phaedrus

copernicus

this whole issue seems to have been made up out of whole cloth by Hindu nationalists who perceive some kind of disrespect for their national heritage. You have presented no evidence whatever that there is any kind of general conspiracy among western scholars to impose the AIT

Umm and you have presented evidence for your first statement??. And when did i use the word "western" while talking about scholars?

. To the best of my knowledge, central or eastern Europe is still the favorite. I would also say that nobody is seriously looking at northern India anymore, and Elst's rather light survey of the literature does little to shake the foundations of modern research. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's work is a bit ground-shaking.

Thanks for the clarification and still await your rebuttal of elst's article in detail rather than generic statements Give me specifics.

I also find the genetic articles cited here interesting, although I don't really know enough about that field to evaluate them intelligently.

Read my post which outlines few questions about the type of sample chosen for the study while it could have been much more representative of the peninsula.

It seems very plausible to me that the color-caste system in India could have arisen via the invasion scenario. While there are exceptions, the upper castes do appear to be lighter skinned in general. Does anyone deny this? How do those who oppose the AIT explain the origins of the caste system? I can understand why they might be really upset at the DNA study, which seems to support the AIT.

Plausible, likely and such words dont constitute a theory that has been proven "incontrovertibly". So rest easy mate. For both AIT/OIT there is no archaeological/palaeontological evidence and there is only linguistic evidence, so would rather wait for more conclusive evidence before passing judgment. Here I would like to draw attention to the consistency of the so-called linguistic theories and the different interpretations by different philologists. Are all of them similar? Take a look at the interview given by Colin Renfrew who is know to challenge the assumption of IE linguists and the importance of archealogical evidence in his book "Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins"
The Three Dimensions of Human History

And wonder why they talk about AMT now-a-days rather than AIT??

And btw what happened to
???????

[ July 31, 2001: Message edited by: phaedrus ]

phaedrus

Excerpt of one of the international scholars at the harrapan.com site

Emphasis added

DMB

I am neither a geneticist nor a linguist, so I don’t attempt to write authoritatively on this subject, but merely to draw attention to certain ideas of others. I have an interesting recent book by Cavlli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples and Languages, who is a distinguished geneticist with a considerable knowledge of linguistic theories. The book looks at populations and languages world-wide, and is therefore not focused on India or any other particular region. I give a few quotations:

He goes on to explain why there is a similarity between biological and linguistic evolution

He gives the example of the 9th century AD conquest of Hungary by the Magyars, which has resulted in a Uralic language being spoken in the middle of an Indo-European area by people who now have only about 10 % of their genes attributable to the Uralic conquerers.

Referring to a technique called principal component (PC) analysis, he says:

For the origins and diffusion of the Indo-European languages, he suggests a synthesis of the theories of Renfrew and Gimbutas, giving a first spread from Turkey 9500 to 10000 years ago, with a later , major diffusion from the Kurgan steppe north of the Black Sea. He thinks there is some genetic evidence for this pattern.

The reasons behind some of his statements would no doubt be found in some of the works he refers to and in any case, there is a limit to how much can be posted here.

lpetrich

First, a summary of what CR's hypothesis is and what the mainstream view is of the ancestral IE speakers' homeland.

CR pictures the ancestral IE speakers as having lived in western Turkey about 10,000 years, where they were among the first to grow wheat and similar crops. With farming, they spread westward from there to the rest of Europe, reaching southeastern Europe in about 6000 BCE or so, and other parts a few millennia later.

However, the mainstream view is the Kurgan hypothesis, named after the burial mounds (the main evidence) of some cultures that were first found just north of the Black Sea in about 4000 BCE, and which spread out from there in later millennia; they are continuous with the historically-recorded Scythians and Sarmatians of that area 2000 years ago.

However, IMO, his arguments are full of holes. He seems to show only a poor comprehension of linguistic arguments, and his hypothesis has some serious misfits with the Indo-European reconstructed vocabulary. Here are some items that the ancestral Indo-European speakers had been familiar with:

Horse: *ek'wos
Foal [baby horse]: *polos
Wheel: *kwekwlos

And many historically-recorded early spekers of IE languages had attached high importance to the horse, including that beast in some of their favorite religious rituals.

