copernicus

Hinduwoman, that is a very long, rambling post with lots in it to digest. I can't begin to address all of it. However, thank you for your links to the Rig Vedic literature. I must say that I don't know a lot about Hinduism, but I think that this thread has only been interested in it insofar as it bears on the question of Aryan invasions/migrations.

Bear in mind, also, that the Paropola's theory of two waves of Indo-Europeans in no way invalidates the AIT/AMT. It just makes it a little more complex, and it throws into question claims that the Hindu literature was about an invasion of Harappa realms. That does not mean that Indo-Europeans (Dasas or others) never invaded Harappan realms. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that the Harappans were likely not Indo-Europeans. I think that Parpola's theory is far from accepted at this point, so it is premature to claim that it shows anything at all.

It sounds to me as if you oppose the caste system, but have some complex issues about it. As an outsider, I would equate the caste system with racism, but I am not going to claim that it is equivalent to western-style racism in all its aspects. Clearly, the caste system is many centuries old, and it has become deeply ingrained in Hindu culture. Western racism is more recent in origin. The basic argument from a western perspective is that all humans deserve equal status, no matter what their status of birth or gender or religion. The caste system very clearly violates this principle. Those who justified racism in America used to justify color apartheid with the slogan "Separate but equal". Of course, the "separate" was meant to sustain "unequal" status. It was a very cynical slogan. I think that Mahatma Gandhi understood that, having been a victim of apartheid in South Africa. It is no accident that Martin Luther King's anti-racist movement in America was very strongly influenced by Gandhi's egalitarian philosophy.

HindooHeathen

Copernicus,
In my next post I shall give a complete reply to many of the questions that have been raised here regarding AIT. But just one thing , Asko Porpola is not the ultimate authority. Actually the whole scenario of non-Vedic Harappa and its subjugation by Vedic "Aryans" and the recording of the same in the Vedas, is highly questioned if not outright rejected.
Coming to caste, as a person married outside my own caste and religion, I can say that caste is dying its natural death. Today interestingly Hinduthva (crudely call it Hindu nationalism or Hindu polity), is the only ideology that needs the elimination of caste. Veer Savarkar the person who coined the term Hinduthva conducted many inter-caste marriages and constructed temples with Dalits (the so-called "untouchables")as priests. Further south you have the greatest social reformers like Bharathi, Sri Naryan Guru ec. who fought and won rights for the oppressed. Unfortunately Christian missionaries have been trying to fish in the muddled water of Hindu samaj(society). For example in a book titled "Church and the Dravidian movement" released as late as 1950 the ArchBishop of Madurai (a sout Indian town) -RC Church has said in a preface " Dravidian race theory is a time bomb placed by the church to destroy Hinduism".
Even today church is in the forefront to discuss caste conflicts of India at the Durban conference equating it with racism. Throughout history Hindu reformers have successfully fought against all sorts of inequalities. We surely can solve our problems in India ourselves with no help from Church and its racist interpretations of our society and our history!

lpetrich

HindooHeathen:
In my next post I shall give a complete reply to many of the questions that have been raised here regarding AIT.

LP:
I'm all eyes. Let's see how that posting handles such questions as where all the Harappan horses are.

HindooHeathen:
But just one thing , Asko Porpola is not the ultimate authority.

LP:
And neither are the anti-AIT guys.

And I suggest that you study AP's work more closely before not dismissing it -- he proposes that there had been some important survivals of pre-Aryan culture, and he uses those survivals to help decipher the Harappan script. It is clear that AP does not support the straw theory of an Aryan invasion as the source of *all* India's Hindu culture.

HindooHeathen:
Actually the whole scenario of non-Vedic Harappa and its subjugation by Vedic "Aryans" and the recording of the same in the Vedas, is highly questioned if not outright rejected.

LP:
Perhaps with an explanation of why horse remains only start appearing late in Harappan history, and why there is no convincing depiction of a horse in Harappan artwork. Horses are abundantly mentioned in the Vedas (thanx, Hinduwoman) as desirable possessions, so if the Vedas describe the Harappans, then where are the Harappan horses???

