It is a myth because Indians love to portray themselves as the invaders to north, east and west. Indians believde India is the cradle of Homo Sapien's evolution and human's earliest civilization. Other than an Indian Eve (Hawa), who else can be the mankind's 1st mother?
Aryans vs Dravidians?
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It is a myth because Indians love to portray themselves as the invaders to north, east and west. Indians believde India is the cradle of Homo Sapien's evolution and human's earliest civilization. Other than an Indian Eve (Hawa), who else can be the mankind's 1st mother?
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We dont believe in Adam/Eve bull$hit...
Also, scientifically, the first humans spread from Africa, in Kenya. But India was one of the major places where civilization started, since in the ice age most of europe and central asia was frozen.
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These are some documents & excellent researches that I want to share concerning the Indo-Iranian languages & people.
The earliest accounts of the Tarim Basin depict a society whose linguistic and ethnic diversity rivals the type of complexity one might otherwise encounter in a modern transportation hub. The desert sands that did so much to preserve the mummies, their clothes, and other grave goods also preserved an enormous collection of documents, written on stone, wood, leather, oremploying that great Chinese inventionpaper. A German expedition to the Tarim Basin in the early 20th century returned with texts in 17 different languages. We can get some appreciation of the linguistic complexity if we put ourselves in the place of a traveling merchant working the Silk Road in the 8th century CE. A typical trader from the West may have spoken Sogdian at home. He may have visited Buddhist monasteries where the liturgical language would have been Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, but the day-to-day language was Tocharian. If his travels took him south to Khotan, he would have to deal in Khotanese Saka. Here, if he had been captured by a raider from the south, he would have had to talk his way out of this encounter in Tibetan or hoped for rescue from an army that spoke Chinese. He could even have bumped into a Jewish sheep merchant who spoke Modern Persian. And if he knew which way the wind was blowing, he would have his sons investing their time in learning Uyghur, the language of a major Turkish tribe who would descend on the Tarim Basin in the 9th century to form its next major ethno-linguistic group.
Iranians
From a linguistic point of view, we need to explain how languages from two major Indo-European language groups managed to spread into the Tarim Basin, and evaluate as far as possible whether they were the languages spoken by those Bronze Age individuals whose remains were mummified. Purely from a geographical perspective, neither language is likely to have entered the Tarim Basin from either the east (where we find Chinese) or the south (Tibetan), thus limiting their approach to either the mountains to the west or the steppes to the north. We also know that the Saka were known to the ancient Greeks as Scythians, and were clearly a people of the northern steppes, famous as horse-riding nomads who periodically challenged the civilizations to their south. They are attested in historical and archaeological sources from about the 8th century BCE, and are identified with ancient regional cultures such as the Tagar of the Minusinsk Basin (8th to 1st century BCE), located to the north of the Tarim, or cemeteries to its west such as Shambabay/Xiangbaobao on the Chinese side of the Pamirs.
The tall hats of the female mummies from Subeshi might also pass for a Saka trait, and so identification of some of the mummies with the Saka or Iranian speakers in the northeast Tarim is a serious possibility. But here we are dealing with people and languages which, if our archaeological identifications can be trusted, date only to the last half of the 1st millennium BCE. Can we determine an earlier date for Iranian speakers in the Tarim? The Bronze Age antecedent to the Iron Age Scythians/Saka is the Andronovo cultural complex, a series of related cultures that spanned the area between the Urals and the Yenisei from ca. 2000900 BCE. Its linguistic identification is somewhere within the general Indo-Iranian branch of languages and, at least within the steppeland regions, it is presumably Iranian before the 1st millennium BCE. The Andronovo cultural complex provides a broad umbrella of cultural traits which importantly include the use of tin bronze, an extensive series of characteristic metal implements and ornaments, the use of chariots, and distinctive horse-gear. Economically, the culture was versatile: in some regions, it was clearly semi-nomadic, while in others, it adopted irrigation agriculture.
Its presence is attested in the Jungghar/Zhungeer Basin at cemeteries at Sazicun and Adunqiaolu, where the ceramics are clearly related to the Andronovo complex. People associated with this cultural complex may have lived in the Tarim Basin, although the evidence is strongly circumstantial. We do not have clear examples of Andronovo settlements marked by its distinctive ceramic styles. While some of its burials share what may be generic elements with those found in the Tarimuse of timber chambers or stone ciststhe Andronovo type of east Kazakhstan, the Fedorovo culture, practiced cremation as well as inhumation. In short, direct evidence for Andronovo sites is so far absent from the Tarim Basin. It must be noted that Andronovo metalwork has been recovered from a number of sites, e.g. Xintala, Qizilchoqa, and Yanbulaq as well as the Agarshin hoard from Toquztar. In addition, the initial appearance of horses and wheeled vehicles in the Tarim, and the introduction of the chariot to China, are all attributed to Andronovo contacts. This evidence dates from ca. 1300 BCE onwards and advances considerably the potential presence of Iranian speakers in the Tarim, although it does not provide us with the settlements and burials that might better constitute a smoking gun.
