lpetrich

LP:
So horses and wheels agree with the Kurgan hypothesis and not with CR's.

phaedrus:
Err...the whole point of providing the link was to emphasise the point that linguistic evidence aint enough....read the link pls

LP:
I have. And so what?

phaedrus:
... And who the fuck is bothered about Hindu nationalists, they are not interested in unbiased search for truth.

LP:
They are the loudest opponents of the AIT.

phaedrus:
Edited to add I always wondered whether horse chariots were the ideal means of travel for any invading party through the mountain terrain.

LP:
They may not be very useful in mountain passes, but they are nevertheless useful in valleys, and while the Vedas mention chariots, there is very little evidence of Harappan chariots. So non-Harappan items in the Vedas include

Horses
Iron
Chariots

copernicus

HindooHeathen and Phaedrus: Thanks for the lengthy replies, but this forum makes it very difficult to develop long, complex arguments that make many different points of varying credibility and relevance. So I would like to appeal to you to try to make your points a little more succinctly. Also, I don't really want to get into debates over Hindu scripture or archeology, which I can't claim much expertise in. From the viewpoint of linguistics, though, a fairly strong case can be made for the view that Aryan tribes invaded (or migrated to) Northern India circa 1500 BC.

I'll only respond briefly here:

1) Max Muller is relevant from the viewpoint of history, but not scholarly debate. The linguistic arguments are supported in a large body of literature.

2) The linguistic evidence is quite strong, and it contradicts the north India homeland hypothesis. Your only evidence against it is Elst's dabbling critique of a few linguistic sources, which doesn't address the large body of data about Indo-European culture and geographical location.

3) Most Harappan scholars seem to think that Harappan was definitely not Indo-European, based on the known differences between European and Harappan cultures. Evidence from a variety of sources--place names, script, architecture, livestock--support a Dravidian connection.

4) When I said that the Harappans "could have" been Indo-European, I only meant to say that all is open to debate. The existing positive evidence is strongly against such a conclusion. Sorry if you felt that I was lending credence to what I consider a very marginal possibility.

lpetrich

HindooHeathen:
... Any linguist worth his/her salt knows that Tamil is the oldest Dravidan language and also that the oldest literature of Tamil does not have any memory of outsiders (though many earlier natural disasters are faithfully recorded in them, for example the submerging of a land mass south of cape-comorin).

LP:
HindooHeathen, you still have not explained to us how the oldest writings in Tamil date back to 2000 BCE. That's *very* big news to anyone who has ever studied the history of writing.

HH:
What the opponents of AIt claim is that when Max Muller interpreted the word Aryan [which occurs in the whole body of Vedas less than 40 times] as a race with distinct culture from that of Dasyus. ...

LP:
Demonization of Max Muller does not prove a thing.

HH:
It is precisely this interpretation of Vedas which we oppose. And it is for this interpretation of Vedas which was done with motives non-academic. It is this interpretation which has been part of Evangelical methodolgy.

LP:
Sleazy missionaries are an entirely separate issue.

HH:
I shall take the verse in Rig Veda that is central to the idea that "the Hindu literature, seems to describe wars between Aryans and non-Aryans"(Post of Copernicus).For example the term "Krishna garbha" (RV I,102,1)is translated to mean "dusky brood" but actually it means "Pregnant with darkness" a term even today used in many parts of India to mean rain clouds. ...

LP:
However, rain clouds might be considered a "dusky brood".

HH:
Further Copernicus says "...there is no linguistic evidence one way or the other as to whether there was fighting. It's just that it seems rather implausible that a massive tribal migration of that sort would be peaceful. It also seems implausible to opponents of the invasion theory, and that is why they try their best to argue for a northern India urheimat." This clearly a diametrically opposite stand to the one he/she took in the posting that stated,"the Hindu literature, seems to describe wars between Aryans and non-Aryans".

LP:
Literary depictions of fighting != grammar and vocabulary. And Copernicus had been talking about grammar and vocabulary comparisons when he meant linguistic evidence.

HH:
IP says, "...If the Vedas describe the Harappans, then Harappan remains ought to be full of horse remains and horse depictions." and continues to talk about a "piltdown horse" hoax. Essentially it is more of hoaxing a hoax than a hoax. Dr.N.S. Rajaram had clearly not re-touched the seal and only thing is that he could not get a good photo of the seal(which incidentally he got from a middle class Sanskrit scholar in the sub-urb of West Bengal). Just because his Western detractors have access to more quality photographs (which conclusively prove nothing of a hoax) should we call Dr.N.S.Rajaram a hoaxer?