However, horses are not native to many of the places that IE speakers were first found in; they were imports from elsewhere. And they first show up in such places a few millennia later than CR's hypothesis requires. Their appearance time fits the Kurgan hypothesis much better; in fact, the first evidence of a domesticated horse, the 4000-BCE Dereivka stallion, is found in the Kurgan homeland.

Likewise, wheeled vehicles are much more recent than CR's hypothesis would require them to be; they start appearing in the archeological record at about 3500 BCE or thereabouts in Kurgan areas.

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

lpetrich

Which is very different from the view that the AIT theory is strongly falsified by the Harappan inscriptions.

And all three scholars agree that the absence of Harappan horses is strong support for the AIT. However, Parpola points out that some of Hinduism can very likely be traced back to the Harappans and earlier, a circumstance that ought to be some consolation for Hindu nationalists.

phaedrus

lpetrich

It's what language that that writing was written in that counts. If northern India had been the IE homeland, then the Harappan writing would have been of some early Sanskrit-like dialect. But it has yet to be convincingly deciphered, and an early Dravidian dialect is at least as plausible. Also, the Vedas were originally not written down, but memorized by professional chanters, who transmitted them for some centuries after their composition. So why wasn't Harappan writing used to write the Vedas? Why did India have to re-acquire writing?

It is a well known fact there is an archaeological gap in the indus civilization, where it is strange to find no leftovers of writing from the centuries between the abandonment of the Harappan cities and the Maurya empire, more than a thousand years during which numerous important works in Sanskrit and Prakrit. Maybe we will find some clues once there are future finds for the transformation of the indus script. As you yourself pointed out, the vedas were verbally transmitted. Though an interesting point, could be easely speculated to say that "a new form of writing" was being developed while the compositions were being orally transmitted.

(Please refer to the Bactria Margiana Archeological Complex i mentioned above, if i remember well it refers to a form of writing existing outside the peninsula during the same time period)

The Vedas feature some things that are rare or absent from Harappan sites, such as horses and iron weapons; and they describe a society of small villages, again unlike the Harappans and their cities. So the Vedas must be post-Harappan, which yields an upper limit of their age of about 3500 years.

Could you give me the verses which are supposed to describe these things you mention..

I will leave you with a quote by by archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer of Wisconsin University....

phaedrus

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

phaedrus

I can use the same old cliche used by both sides of this particular debate worldover, lack of evidence does not constitute "proof". Let them decode the harrapan inscriptions, maybe we will get something out of it. And who the fuck is bothered about Hindu nationalists, they are not interested in unbiased search for truth.

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

[ July 31, 2001: Message edited by: phaedrus ]

HindooHeathen

Let me first thank DMB for providing me the 'New Scientist' data. In fact those results have been out in India and quite some discussions have taken place around. It is a very controversial study and I shall give the reasons why we are skeptical about it in the later part of the post.
But before that let me take the AIT position and put it clearly:
"As for Indus Valley civilization, it may well have been an Indo-European-speaking culture. We just don't know. Moreover, there is no linguistic basis for proving that Indo-Europeans invaded or migrated peacefully (although I somehow doubt the latter, given those times of inter-tribal warfare). We only know that Sanskrit is more closely related to Latin and Greek than to any Dravidian language. And we have the Hindu literature, which seems to describe wars between Aryans and non-Aryans. And we have DMB's evidence of genetic diversity. Also, the Hindu pantheon bears some striking relationships to the Indo-European pantheon (cf. Agni and Vulcan, Cupid and Kama--both with bow and arrows). One of the major differences is that the Hindu religion seems to blend in animism, supposedly from the religion of a conquered people." [From the post of Copernicus]
Animism from the natives? Really?
Fire worship is Vedic; Indra is identified with Bull in Vedas; River worship is in Vedas; Kama is a very later Puranic entity. Trees are considered sacred in Vedas.
Please note that AIT opponents do not argue a case for racial purity [whatsoever that may mean]of Indians. It may be that in ancient India many populations moved in and out. Any linguist worth his/her salt knows that Tamil is the oldest of the living so-called Dravidan languages 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). 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, it was done with motives non-academic. Interestingly three subsequent studies of Vedic literature from three Indian scholars of even different backgrounds, Dr. Ambedkar [Dalit leader, historian and the maker of Indian constitution], Vivekananda [a monist philosopher and monk], Sri Aurobindo [Indian nationalist and a scholar of languages (Sanskrit, Latin , French and Tamil)], have yielded a completely different result. They all have concluded that there is no evidence to suggest that Aryans and Dasyus are two different races or cultural groups.
It is precisely this interpretation of Vedas, which we oppose as going against empirical evidence. And it is for this interpretation of Vedas which was done with motives non-academic Indians have opposed tooth and nail not the idea that Indian population shows genetic and even cultural diversity. It is this interpretation, which has been part of Evangelical methodology.
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. Also the term Varna is often translated by Western scholars of the Colonial era as race. But the Medieval AmaraKosa a definitive Sanskrit lexicon has many terms for race but Varna is not one among them.

