group? In
the entire Magdalénien territory, there is (…), apart from
similarities in tools and way of life, a conspicuous unity in artistic
styles and symbolism.”84
This culture
made way for a new cultural wave: “Around 10,000 BC or shortly after, the
Magdalénien culture comes to an end without any demonstrable
reason. This is the end of a civilization. This is clearly
visible in the French-Cantabrian region where the places of worship which
had been installed in deep caves 8,000 years earlier, were
abandoned.In [its northern reaches], the
Magdalénien culture makes way for cultural currents from the
Anglo-Polish plains”85, a
nomadic culture of pioneers living on the rim of the (by then receding)
ice-cap. They were the last hunter-gatherer culture in Europe, and
their expansion in non-Mediterranean Europe set the stage for the
inexorable expansion of the Neolithic Revolution of agriculture from the
southeast.
So, that’s
archaeology in action. Without the benefit of a single written
document, several cultural and partly demographic waves have been
identified in European prehistory: a Mesolithic wave expanding from the
Ur-European population centres in the southwest (probably proto-Basque)
before 10,000 BC; a counter-wave from the northeast after 10,000 BC
(linguistically unidentified); the wave of agriculture spreading to the
farthest corners from the southeast in the 7th-4th millennium BC
(linguistically unidentified); and finally the wave of the horse-riding
late-Kurganites bringing their IE languages.
There is as yet
no parallel map of a Kurgan-to-India migration. Thus, the material
relation between the Andronovo culture in Kazakhstan (often considered as
the Indo-Iranians freshly emigrated from the Kurgan area) and the
Bactria-Margiana culture (presumed to be the Indo-Aryans and the Iranians
on their way to India and Iran) has been established only vaguely,
certainly not enough to claim that the latter was an offshoot of the
former (which the AIT would require). As we saw, even tracing a
migration from Bactria across the Indus has not succeeded so
far.
But then,
neither has a reverse migration been mapped archaeologically. If the
Bactrian Bronze Age culture was Iranian and the Iranians had earlier been
defeated in India, where is the archaeological trail of the Iranians from
India to Bactria? And earlier, where is the evidence of the
Proto-Indo-Europeans on their way from India to the Kurgan area?
Those who consider India as the Urheimat of IE should suspend their
current triumphalism and take up the challenge.
Footnotes:
18E.g.B.B.Lal:
New Light on the Indus Civilization, Aryan Books, Delhi
1997.
19Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p-33.
20Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p. 157.
21Maurizio
Tosi: “De indusbeschaving voorbij de grenzen van het Indisch
subcontinent”, in UNESCO exhibition book Oude Culturen in
Pakistan, Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis, Brussels
1989, p.133.
22Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.180.
23Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.160.
24Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.224, with reference to A.A. Askarov:
“Traditions et innovations dans la culture du nord de la Bactriane à
l’age du bronze”, Colloque Archèologie, CNRS, Paris 1985,
p.119-124.
25Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.160.
26Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.158.
27Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.160.
28This
is one of the points elaborated by Shereen Ratnagar: Enquiries into
the Political Organization of Harappan Society, Ravish Publ., Pune
1991.
29Vide
Shereen Ratnagar: “Revisionist at work: a chauvinistic inversion of the
Aryan invasion theory”, Frontline, 9-2-1996, an attack on Prof.
N.S. Rajaram.
30Asko
Parpola: Deciphering the Indus Script, Cambridge University Press
1994, p. 171.
31Discussed
in Hans-Peter Schmidt: “The origin of Ahimsa”, Mèlanges d’Indianisme
à la Mémoire de Louis Renou, Paris 1968, and Herman W. Tull: “The
killing that is not killing: men, cattle and the origins of non-violence
(ahimsa) in the Vedic sacrifice”, Indo-Iranian Journal 1996,
p.223-244.
32Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p. 161.
33The
name Soma/Haoma does not etymologically refer to a specific
plant, but to the process of pressing it to obtain its juices:
sav/hav, “to press/crush”. Gernot Windfuhr: “Haoma/Soma:
the Plant”, Acta Iranica 25, 2nd series, vol.XI (Brill, Leiden
1985), p.699-726, proposes that the original Soma plant was a man-shaped
root, like the European mandrake, probably the ginseng
root. Windfuhr shows that its symbolic connection with the
celestial man (the constellation Orion) has an exact parallel in the
Chinese lore about this strongly medicinal plant. on the other hand,
ginseng is at best very rare in the foothills of the Himalayas, while
ephedra is quite common there and in the Afghan and Iranian highlands,
and it also has mild mind-altering properties. So, the discovery
of ephedra in Togolok seems to be a decisive breakthrough to
near-certainty about the identity of Soma. Further arguments for
the ephedra hypothesis are given by Harri Nyberg: “The problem of the
Aryans and the Soma: the botanical evidence”, in G. Erdosy: The
Indo-Aryans in Ancient South Asia, p.382-406.