LP:
So it was a low-quality picture? And is that the best evidence that could be found for Harappan horses?

HH:
Dr.N.S.Rajaram has given a clear and honest reply to the deciphering he made.In fact it is Michael Witzel one of Dr.Rajaram's detractors who has been exposed for intentional mis-translation of Vedic verses to fabricate literary evidence to "prove" an Aryan "migration". Further many Lothal based excavations have yielded not only horse terra-cotta but also horse bones, a species mentioned in the description of Asvameda sacrifice of Vedas. Saying that horses and chariots came into India along with the supposed Aryan Invasion/migration flys against the face of evidence that a lot of cave paintings and rock art which are at least 5000 years old and depict horses ...

LP:
I was unable to reach the URL http://sarasvati.simplenet.com/horse1.htm so I'm unable to tell whether that was really a painting of a horse.

However, horse remains are absent in most times in Harappan sites, only appearing toward the end of their existence. And there is no clear depiction of a horse in *any* of the Harappan seals, though they depict several other sorts of beasts, like bulls and rhinos.

HH:
The seal which IP has talked about is often known as "PasuPathi" seal. "Pasu" is the word in Dravidian language which specifically refers to cow and universally refers to all animals. ...

LP:
So what?

HH:
... . The paper concerned makes the conclusion that based on the way some constellations are talked about in the Vedas, the hymns should have been written at a geographical location south of Vindhya mountain range.

LP:
An ingenious approach, at least if constellations can be unambiguously identified.

HH:
In a famous essay by British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, titled "Aryan Invasions Over Four Millennia". Published in a book called "Culture Through Time" (edited by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, 1990) explains the dubious role of Western philologists in constructing the AIT: "Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population! The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework... Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED."

LP:
Straw position. It's something that no serious prehistorian nowadays takes seriously. Invasions are real. Survival of pre-existing culture is real. As I see it, the AIT is completely consistent with survival of pre-Aryan populations and culture and religion and whatnot; there is no need to invoke such extreme positions.

HH:
You can find the same sense of racism in the detractors of Dr.N.S.RajaRam even today. Here I provide a quote from these "academic" attacks (one of the links provided here) on Dr. Rajaram: "One of the pinnacles of European intellectual achievement was the discovery of the Indo-European language family, a discovery stimulated by 18c European studies of Sanskrit. ..." How dare those lowly Indians question the "pinnacle of European intellectual achievement"? ...

LP:
I don't see any good reason to have an inferiority complex here. The discovery of the Indo-European language family was an important discovery, and I don't see why it's supposed to be such a put-down.

HH:
Surely, LP & Copernicus, whoever created AIT, did not create it out of academic interests but rather many other considerations did exist. And most people who perpetuate it too seem not to have come out of the Euro-centric mind set.

LP:
I don't see how the Aryan invasion theory of Sanskrit is much different from the Hellenic invasion theory of Greek, the Turkic invasion theory of Turkish, the Magyar invasion theory of Hungarian, the Angle-Saxon-Jute invasion theory of English, the Roman invasion theory of the Romance languages, etc.

And I don't see why the Aryan theory is supposed to be a political scam while the others aren't.

HH:
" ...The modern archeological record for South Asia indicates a cultural history of continuity rather than the earlier eighteenth through twentieth century scholarly interpretations of discontinuity and South Asian dependence upon Western influences. ..."

LP:
Partial continuity does exist, but the continuity was not complete, as the post-Harappan content of the Vedas clearly indicates.

hinduwoman

Here The AIT theory is a matter of scholarly debate only and no one is using it for anything else. But in the world of politics it is a different matter. Here are my objections to it:

They are saying Hinduism came from outside and was imposed by force on local inhabitants. That is why the anti-AIT is on a sons-of-the-soil campaign.

Hinduism = racism. In international arena racism is a loaded word. It does not matter whether the charge is true or not; merely accusing one of it is disastrous. In recent conferences on racism they wanted to include caste as well. Hence such dsire to prove that caste and race has nothing in common.