RV (Verse III,34,9) explicitly states that Indra the thunder-bolt yielder gave the arya-varna after killing Dasyus, horses, sun and cows. The release of sun as the result of conflicts clearly show the non-racial aspect as well as a poetic-semi-mythical rendering of a natural phenomenon. Sayana the early Sanskrit interpreter has translated the color Krishna as a color of drak cloud. But with Max muller school it suddenly becomes the color of dark skin! Further Rig Veda calls Indra an outcaste! If varna refers to skin colour then Veda should have a lot of verses against the dark skin. In a few places where skin colours are mentioned Dark skin colors are highly venerated and even the hymn composers are identified with dark skin colours. For example, RV X,31,11 is composed by Kanva who is dark in colour. Then Krshna Angirasa who composed RV VIII, X is said to be born of dark coal. In RV II,3,9 a hymn is invoked to have children of brownish complexion. Further the RV verse VI,22,10 states "Oh Indra you make dasa calamities arya and destroy the humans" In all these, if Indra is made to represent natural phenomenon then the whole body makes sense while a racial interpretation falls flat with inconsistencies unable to make sense of most of the verses. In fact that explains why most Vedic scholars of Max Mullerian interpretation of Vedas suffer frustration as many hymns refuse to yield any "sense" (as per the racial interpretation).

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".

Hans Henrich Hock (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) has this to say in a very illuminating and thoroughly researched paper titled "Through A Glass Darkly: Modern Colonialist Attitudes Vs. Textual And General Prehistoric Evidence On "Race" And "Caste" In Vedic Indo-Aryan Society"

"It is the purpose of this paper to question the "orthodox" position (or positions) just outlined, in terms both of a reexamination of textual evidence and linguistic evidence and of a reconsideration of the basic assumptions made about the arya/dasa contact specifically and the nature of such contacts in prehistoric contexts in general....
As I show in Hock 1996, the textual evidence for interpreting words meaning 'dark, black' and 'light, white' as referring to skin color is quite uncertain. At least equally possible is an "ideological" interpretation of the terms somewhat along the lines of the black hats of the 'good guys' and the white hats of the 'bad guys' in Western movies. In fact, such an interpretation provides a plausible explana tion of why a word originally meaning 'light' came to designate the world, loka, if we assume that it first meant the 'light world' of the aryas. Moreover, there is good reason for believing that such notions as "race", defined in terms of skin color, are an invention of (early) modern European colonialism and imperialism (see e.g. Appiah 1987) and thus are inappropriate for the prehistoric arya/dasa contact....What appears to be specifically Indian is the explicit consolidation of these two out-groups into the fourth, shudra, caste but it is not at all clear that this consolidation must be attributed to a special relationship between aryas and dasa, different from the relationship between, say, early Iranian "in-group" and "out-group" strata."