HindooHeathen:
Coming to caste, as a person married outside my own caste and religion, I can say that caste is dying its natural death. Today interestingly Hinduthva (crudely call it Hindu nationalism or Hindu polity), is the only ideology that needs the elimination of caste.

LP:
I disagree that that's necessarily the case, though it is not surprising that a strong Hindu nationalist might want to move away from caste -- it gets in the way of being united against enemies such as Muslims and Christians.

HindooHeathen:
Even today church is in the forefront to discuss caste conflicts of India at the Durban conference equating it with racism. ...

LP:
They may see it as an opportunity to get lower-caste converts, of saying "see how bad it is under Hinduism? If you believe in Jesus Christ, you won't be on the low end of society's totem pole."

And I wonder if something similar ("If you believe in Mohammed, you won't be on the low end of society's totem pole.") had helped spread Islam some centuries earlier.

copernicus

Thanks for the comments, HH. I think that I have pointed out more than once that Parpola's new theory should not be taken as proof of anything. Why am I being cautioned not to take him as "the ultimate authority" now? I have a completely open mind on whether the Vedic Aryans had any contact at all with Harappans. As for whether or not Indo-European tribes invaded and subjugated native non-Indo-European tribes in north India, it seems rather likely to me that the "migration" was other than peaceful. In the absence of strong evidence one way or the other, there is very little for us to argue over. However, there is little doubt that Indo-Europeans, most certainly including the Vedic Aryans, originally came from outside of India.

I have just read the threads on Hinduthva and the caste system. I found them very interesting, and I think that subsequent discussions on the caste subject ought to be in one of those threads or a new one. We should try to confine this thread to just the question of Aryan invasion/migration theory. I do find it interesting that you and others seem to resist the idea that the caste system be considered "racist". I wouldn't mind pursuing that in another thread, but please bear in mind that many of your references to Indian personalities, culture and history will be obscure to me. So the discussion will have to be kept at a somewhat higher level than it was in the very interesting Hinduthva thread.

phaedrus

copernicius

You have even quoted my comments to this effect. I believe that the "migration" probably did involve fighting, but I have never made any serious effort to support that claim, and you know it

Umm thanks for the clarification and wonder why we were arguing for so long then?

Having failed to make your case in favor of an Indian homeland for Proto-Indo-European, you fall back on the straw man argument over whether the migration was violent or peaceful, something for which there is no solid evidence one way or the other

When did i even try to make a case for an Indian homeland? I just provided a link to an article when the thread started moving towards linguistic evidence.

This is where this whole thing about homeland started. Does my original reference to this particular article in any way suggest that i was making a case for an "indian homeland"?? Observe the word "crutch".

And there is no solid evidence for anything, only theories based on the current corpus of evidence be it archealogical or linguistic or genetic..


All of my posts are still there for anyone to read. Unfortunately for your case, so are yours, eh "mate"?

Zigjackly and since i had a very good sleep, i'm in the mood to spend some time pasting something

phaedrus

LP

Sorry for not responding earlier. I think you have responded to this particular post of mine, i was referring to the following post of mine which was in response to an earlier post of yours....

[ August 05, 2001: Message edited by: phaedrus ]

hinduwoman

You are right. I will move this caste topic into another thread.

HindooHeathen

Copernicus:

"I don't recall Elst citing Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's
hypothesis,which is yet another view of the PIE
homeland. Unfortunately for Elst, it doesn't support
his own speculations."

But Elst does mention Gamkrelidze and Ivanov. See his
article titled "The official pro-invasionist argument at last
A review of the Aryan invasion arguments in
J. Bronkhorst and M.M. Deshpande: Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia"

LP:
"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."