Tocharians
The one language group that is most clearly anchored in the Tarim, Tocharian, lacks any obvious external source. So the line of reasoning that might link linguistic evidence with the archaeological record becomes even more dubious. To render matters even more difficult, Iranian speakers from the Andronovo culture of the Iron Age could enter the Tarim Basin from both the north and the west, so this would seem, at first, to remove any potential homeland for the Tocharians since they should not have come from precisely where we derive another language group. There are two ways out of this problem. The first involves suggesting a long and untraceable trek across the Eurasian steppe to the Tarim Basin. As the Andronovo culture is sister to the Timber-grave culture of the European steppe also seen as the antecedent to Iranian speakersthis trek would have to start somewhere to the west of the Dnieper and would rival prehistoric journeys such as the migration of southern Athabascans from Canada to the American Southwest. Such an extraordinary historical event is rarely the type of solution that is likely to satisfy either archaeologists or linguists.The alternative approach is to select a staging area much closer to the Tarim Basin that predates any of the proposed Iranian-associated migrations. One culture that might fit the bill is the Afanasievo culture of the Altai and Minusinsk regions. This was an Early Bronze Age culture which may have appeared before 3000 BCE (the start date is a serious problem) and continued to ca. 2500 BCE.
The Afanasievo is known from settlements that practiced both cereal agriculture and the raising of domestic livestock; however, most evidence of this culture comes from about 50 cemeteries. The Afanasievo burials are in pits, either single or collective, surrounded by stone enclosures, both rectangular and circular. Grave goods include ceramics that are generally decorated over much of their body; shapes are large pointed base vessels and small footed vessels that have been interpreted as censers for burning either an aromatic or hallucinogenic substance. The Afanasievo culture is linguistically attractive because its own antecedents appear to lie in the European steppe, the same region that provides the point of departure for the Indo-Iranian expansion some thousand years later. This provides a convenient explanation for why the Tocharian languages are ultimately related to Indo-Iranian as members of the Indo-European language family, but also as to why they are very different, in that they separated from the rest of the Indo-Europeans at an early date. Admittedly, this still requires an enormous trek from the Volga-Ural region east to the Yenisei with very little evidence of intermediate stop-overs other than an Afanasievo cemetery near Karaganda.
The growth of farming economy in Europe became more active with the split of the proto-language and the dispersal of the Indo-Europeans. The astonishing scope and speed of that process were afforded by the use of the domesticated horse and wheeled vehicles. The Indo-Europeans did not have to be pioneers in this field, but they were probably skillful in spreading other peoples innovations. Recent work on the Botai culture of North Kazakhstan makes it possible to suppose a contribution of the Proto-Yeniseian people to the development of horse domestication. For approximately fifteen hundred years serious preparatory work on horse domestication and the use of wheeled vehicles had been going on in different parts of Eurasia.
Then, almost suddenly, the results are witnessed. On the border of the 3rd and 2nd mil. BC both of these important innovations appear together, usually in a context implying the presence of Indo-Europeans: traces of Near East-type chariots and the ritual use of the horse are clear in (probably Ancient Iranian) Margiana (Gonur), we see chariots on the Anatolian type of seals in Kanish; Hurrian sculptures and other symbols of horse abound in Urke as if foretelling the future Mespotamian-Aryan and Hurrian excellent training of horses in Mitanni (as later in Urartu). One of the first examples of the sacrificial horses used together with chariots in an archaic ritual was found in Sintashta; the following studies of the cities of the Transuralian Sintashta-Arkaim area made it clear that some Indo-European (and maybe Iranian as well) elements were at least partly present there. The movement of Indo-Europeans to the north of the Caspian Sea in the northeast direction documented in the Sintashta-Arkaim complex led them much farther to the Altai-Sayany area where recent genetic investigations found traces of a Caucasoid element.
Another Indo-European group moving in a parallel eastward direction using the South Silk Road caused the presence of a similar anthropological group among the population of Central Asia. It may be supposed that the Caucasoid anthropological type of the Iranian and/or Tocharian population of Eastern Turkestan, attested in the mummies recently found there as well as in the contemporary images of the native people, should be considered as the result of these migrations from the West to the East. The problem whether the boats played a role comparable to that of chariots at the time of early migrations is still to be decided by maritime archaeology. It seems that before the efficient use of chariots and horses, long-term mass movements were hardly possible. The first changes in the geographical position of separate dialects, e.g. when the Anatolians separated the Greeks from the rest of the East Indo-European group (that included the Armenians and Indo-Iranians), were caused by rather small-scale migrations close to the original homeland in the Near East.