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? 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 For a horse cave painting see http://travel.indiamart.com/indian-cities/bhimbetka/
For its age see http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/rockpain/betaka.htm

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. In fact despite the Western fixation with identifying the north as cow-belt, it is in the South India cows are more honoured and cattle is considered more important and as a measure of wealth. For example the Tamil word for wealth is "maadu". Also it is the word for cattle (specifically cow and bull). The most ancient Tamil-specific God is Murugan who is identified with Sun in ancient literature. Primacy of sun has always been found in Vedic lore. There is nothing to suggest that culturally the people of the south are different from North Indians.

Even many scholars like Iravatham Mahadevan (who supports the Dravidian origin of IV culture) interpret many IV seals of Unicorn Bull seals as 'Indra with Soma'. see: http://www.harappa.com/seal/seal2.html
Further many seals suggest a society with clearly specific labor groups like a priest class and warrior class. So even if the so-called IE people migrated into India it is highly unlikely they brought the caste system. Most probably they got assimilated into Indian culture like the later day Huns who became sanskritised into Kushans and became part of social fabric.

As far as astrnomical evidence I have mentioned before, I am searching for a specific papers of the proceddings of a Banglore astronomical society in my archives. And I shall give the correct data soon. However I can give you what exactly is contained in it. 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.

Now let me come to the genetic research and explain why the research findings are questioable. I thank Ms. Supriya Bezbaruah and Mr.Samrat Choudhury of "India Today" (for their article in IT dated July 30,2001) for the criticism below:
Eminent social anthropologist Dr.V.N.Srivastava points out that there is no specific Aryan race, and the Cambridge university archeologist Dilip Chakravarthi points out that the study makes use of geographic terms such as Asian or European and racial terms such as Caucasoid in an interchangeable way. A sample of 36 Brahmins in a population of one billion Indians is not exactly a complete study of population. A 1960 study of four Brahmin sub-castes with four peasent sub-caste with a larger nbumber of population showed that variations within Brahmin sub-castes were higher than variations between Brahmins and peasent castes. (Karve and Malhotra,1960). Some of the samples the aforesaid study took for some caste groups were even less than 10. And all samples are limited to a very small geographical area. SriVastava points out that the results can be different if the sample size has been larger. After all caste itself is elastic points out B.N.Chattopadhyaya of ancient history at JNU, Delhi. He cites the example of the Boya tribe in AP. They became Kshatiyas and a group in them became Brahmins too. Dr.S.P.Gupte of Archaeological society of India further points out that the study cannot specify the period as to when the genetic make up of Indian population changed. And So with clear absence of any archeological data to suggest migrant/invasion intrusion into the Indus/saravathy river civilization, the study proves almost nothing.

Given the cautious notes that accompanied previous such studies and even the negative conclusion with regard to the AIT (as in the case of "Human evolution: the southern route to Asia." by Disotell TR) the language of the "New Scientist" is singularly unfortunate and not befitting its academic standards. It betrays, I regret to say, a tabloid sensation-seeking tendency, at the cost of making racial interpretation over a nation's social make-up.

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."

