Well that book was only cited twice in the genetic study if I am correct. The first citation was to refer to migration dates, & the other was regarding the caste system. It didn't mention "Nazi" in the title, but its title indicates that it was meant to discuss nationalistic or possibly racist ideas in Europe. Regardless, that book is irrelevant now because the genetic study that cites it only referred to it for information regarding the caste system & migration dates. I thought you referred to that book to make the genetic study sound racist, which it most certainly is not as proven by its content. The study is legitimate, & its results are without a doubt interesting.
Alright, that's my mistake. I was aware that the Swastika was used in European cultures as well. The only reason I associated the Nazi Swastika with Harappa is because of the similarity in their appearance & design, but that Bulgarian Swastika is undoubtedly closer to the Nazi one, especially because of the circle around it. However, it should be noted that the word "swastika" is of Sanskrit in origin, & so is the word "Arya".
Actually, the Indo-Iranians are a branch of Indo-European tribes that spoke Avestan & Sanskrit originally. If you are referring to that genetic study, then any mention of similarity to European DNA is in fact Indo-Iranian DNA because there were no migrations from mainland Europe to the Indus, Afghanistan, or Iran. Yeah, the IVC & Vedic people are not related but they did interact later on. Sanskrit & Harappan languages were different, but Sanskrit borrowed many loanwords from other languages, some of which are lost today. Understanding the Harappan script is a must in my opinion, & it will broaden our understanding of those people greatly.
Let's ignore the Nazis, I honestly have no clue as to how they referred to themselves as Aryans. The ancient Greek & Roman people never called themselves Aryans, in fact it was the Medians that called themselves Aryans with a lot of pride. The Greeks however referred to the Medians as "Medians". Historically, it was only the Indo-Aryans & Indo-Iranians that called themselves "Aryans", the term originally referred to the Indo-Iranian tribes, but later on expanded to include people that followed Aryan culture. You might find this quote below from Darius the Great interesting.
Inscription of Darius the Great at Naqsh-e-Rostam
It's true that the IVC covered pretty much all of Pakistan. However, I still maintain that the Vedic people were different from the Harappans on account of the genetic, historic, cultural, & linguistic evidence we have available. Let's not forget about the evidence provided to us from the Iranian civilizations either. The writers of the Rigveda were Indo-Aryans & they were related to the Indo-Iranian tribes that wrote the Avesta. I would also like to apologize if my post
#153 sounded rude. I was simply trying to explain that the genetic study was a legitimate & neutral source.
I am not sure about the Caspian Sea, but Central Asia is a likely possibility. Hopefully, future research & studies will clarify this issue.
What I meant was, why was the caste system created apart from assigning different groups different jobs?
That's not necessary, I do not require any pictures, neither am I interested in them. Based on what you have stated, the castes in India have probably mixed up, thus their appearance is bound to vary.
When I look at any such study critically, I also look at the non-genetic/non-scientific references which are apparently cited to justify a particular viewpoint which may not justifiable through the scientific data output or may need emphasis in presenting certain conclusions. Such non-genetic/non-scientific references in many cases are required as well, to make sense of the study and unless selected carefully do colour the conclusions that are drawn. To me, the study may have coloured itself towards a particular hue by citing those references and thus inferred inappropriate aspects. And it was not the racist content which was cited but a quoted opinion which was doubtful. At least this is how I function.
Here I would like to quote from a very interesting book written by a Russian, Elena E. Kuz'mina, The Origin of the Indo-Iranians, edited by J. P. Mallory.
Quotes:
A triumph of Russian Indo-Iranian studies was the international symposium of 1977 in Dushanbe on Ethnic problems of the history of Central Asia in the early period. Among its participants were leading linguists, historians and archaeologists: I. Dyakonov, V. Abaev, V. Livshits, I. Steblin-Kamensky, G. Bongard-Levin, B. Litvinsky, E. Grantovsky, I. Aliev, M. Pogrebova, K.