Indo-Aryan Expansion South
The Andronovo (2000900 BC) were Indo-European speaking agro-pastoralists of the eastern steppes, who with the acquisition of the chariot expanded both east and south. In these wanderings, their language became sufficiently differentiated to form the Aryan branch of the Indo-European linguistic phylum. Their southern migrations toward India, following different routes, extended over a thousand years or more. Moving south from the Tobol-Ishim steppe, their first encounter with settled irrigation agriculturalists in Margiana was hostile. But subsequently across Margiana and Bactria there appears to have been social interaction between the two groups. At different oasis sites, evidence of hallucinogenic beverages, fire cults, and mortuary practices closely matched rituals known to characterize later Swat cultures of Pakistan and those of Vedic India. Over the centuries, repeated migrations of these Indo-Aryan speaking peoples traveling south toward India was evidenced in the archaeological record by chiefly tombs with models of battle chariots, flourishing metallurgy, and proliferation of weapons. At Pirak on the Kachi plain, terracotta figurines of mounted horsemen c. 1700 BC are indicative of regular travel on horseback. The Early Iron Age was signalled by the appearance of Yaz I culture (15001000 BC), as the smelting of iron daggers and arrowheads spread from the steppes across the Iranian plateau through Baluchistan to India. Along the Ganges, iron axes were used to clear vegetation and iron ploughs to till soil, earlier impervious to copper and bronze tools. And in the Deccan (800 BC), megalithic stone circles with burials have been found surrounding a central mound.
In these graves lay sacrificed horses elaborately fitted with iron bits, copper ornaments and trappings, closely paralleling ancient funerary practices of the faraway steppes. Thus in the course of a thousand years, southward migrations of Indo-Aryan charioteers significantly impacted southern Asia. While the horse and chariot wrought military and political upheaval, efficient stockbreeding and the introduction of iron strengthened the economies of these lands. But changes were not only political and economic in nature. The invaders also brought with them from the steppes their religion, in which the horse and war chariot featured dramatically in the cosmic symbolism of myth and ritual. From the Rgveda, the ten sacred books of Sanskrit hymns, we learn that the horse-chariot was believed to control the sun. Martial symbol of world rule, the horse was carrier of the gods, the white horse drawing the chariot as the primeval force that moves as fast as light. Because of its antiquity, the Rgveda allows us to trace correspondences with mythical traditions of other Indo-European cultures migrating out of the steppesinto Anatolia, as we have seen, and west into Europe. The oldest of gods, Sanskrit Dyaus-pitr (Sky Father), appears in the early verses and has cognates in Greek Zeus-pater, Latin Ju-piter, and Germanic Tyr. Similarly, the adventures of the Vedic Asvin twins have western parallels in Greek Castor and Polydeuces, Roman Castor and Pollux, and Saxon Hengist and Horsa.
Iranians, Cavalry, and Achaemenids
During the first millennium BC, other Aryan speakers of the Srubnaya culture, a western counterpart of Andronovo, migrated south from the steppes along the shores of the Caspian toward Iran. Later in the millennium, these Iranian speakers would invade the Middle East. In the seventh century BC, Cimmerian cavalry attacked Urartu in Anatolia, then Assyria and Phrygia, while Scythian horsemen undertook devastating raids into Mesopotamia and Syria. Other Iranians, the Medes, had bred the famous Nisaean cavalry mount, the finest horse of antiquity. In 612 BC Medean cavalries sacked Assur and Nineveh. The Achaemenid Cyrus II later would storm Sardis; his cavalry dominating the battlefield. As successful in the east as in the west, Cyrus also consolidated Medean territories as far away as remote Gandhara.