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. The historical implication of this linguistic relationship is that the Vedic civilization of India was brought there by migrants from the northwest who possessed the horse and war chariot, and practiced a religion centering on fire sacrifices. The culture and language of these Aryan newcomers eventually came to be widespread in India, among local populations whose original practices were different, and whose languages were largely unrelated to Sanskrit." How dare those lowly Indians question the "pinnacle of European intellectual achievement"? Hurray for Michael Witzel for inventing (yes that should be the word) a hoax in his work (never mind that the horse seal mentioned is in no way central to Rajaram's argument and that it appears more as a mention than an argument.Never mind that Michael Witzel himself had to retract his translation of the only Vedic verse he paraded as a conclusive evidence for an Aryan migration after that "amateur" Elst pointed out the mis-translation, Never mind the fact that horse remains have actually been excavated, pre-historic cave drawings of horses found throughout India, still here is an Indian (who does not have any culture of his own) refuting the "the European study of Sanskrit" which should be superior to any other study of Sanskrit! No wonder Internationally acclaimed historian Jim Shaffer calls these AIT/ART as being marked by "European ethno-centrism". The article further continues to quote two very scholarly persons who have attempted Dravidian based deciphering of IV seals. Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan. Predictably they disagree with Dr. Rajaram. But then in Harappa.com the same Mahadevan makes IV seal decipherment with Vedic imagery (for example the seal Unihorn with a cult object like entity as Indra and Soma. See : http://www.harappa.com/seal/12.html) He even makes a claim that Indra is essentially a Dravidian God whom Aryans borrowed! Here is another typically Aryan Invasion Theory scenario the article makes : "Vedic civilization of India was brought there by migrants from the northwest who possessed the horse and war chariot, and practiced a religion centering on fire sacrifices.". Interestingly, Dr. B. B. Lal, President, World Archaeological Congress Former Director General Archaeological Survey of India, makes the following observation "Early Indus settlement at the site. This is perhaps the earliest archaeologically recorded earthquake. Kalibangan has also thrown up evidence of a new kind of ritual associated with a cult of 'fire alters'." ("India Adds New Dimensions to the Indus Civilization ",1996).For a complete refutal of the so-called hoax and for the presence of horse in the IV please see: http://sarasvati.simplenet.com/horse1.htm http://sarasvati.simplenet.com/horse3.htm


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.

Further Indian origin of Vedic civilization as per the posts made here are not held by any serious scholars it seems. Is that so?
" ...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. The cultural and political conditions of Europe's nineteenth and twentieth centuries were strong influences in sustaining this interpretation. It is possible now to discern cultural continuities linking specific social entities in South Asia into one cultural tradition. This is not to propose social isolation nor deny outside influence. Outside influences did affect South Asian cultural development in later historic periods, but an identifiable cultural tradition has continued, an Indo-Gangetic Tradition linking diverse social entities which span a time period from the development of food production in the seventh millennium BC to the present."
(Shaffer and Lichtenstein 1999:255-56)

"...The South Asian archaeological record reviewed here does not support ... any version of the migration/invasion hypothesis. Rather, the physical distribution of sites and artifacts, stratigraphic data, radiometric dates, and geological data can account form the Vedic oral population movement....[These theories] are significantly diminished by European ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism, and antisemitism. Surely, as South Asian studies the twenty-first century, it is time to describe emerging data objectively rather than perpetuate interpretations without regard to the data archaeologists have worked so hard to reveal."
(Shaffer, Jim and Lichtenstein, Diane. "Migration, philology and South Asian Archaeology.'' In Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and Ideology, edited by J. Bronkhorst and M. Deshpande, CSSAS, Univ of Michigan, 1999.)

[ August 01, 2001: Message edited by: HindooHeathen ]

lpetrich

phaedrus:
It is a well known fact there is an archaeological gap in the indus civilization, where it is strange to find no leftovers of writing from the centuries between the abandonment of the Harappan cities and the Maurya empire, more than a thousand years during which numerous important works in Sanskrit and Prakrit. Maybe we will find some clues once there are future finds for the transformation of the indus script. As you yourself pointed out, the vedas were verbally transmitted. Though an interesting point, could be easely speculated to say that "a new form of writing" was being developed while the compositions were being orally transmitted. ...

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. The Minoans had their own writing system, Linear A, which was used to write a language that is still unknown; the most confident hypothesis about that language is that it had not been Greek. Nearly all of the surviving examples of this writing are bookkeeping records and dedications on religious objects.

But we know that Greek-speakers had taken over because they borrowed that writing system and turned it into Linear B, which was used to write an early dialect of Greek. However, the only surviving examples of this writing are bookkeeping records (unlike Linear A, no dedications!), and those only in the Mycenaean and Late Minoan III palaces. When those palaces were destroyed in about 1200 BCE, writing disappeared, and the only mention of writing for the next few centuries was in the Iliad, where a messenger delivers a tablet with "magic signs" which is interpreted to mean that its receiver should be killed.

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

phaedrus:
Could you give me the verses which are supposed to describe these things you mention..

LP:
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:
I will leave you with a quote by by archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer of Wisconsin University....
[on how he sees no evidence of an Aryan invasion...]

LP:
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.