I included that song on Rama to show how American teachers are projecting hinduism in the most negative light possible. Never mind that Rama could not be an Aryan invader subjugating the dravidian demons, though he does clash with many tribals. Yet, he is being dragged in simply to tell impressionable students how awful he was. For many of the american students this is the first introduction to Hinduyism they are getting. Why include multiculturalism in schools if you are going to perpetuate the steroetypes?
How would these people like it if the first taste of Christianity any Hindus get is Christopher Malowe's writings?

copernicus

If anyone is attacking Hindu culture unfairly with the AIT hypothesis, then I agree with you that they should not. However, I don't really see it being used that way by most scholars. Indeed, nobody seems to think that modern Hindus have anything to be ashamed about, even if ancient Aryan tribes behaved aggressively. That wasn't unusual behavior for those times, and nobody is singling out Hindu culture as excessively barbarian in this respect. Indeed, ancient India is singled out as one of the cradles of civilization. It is certainly true that the modern linguistic community has immense respect for ancient Hindu culture, and most linguists accept the AIT as a reasonable theory.

Granted that 'racism' is a loaded word. Nevertheless, I think that most people perceive the caste system as a type of racism. Gandhi did, and he wasn't the only Hindu to see it that way. That is not the same as equating Hinduism with racism.

Sorry, but that is a very weak argument. I had never heard of that poem before you cited it, and you gave no evidence whatever that it was widely quoted to Americans as their first introduction to Hinduism. Most Americans get little or no introduction to Hinduism. There is no standard method for presenting Hinduism to Americans. I suspect that you have no idea at all what most Americans think of Hinduism.

On what basis do you make this claim? What makes you think that you know anything at all about what American students are exposed to? Have you ever attended an American high school? Have you had extensive contact with American students?

phaedrus

LP

Gaps in the written record have happened elsewhere. Consider one place where a conquering-Aryan scenario is generally accepted: Greece, where Greek was clearly introduced to the mainland by 2000 BCE and to the islands by 1500 BCE. One of these islands was Crete, home of the Minoans, who had a vaguely Harappan-like society…………………….(snip)………………
And when the Greek world re-acquired writing in 800 BCE or thereabouts, they borrowed a Phoenician script that was totally unconnected to Linear B. And the Greek world has remained literate in that script ever since.
Getting back to India, it takes a big stretch of the imagination to connect the later Indian scripts with the Harappan script; almost as big as the stretch necessary to connect Linear B and the Greek alphabet

He he, you just made my case. By describing how you can connect Linear B and the Greek alphabet, you have illustrated how further archaeological findings might throw light on the transformation of the Indus script to the Sanskrit one….Thanks mate

This is all from secondhand descriptions of the contents of the Vedas. However, if you can point me to a good translation somewhere on the Internet, and I mean a translation that:
Uses modern English without trying to imitate King James English
Is reasonably literal, with linguistic ambiguities footnoted
Is not bowdlerized (honest about cow sacrifices and the like)

He he again Why should I provide you with a resource for a good translation. Since you have been so fervently talking about the descriptions in the Vedas et al, you should have taken the effort to find the resources yourself. So all that you have been arguing is based on what others say right? You should have made it clear in the first place, I thought you were actually researching about the whole issue. Gives a lot of credibility to your arguments alrite, especially the linguistic ones when you don’t have an inkling about the vedic script or Sanskrit, all you have been spouting is just reproduction of other’s views?????

However, there are lots of nomadic tribes that have left only tiny archeological footprints; consider such analogies to the conquering-Aryan scenario as the origins of Hungarian and Turkish; Hungarian was brought to central Europe by nomads from the Ural Mountains, and Turkish was brought to Anatolia by nomads from central Asia; both sets of nomads were relatively small fractions of the populations of their conquered lands.

Uhh what has this got to do with the kenoyer quote???? If you didn’t notice, he is one of the co-directors of the HARP (Harappa Archaeological Research Project), ie he is one of the main chaps who is doing the digging and he clearly says no invasion.

phaedrus

LP

phaedrus:
Err...the whole point of providing the link was to emphasise the point that linguistic evidence aint enough....read the link pls

LP:
I have. And so what?

Sigh..so you understand that linguistic evidence aint enough?

phaedrus:
... And who the fuck is bothered about Hindu nationalists, they are not interested in unbiased search for truth.

LP:
They are the loudest opponents of the AIT.