Smirnov, E. Kuzmina, V. Sarianidi, V. Gening, A. Askarov, I. Masimov, the anthropologist V. Alekseev and others. The general thrust of these studies was the localization of the Indo-Iranian homeland in the steppes and their subsequent migration to Central Asia (Asimov 1981: 44-52).
Also in attendance were Indian scholars, S. S. Misra, B. B. Lal, B. K. Thapar, R. C. Gaur, L. Gopal, and A. H. Dani (Pakistan), and European researchers, B. and R. Allchin, R. Ghirshman, K. Jettmar and V. Brentjes. The idea of an Indo-Iranian migration from the north predominated and the Aryans culture after their arrival in India was correlated with the Painted Gray Ware culture. The establishment of this hypothesis for an Indo-Iranian migration was a break-through in Russian science which had for years labored with the concept of autochthonous development. The symposium of 1977 brought euphoria. The Indo-Iranian attribution of the Timber-grave and Andronovo cultures received universal recognition.
However, 1980 saw the beginning of a heated discussion about the new concept formulated already in 1972 by the prominent linguists T. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov (1980; 1984). Assuming connections between the IE languages and those of the Caucasus and ancient Near East, they moved the original homeland to 4th millennium BC Eastern Anatolia, whence the Indo-Aryans (IA) went to Mitanni and India, and the Iranian Scythians, not until in the 8th century BC passed through Central Asia northwards into the steppes following the other Indo-Europeans. This hypothesis was dismissed by Soviet archaeologists. Many Near-Eastern borrowings were called into question by I. Dyakonov (1980).
Proceeding from completely different considerations, C. Renfrew in 1987 localized the Proto-Indo-Europeans in Anatolia, a center of inception of the Neolithic economy from where they passed in the 7th6th millennium BC through the Balkans to settle in Europe bringing along farming and cattlebreeding skills. In doing so, according to his Model A, they immediately went eastwards to India, while according to Model B the original homeland of all the Indo-Iranians was localized in the steppes whence they later moved into Iran and India. C. Renfrews critics pointed out that the distribution of cultural innovations is often conditioned not by migration of a new population but by cultural borrowings.
A. and S. Sherratt (1988) expressed an alternative opinion holding that IE settlement and the Anatolian-Pontic interaction took place not in the 6th millennium BC but only after the secondary products revolution of the 4th millennium BC. In 1990 I. M. Dyakonov (Dyakonov 1990: 53-65) also placed the original homeland of the pre-Proto-Indo-Europeans in the 6th millennium BC in the Near East believing that S. Starostin had established ancient ties with the Caucasian languages and those of the Near East. He assumed a migration of the Proto-Indo-Europeans through the Balkans and Danube and linked it with the distribution of Linearbandkeramik culture. The Indo-Europeans continued to develop in Europe, and as for the Indo-Iranians, I. M. Dyakonov (1995: 123-130) acknowledged them to be the creators of the Andronovo culture linking their migration with the spread of this culture over the south of Central Asia.
In 1989 J. P. Mallory published In Search of Indo-Europeans, in which he most strictly and with much reasoning advocated the concept, expressed as early as the 19th century, of the localization of the IE original homeland in Europe, underlining the role of the Pontic steppes, the place of domestication of the horse.
In 1990 in Delhi, a conference was held at which a group of nationalistically charged intelligentsia declared that the hypothesis of the Aryans migration was created by imperialists, whereas India was the original homeland of the Indo-Aryans and that these were the founders of the high civilization of Harappa. This hypothesis is widely discussed and very popular in todays India.