34K.D.
Sethna: The Problem of Aryan Origins, supplement 5, with
reference to (and extensive quotation from) Asko Parpola: “The coming of
the Aryans to Iran and India and the cultural and ethnic identity of the
Dasas”, in Studia Orientalia, vol.64 (Helsinki 1988), p. 195-265;
see also the review of Parpola’s essay by Harry Falk, in Indo-Iranian
Journal 34, 1991, p.57-60.
35Our
knowledge of the Mazdean use of Haoma is chiefly based on the so-called
Hom Yasht, included in the Avesta as Yasna 9, 10 and 11:1-12. The
common belief that Zarathushtra opposed the use of Haoma is based on
Yasna 48:10 (“When will men shun the mUthra/urine of this
intoxication?”) and on Yasna 32:14, where a positive reference to an
intoxicant is put in the mouth of evil people. But in neither case
is the term Haoma effectively used, and so, Zarathushtra’s
rejection of Haoma is disputed.
36Thomas
Burrow: “The Proto-Indoaryans”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society, 1973, cited with approval by Bernard Sergent: Genèse de
l’Inde, p.232.
37Asko
Parpola: “The coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and the cultural
and ethnic identity of the Dasas”, in Studia Orientalia, vol.64
(Helsinki 1988), p.212-215, with reference to Shatapatha Brahmana
6:3:3:24-25; and: “The problem of the Aryans and the Soma:
textual-linguistic and archaeological evidence”, in G. Erdosy: The
Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p.368ff.
38Asko
Parpola: “The problem of the Aryans and the Soma”, in G. Erdosy: The
Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p.368.
39Asko
Parpola: “The problem of the Aryans and the Soma”, in G. Erdosy: The
Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p.368.
40Asko
Parpola: “The problem of the Aryans and the Soma”, in G. Erdosy: The
Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p.368.
41Asko
Parpola: “The problem of the Aryans and the Soma”, in G. Erdosy: The
Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p - 369.
42Asko
Parpola: “The coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and the cultural
and ethnic identity of the Dasas”, Studia Orientalia, vol.64,
p.224.
43Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.163.
44Rg-Veda
1:51:4, 1:54:6, discussed in B. Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde,
p.163-164. Incidentally, the iconography is not unlike the
classical Chinese dragons, so this may be yet another IE contribution to
Chinese culture. Moreover, the symbolism of the dragon swallowing
the sun and getting forced to release it again also returns in
Babylonian astrological symbolism: till today, the lunar nodes
(intersection points of the lunar orbit and the ecliptic), where solar
and lunar eclipses take place, are called Dragon’s Head and Dragon’s
Tail.
45Reference
is to Russian articles from the 1970s by Viktor Sarianidi and by I.S.
Masimof, and to Marie-Hélène Pottier: Matériel Funéraire de la
Bactriane Méridionale à l’Age du Bronze, Paris 1984,
p.82ff.
46Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.163.
47Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.179.
48Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p. 162.
49J.
Haudry: Les Indo-Européens, p. 1 18, with reference to R.
Ghirshman: L’Iran et les Migrations des Indo-Aryans et des
Iranians (1977).
50P.
Bosch-Gimpera: “The Migration Route of the Indo-Aryans”, Journal of
Indo-European Studies, 1974, p.515.
51“From
Hungary to China”, the Iranian-speaking nomads generically known as
Scythians filled up the entire space of the steppe lands, vide Natalia
Polosmak Francis van Noten: “Les Scythes de I’Altaï”, La
Recherche, May 1995, p.524-530.
52According
to Hermann Kinder and Werner Hilgemann: The Penguin Atlas of World
History, 1979, p.69, the Parthians were equated in Greco-Roman
accounts with a Scythian tribe called the Parni, i.e. Greek
Parnoi equated by Asko Parpola with the hostile Panis mentioned in the
Rg-Veda, in G. Erdosy, ed.: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South
Asia, p.367.
53B.
Philip Lozinski: The Original Homeland of the Parthians, Mouton
Co, The Hague 1959; p.54. The Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus
(XXIII, 6, 43) is quoted as mentioning that “to the north of Persia are
Parthians dwelling in lands abounding in snow and
frost”.
54R.
Thapar: “The Perennial Aryans”, Seminar, December
1992.
55David
G. Zanotti: “Another Aspect of the Indo-European Question: a Response to
P. Bosch Gimpera”, Journal of Indo-European Studies, 1975/3,
p.255-270, spec. p.260.
56C.