So why bother about them, have your debates with people who want to approach the truth in an unbiased manner

They may not be very useful in mountain passes, but they are nevertheless useful in valleys, and while the Vedas mention chariots, there is very little evidence of Harappan chariots. So non-Harappan items in the Vedas include

Horses
Iron
Chariots

So they came down the moutains and learnt how to build the chariots????? You are referring to references in the vedas and pointing out the lack of archaelogical evidence and what if the harrapan script once decoded refers to horses???

Anyhow, as i said earlier, please point out the verses which contain these descriptions..

phaedrus

copernicius

and Phaedrus: Thanks for the lengthy replies, but this forum makes it very difficult to develop long, complex arguments that make many different points of varying credibility and relevance. So I would like to appeal to you to try to make your points a little more succinctly

Lengthy and moi? Dont generalise mate and would like you to respond to the points raised instead of yet again talking in general statements. It is you who have to respond to the succinctly points i made (did i? )

Also, I don't really want to get into debates over Hindu scripture or archeology, which I can't claim much expertise in. From the viewpoint of linguistics, though, a fairly strong case can be made for the view that Aryan tribes invaded (or migrated to) Northern India circa 1500 BC.

Uhh, if you dont talk about the hindu scripture how can you talk about linguistics You need to be more succinct mate They migrated is the right word alrite, you can refer to all the latest academic work in the area and they have stopped using the term "invasion"

The linguistic evidence is quite strong, and it contradicts the north India homeland hypothesis. Your only evidence against it is Elst's dabbling critique of a few linguistic sources, which doesn't address the large body of data about Indo-European culture and geographical location

Yet again a generic statement, talk in specifics, otherwise dont make assertive statements.

So I still wait your response to my earlier "small" post in specifics rather than generics.

lpetrich

LP earlier:
Getting back to India, it takes a big stretch of the imagination to connect the later Indian scripts with the Harappan script; almost as big as the stretch necessary to connect Linear B and the Greek alphabet.

Phaedrus:
He he, you just made my case. ...

LP:
That was a joke -- Linear B and the Greek alphabet are separate inventions; as are the Harappan script and later Indian scripts.

LP earlier:
This is all from secondhand descriptions of the contents of the Vedas. However, if you can point me to a good translation somewhere on the Internet, and I mean a translation that:
Uses modern English without trying to imitate King James English
Is reasonably literal, with linguistic ambiguities footnoted
Is not bowdlerized (honest about cow sacrifices and the like)

Phaedrus:
He he again Why should I provide you with a resource for a good translation. ...

LP:
I'm not a lazy bum; I've searched for online translations of the Vedas with NO success. All I've found is various summaries and a few sample hymns, like a hymn that honors fire as a god and Carl Sagan's favorite Veda quote, Rig Veda 10:139, which wonders if the Gods themselves know how the Universe was created.

[various other less-controversial invasions...]

Phaedrus:
Uhh what has this got to do with the kenoyer quote???? If you didn’t notice, he is one of the co-directors of the HARP (Harappa Archaeological Research Project), ie he is one of the main chaps who is doing the digging and he clearly says no invasion.

LP:
I wonder what his criteria are for deciding that an invasion has happened.

However, most other archeologists who have examined this problem have concluded that an invasion has happened.

lpetrich

phaedrus:
Err...the whole point of providing the link was to emphasise the point that linguistic evidence aint enough....read the link pls

LP:
I have. And so what?

Phaedrus:
Sigh..so you understand that linguistic evidence aint enough?

LP:
One has to compare it with archeological evidence, like whether any horse remains have been found. If there are, then the people who had lived there would have had a word for it.

Phaedrus:
So they came down the moutains and learnt how to build the chariots????? You are referring to references in the vedas and pointing out the lack of archaelogical evidence and what if the harrapan script once decoded refers to horses???

LP:
They had already known how to build chariots when they were in the mountains; chariots could be useful in the valleys between mountains, even if not in mountain passes.

Phaedrus:
Anyhow, as i said earlier, please point out the verses which contain these descriptions...

LP:
When you give me a URL for a complete online translation of the Rig Veda (the most useful one I think).

Phaedrus to Copernicus:
Uhh, if you dont talk about the hindu scripture how can you talk about linguistics ...

LP:
Those scriptures are good as examples of the appropriate languages; language structure is a separate concern.