Continuing further from ^^^^^^
She also highlight some of the important hypotheses:
Hypothesis I: T. Gamkrelidze (1990: 5-14) apparently adheres to his previousstandpoint. But V. V. Ivanov in his report at the presidium of the Academy of Science in Moscow on 11 Sept. 2001 suggested that the Indo-Europeans did not penetrate through the Trans-Caspian deserts, but around the Pontic and he suggested that Marija Gimbutas’s hypotheses were no longer relevant, the range of the early Indo-Europeans being greater than the territory of the Pit-grave culture and that it coincided with the range of the horse in which he includes the Near East. Moreover, he emphasizes the importance of the horse and chariot in Arkaim, but assumes a migration of the founders of this culture from the south, from Mitanni where horse-training was for the first time developed by the Mitanni Aryans (Ivanov 1997: 22, 23).
In his article of 2002 he made the next important step. He speaks of Irano-Finno-Ugrian connections in the names of metals, admits the Yenisean or Tocharian, but predominantly (Indo-Iranian or Eastern Iranian Proto-Scythian attribution of Sintashta, yet he cites very interesting not only Iranian but Indo-Aryan etymologies, e.g., Dary-al, Ur-al, Ar-al.
Hypothesis II: The hypothesis of C. Renfrew (1990; 1999; 2002a, b) has also undergone a transformation. He has accepted some objections of his critics, linked the most ancient events of IE history with the Balkano-Danubian and North-Pontic region, underlined that M. Gimbutas’ hypothesis supported by D. Anthony (1986; 1995) for the role of the warrior-horsemen as the distributors of the IE speech in Europe has been questioned, and he flatly rejects the IE migration suggested by V. V. Ivanov and T. Gamkrelidze from the south-east through the Trans-Caspian deserts. Most importantly, C. Renfrew observed that he “no longer argues the case for hypothesis A” (Renfrew 2002b): “elements of consensus seem to be emerging. There is wide agreement with Kuz’mina’s view (1994) of the significance of Andronovo culture”, which “very probably represents the distribution of Indo-Iranian speech in the early second millennium BC” (2002: fig. 5). This marked the crossing of the second or Ural fault line (Mallory 1998b: 188) “and the steppes zone became a bridge across the Eurasian continent” (2002: 15). But further C. Renfrew emphasized that in the way of the final solution to the Indo-Iranian problem was “the third of Mallory’s ‘fault lines’, the Central Asian line”, as long as “archaeologically there is all too little trace of the ‘coming’ of the Indo-Iranians to the Iranian Plateau and to India” (Renfrew 2002: 15, 16).
Hypothesis III: J. P. Mallory (1996; 1997; 1998a, b; 2001; 2002; Mallory and Mair 2000), in a range of works focusing on the origin of the IE peoples, paid much attention to the Indo-Iranian ethnogenesis. He looked into the general theoretic problems and methods and from this standpoint gave a critical analysis of the proposed models. He underlined that the previously suggested dates of the break-up of the IE community were groundless since the terms related to the wheeled transport and the horse were common Indo-European (Mallory 1996: 8-11), but noticed at the same time that “the specific model proposed by Marija Gimbutas could also stand some readjustment” (Mallory 2002: 3, fig. 7).
While Summarizing she says, it should be noted that in spite of the serious disagreement, the Andronovan hypothesis gains an increasingly wide acceptance. However, not only its opponents, but also its adherents stress the “absence of distinct traces of the Andronovans’ migration outside the boundaries of Bactria and Margiana” and regard it as “a kind of movement very unlikely to have had artifactual correlates” (Burney 1999: 8), since the pastoralists from the north brought the Indo-Aryan language but not the pots. What are then the perspectives of Vedic archaeology?
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She mentions Vedic Archeology. Lets see what is Vedic Archeology.
In his book Traditional India, O. L. Chavarria-Aguilar writes of Indians: "A more unhistorical people would be difficult to find." Vedic civilization believed in recording the eternal and infinite. The ephemeral details of daily life (so much the concern of contemporary people) need not be recorded, since they had so little bearing on the larger, more significant goals of human life. Leisure time was to be used for self-realization, cultural pursuits, and worship of God–not rehashing current events or the past. Therefore, practically no histories, according to the Western concept of history, exist today about ancient India, because none were written.
@ p(-)0ENiX, You said I did not quote references – so I quoted a few.