Renfrew: “Before Babel: Speculations on the Origins of Linguistic
Diversity”, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1 (1), p.3-23,
spec. p.14.
57Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p. 198-199. On p.206 ff.,
Sergent adds some new data about the large IE and specifically
Indo-Aryan presence in West Asia. Indo-Aryan names are quite
common in Syria and Palestine in the 15th-13th century BC, e.g. the
Palestian town of Sichem was ruled by one Birishena, i.e.
Vira-sena, “the one who has an army of heroes”, and Qiltu near
Jerusalem was ruled by one Suar-data, i.e. “gift of
Heaven”. To Sergent, this also proves that the Indo-Aryans
maintained a separate existence after and outside the Mitannic kingdom
until at least the 13th century BC.
58Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p. 201.
59Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.199, quoting Paul Garelli: Le
Proche-Orient Asiatique, PUF. Paris 1969.
p.89-93.
60Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.200.
61Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.201.
62Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.219ff.
63Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.221.
64Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.224; emphasis
added.
65Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.246-247.
66Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.155 (“the worst is achieved by Jim
Shaffer” with his “bad faith”), 477 (“manipulations in which Jim Shaffer
indulges, consisting in starkly ignoring the linguistic
evidence”).
67Personal
communication during the 1996 Indus-Saraswati conference in Atlanta
GA.
68Jim
G. Shaffer and Diane A. Lichtenstein: “The concepts of ‘cultural
tradition’ and ‘palaeoethnicity’ in South-Asian archaeology”, in G.
Erdosy, ed.: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p.
139-140.
69Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p. 241.
70M.
Monier-Willams: A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, p.1036, entry
vyAghra.
71Rg-Veda
1:64:7 and 8:33:8.
72Rg-Veda
9:57:3, thus translated by Ralph Griffith: The Hymns of the
Rg-Veda, p.488.
73Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.230.
74Ralph
Griffith uses “sword” twice in his translation The Hymns of the
Rg-Veda, p.25 (1:37:2) and p.544 (10:20:6), both already in the
younger part of the Rg-Veda, but in the index on p.702 he corrects
himself, specifying that “knife” or “dagger” would be more
appropriate. Likewise, the core stories of ,the Ramayana and
Mahabharata, the ones most likely to stay close to the original versions
even in their material details (unlike the many sideshows woven into
these epics, often narrating much more recent events), feature only
primitive weapons: Rama’s bow and arrow, Hanuman’s
club.
75Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.223.
76Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.541 n.100, with secondary reference
to R. Morton Smith: “The Indian Sennachy”, Journal of Indo-European
Studies 1978, p.77-91.
77Bernard
Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.241-244. He specifically rejects the
common belief that the Dasas were black-skinned, in spite of their
occasional description as “black-covered” or “from a black womb”,
pointing out that even the fair-haired and white-skinned Vikings were
called the “black foreigners” by the Irish, with “black” purely used as
a metaphor for “evil”.
78Thus
Bernard Sergent: Genèse de l’Inde, p.242.
79J.P.
Mallory: In Search of the Indo-Europeans, Hudson Hudson,
London 1989, p.108.
80Edgar
C. Polomié: “The Indo-Europeanization of Northern Europe: the Linguistic
Evidence”, Journal of Indo-European Studies, fall 1990,
p.331-337.
81Suggested
by Xavier Delamarre: Le Vocabulaire Indo-Eurpéen, Maisonneuve,
Paris 1984, p.167.
82Remark
that they are all terms of flora and fauna, the typical substratum
vocabulary in an immigrant language. Common developments within
the pan-IE vocabulary also set the European languages apart, e.g. from
sus, “pig”, the derivative su-in-o, “swine”, is attested in
Latin, Greek, Baltic, Slavic and Germanic; from *ker-, “horn”,
the derivative *kerew-, “deer”, strictly “the homed one” (still
attested in its literal meaning in Avestan, srvara, as epithet of
a horned dragon, but in the European languages a paraphrase like
Sanskrit hastI, “the handed one”, for “elephant”), is attested in
Germanic (Dutch hert), Greek. Latin (cervus), Celtic and
Baltic.
83Pierre
Bonenfant Paul-Louis van Berg: “De eerste bewoners van het
toekomstige ‘België’: een etnische overrompeling”, in Anne Morelli ed.:
Geschiedenis van het eigen volk, Kritak, Leuven 1993 (1992),
p.21-36, specifically p.28.
84P.
Bonenfant P.-L. van Berg: “De eerste bewoners van het toekomstige
‘België’”, in A. Morelli, ed.: Geschiedenis van het eigen volk,
p.24.
85P.
Bonenfant P.-L. van Berg: “De eerste bewoners van het toekomstige
‘België’”, in A. Morelli, ed.: Geschiedenis van het eigen volk,
p.24.