Harappan seals are no zoological catalogue of aniamals. However
enough of horse remains have been excavated in Calibangan(2250 BCE)

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:

LP, at times you astonish me. One of the important AIT argument is that
cow worship is "Aryan". But then how come the Pasupathi seal is central
figure in non-Aryan Harappa which in turn has connections to the cow
revernce? The usual AIT scenario combines sereo typed images of North India
as cow-belt with nomadic Aryan settlement in North India with the
importance of cows in nomadic societies. If so, one wonders why the so-called
Indo-European cultures of Central Asia/Europe did not develop either
cow-reverence or any religious cow depictions in their art.
Also cow worship is more strong in the south India with even
special days of reverence for cattle in the lunar months. So the so-called
"fixation with cows" is not restricted to North India (where Aryans are
supposed to have occupied). Hence again the idea of cow-revernce of nomadic
life collapses. Or shall we say Aryans borrowed cow worship from
Dravidians. After all today's AIT scholars even suggest that Aryans
borrowed fire worship, Indra- the supposed destroyer of Harappa etc.
from Harappan Dravidans! Further Bull is a strong
image of Indra associated with Soma. All these "strongly Aryan concepts" very central to Rig Vedic rituals.
In fact it is these kinds of ritual imagery (rather than the poetic horse
imagery - Aswamedha sacrifice as mentioned by you,is a very later day,
specifically during epic ages, development-) you expect to find in the
material culture. And predicatbly they appear very frequently in Harappan
seals.

Another important aspect of AIT is that the Rig Veda talks of mostly rural life
while Harappan is an urban civilization. But RV rituals often are urban in
nature requiring bricks. The common Vedic word for man 'Purusa'means urban dweller. It is nothing but circular argument that makes RV rural. There are abundant mentions of cities in vedas.There are also many mentions of Aryan enemies in RV.


A very small note here. "...The bronze parts of the chariot and the bronze tools, with which chariots were fashioned from mountain hardwoods, furnish words that embrace the smelting of metals. Petroglyphs, symbols marked on stone, found in the area from the Transcaucasus to upper Mesopotamia between the lakes Van and Urmia are the earliest pictures of horse-drawn chariots." These are words from
The Scientific American article on 'the Early History of Indo-European Languages'
by Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov (Scientific American, March 1990, P.110) The petroglyph that accompanies this statement as far as I can see shows no horse drawn anything, the least one with martial connotations. Compared I find Dr.N.S. Rajaram's Harappan horse seal far more convincing.

Also as far as the horse evidence (which is a negative evidence) of non-Indic Vedic origin, Dr.N.S.Rajaram makes this very interesting observation "...Actually, the Harappans not only knew the horse, the whole issue is irrelevant. To prove their point, scholars who insist on the non-Indian origin of the Vedas must produce positive evidence: they must show that the horse described in the Rigveda was brought from Central Asia. But this is contradicted by the Rigveda itself. In verse I.162.18, the Rigveda describes the horse as having 34 ribs, while the Central Asian horse has 18 pairs (36) of ribs. We find a similar description in the Yajurveda also. This means that the horse described in the Vedas is the native Indian breed and not the Central Asian. The 34-ribbed horse has been known in India going back tens of thousands of years. This makes the whole argument based on ‘No horse at Harappa’ not only false, but also irrelevant."

Given the rock paintings dated prior to the time of the supposed Aryan Invasion, depicting horses, and given the
above Indic horse descriptions one finds in the Vedic hymns, AIT proponents often ignore any evidence to the contrary. Or they make their theory flexible. For example, the first AIT proponents (even archeologists like Wheeler) accused Indra the Aryan invader and destroyer of Dravidian forts at Harappa. Now Asko Porpola makes Indra Dravidian with increasing deciphering of Vedic imagery in Harappan seals.

The construction of an "Aryan" invasion from Vedic lore is empirically wrong and motivated. The main motivation here being evangelism and rationalization of colonialism (which often go hand in hand).


[ August 07, 2001: Message edited by: HindooHeathen ]

[ August 08, 2001: Message edited by: HindooHeathen ]

lpetrich

phaedrus:
Dude dont you get it, the way you explained why the greeks re-acquired writing is an indication that such explanation would be possible for Sanskrit and Indus script.

LP:
That is certainly correct; writing was re-acquired in India, as it had been in Greece, and the Aryan invaders had had no writing. I think that you might want to try to understand this argument that the ancestral Indo-European speakers had not had writing:

* Words for writing are separate coinages that do not correspond with each other (English write, Latin scrib-, Greek graph-, Russian pis-), and words for writing are sometimes borrowed; for example, the German word for writing, schreib-, is rather transparently borrowed from the Latin word.

* Most writing of Indo-European languages was introduced from outside. The main exceptions are ogham (Irish) and runic (Germanic), but these are almost certainly stimulus-diffusion inventions (inventions inspired by awareness that something is possible).

* There is nothing that looks like writing in Kurgan remains, though some Kurgan artwork has survived.

phaedrus:
Well then all you can do is keep quoting secondary sources. ...

LP:
Because primary sources are sometimes hard to find; I wish to thank hinduwoman for being so helpful here.

phaedrus:
As Colin Renfrew very rightly pointed out, linguistic evidence in isolation doesnt do anyone any good.

LP:
So what?

phaedrus:
People could have seen the horse in other lands and could have had words for it ...

LP:
Which means that having a word is not enough, I will concede. But the Vedas do not describe the horse as some exotic beast of some distant land; the Vedas describe horses as widely-used in the society that their creators had lived in.

phaedrus:
Can you substantiate them knowing how to build chariots while they were in the mountains??

LP:
One can use chariots in valleys in mountainous areas.

lpetrich

LP:
"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:
Harappan seals are no zoological catalogue of aniamals. However
enough of horse remains have been excavated in Calibangan(2250 BCE)

LP:
What's "enough"? And even if those seals are not zoological catalogs, then why do they show bulls and antelopes and rhinos and elephants and tigers and crocodiles and monkeys but not horses? Surely, some Harappan might have decided to put a horse in his/her personal ID stamp if horses had been as widely-present as the Vedas indicate.

Furthermore, horse remains are rare if not absent from Harappan sites, contrary to what the Vedas indicate about horse abundance.

HH:
LP, at times you astonish me. One of the important AIT argument is that
cow worship is "Aryan". ...

LP:
Whose argument is that? I've never seen that. It's reverence for HORSES that is "Aryan" -- and that is shared by other early Indo-European speakers.

HH:
Also as far as the horse evidence (which is a negative evidence) of non-Indic Vedic origin, Dr.N.S.Rajaram makes this very interesting observation "...Actually, the Harappans not only knew the horse, the whole issue is irrelevant. To prove their point, scholars who insist on the non-Indian origin of the Vedas must produce positive evidence: they must show that the horse described in the Rigveda was brought from Central Asia. But this is contradicted by the Rigveda itself. In verse I.162.18, the Rigveda describes the horse as having 34 ribs, while the Central Asian horse has 18 pairs (36) of ribs. We find a similar description in the Yajurveda also. This means that the horse described in the Vedas is the native Indian breed and not the Central Asian. The 34-ribbed horse has been known in India going back tens of thousands of years. This makes the whole argument based on ‘No horse at Harappa’ not only false, but also irrelevant."

LP:
34 instead of 36 ribs is an interesting curiosity; but some present-day horses have similar variations in bone numbers; for example, Arabian horses, URL http://www.arabianhorseamerica.com/owner/type.html
have 23 instead of the usual 24 trunk vertebrae.
Which means that 34 instead of the usual 36 ribs may have been a similar sort of variation that started off in some already-domestic population.
Horses are also know to have variations in the number of tail vertebrae (usual number: 18).

Alternatively, there might be some difference in convention in counting very short ribs, with our anatomists counting them and the Vedas' authors not counting them.
I think that this rib question might possibly be settled by counting the ribs in complete horse skeletons, such as skeletons of present-day horses.

In my web search, I found that only anti-AIT sites know about 34-rib horses; I found nothing on them elsewhere, including in sites that mention variations in the number of vertebrae.

HH:
Now Asko Porpola makes Indra Dravidian with increasing deciphering of Vedic imagery in Harappan seals.

LP:
I don't see how he makes Indra Dravidian; he's claiming that some rites associated with Indra were also practiced by Harappans. He also claims that the Vedas are post-Harappan.

HH:
The construction of an "Aryan" invasion from Vedic lore is empirically wrong and motivated. The main motivation here being evangelism and rationalization of colonialism (which often go hand in hand).

LP:
They are out to get me, right?