THE HOMELAND OF THE EARLY ARYAN SPEAKERS - IN THE LIGHT OF LOANWORDS IN PROTO-FINNO-UGRIAN - ARCHAEOLOGICAL COUNTERPARTS OF THE COMMUNITIES - SPEAKING PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN AND PROTO-ARYAN
The vocabulary associated with wheeled vehicles that can be reconstructed for the Indo-European protolanguage dates the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European c 3500 BC: before this there were no wheeled vehicles anywhere. (Anthony 1995) This date and distribution of the earliest vehicle finds in turn give a good starting point for locating the archaeological culture where Proto-Indo-European was spoken. It should be a culture connected through a chain of genealogically related cultures with the often widely dispersed areas where the various branches of Indo-European were first attested. This and various other criteria have suggested the Srednij Stog culture (c 4500-3350 BC) of Ukraine as the most likely candidate. (Mallory 1989)
Important indications for the location of Proto-Indo-European and of Proto-Aryan (and its successors) are the numerous loanwords borrowed from these languages into Proto-Uralic or Proto-Finno-Ugrian (here taken as synonyms). In all likelihood, Proto-Finno-Ugrian was spoken in the successive Lyalovo (c 5000-3650 BC) and Volosovo (c 3650-1900 BC) cultures, which had their centre on the upper Volga. The Lyalovo culture (characterized by Pitted Ware) expanded around 3900 BC to Karelia, Finland and the Baltic (the ceramic developed into Combed Ware in these regions); in the southwest, on the upper Don, the Lyalovo culture was in contact with the Srednij Stog culture. Around 2300 BC, the southern part of the Volosovo culture was intruded by the Abashevo culture (c 2800-1900 BC), which was descended from the Srednij Stog culture via the intervening Pit Grave culture (c 3500-2800 BC). As a result of this development, several Proto-Finno-Ugrian speaking communities seem to have had a ProtoAryan speaking elite minority, whose later absorption into the majority left Aryan loanwords in early Finno-Ugrian. (Carpelan and Parpola 2001)
In the southern Urals, the Abashevo culture gave rise to the Sintashta-Arkaim culture (c 2200-1800 BC), the graves of which contain the earliest known horse-drawn chariots (c 2000 BC) The Sintashta-Arkaim culture in turn is the source of the Andronovo cultural complex, which spread widely in southern Siberia and Central Asia between 1800 and 1300 BC. (Epimachov and Korjakova 2004)
THE SOUTHWARD MIGRATION OF ARYAN SPEAKERS
AND THE BACTRIA-MARGIANA ARCHAEOLOGICAL COMPLEX
The homeland of the Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages thus was in the steppes of South Russia and northern Central Asia. Yet, as their latter name indicates, they have long been spoken predominantly in India and in Iran (India and Iran denoting here South Asia and Greater Iran in the sense of the Achaemenid Empire). This implies a southward movement from northern Central Asia through southern Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan) approximately in the course of the second millennium BCE. During this time, southern Central Asia was in the control of the agriculturally based Bactria and Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) (c 2500-1300 BC). The archaeological record shows that between 1800 and 1300 BC, the Andronovo tribes have been coming to southern Central Asia in increasing numbers, until eventually almost every BMAC settlement was surrounded by their campsites (cf. Gubaev et al 1998; Cattani 2004 [2005]; Hiebert 2001; 2002; Hiebert & Moore 2004 [2005]; Francfort 2005: 295-304).
Undoubtedly the BMAC originally was non-Indo-European in its language, as it owed its birth to forces coming from earlier cultures of southern Turkmenistan, Elam, Iran and Baluchistan (Francfort 2005: 258-261). But it seems that during the second millennium BC, the BMAC was linguistically Aryanized, because the Andronovo culture did spread from the north to the region of the BMAC, but not further to India and Iran and thus did not transport the IndoIranian languages there, while on the other hand the BMAC did spread both to Iran and South Asia. Also, an aristocratic grave that recently came to light at Zardcha Khalifa in Tajikistan has shown that the elite of the BMAC had adopted the horse-drawn chariot from the Sintashta-Arkaim culture (Bobomulloev 1997). The Vikings sailing from Scandinavia to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea through the rivers of Ukraine and Russia took over the rule in the local communities speaking Old Russian. In the Hurrian-speaking kingdom of Mitanni, the Proto-Indo-Aryan speaking rulers adopted in its entirety the local culture where they had seized the power, including the religion, the Hurrian language and the use of the cuneiform script. In these two parallels, the incoming minority language was eventually absorbed, but in the case of the BMAC, the number of Aryan speakers was replenished by successive waves of immigrants from the north.
THE GANDHÂRA GRAVE CULTURE, ITS BMAC BACKGROUND, AND THE HORSE
Situated in and around the Swât Valley in northern Pakistan, on the route that leads from Afghanistan to South Asia, the Gandhâra Grave culture (c 1600-600 BC) occupies a strategic location at one of the principal entrances from Central Asia. This entrance was undoubtedly used by the Rigvedic Aryans, as the Kabul River, the Swât River and other waterways of this region are mentioned in the Rigveda. The horse and the horse-drawn chariot occupy a position of central importance in the culture of the Rigveda. It is therefore very significant that the Gandhâra Grave culture has produced the earliest known evidence of the domesticated horse from this part of South Asia. (Around the same time, the domesticated horse appears at Pirak near the Bolan Pass that connects the highlands of Baluchistan with the plains of the southern Indus Valley.)
The Gandhâra Grave culture first appears during the late part of the Ghâlegay IV Period, between c 1600 and 1400 BC. At this phase it is represented by the black-grey, burnished ware widespread hroughout all the occupation phases of all the valleys settlements excavated so far, which is comparable to the BMAC ceramics at Dashly, Shah Tepe, Tepe Hissar and Tureng Tepe (Stacul 1987: 121f.). The hypothesis that its presence in the Swât Valley results from immigrations from the west is supported by the evidence of the only known late Ghâlegay IV Period graveyard at Kherai in Indus Kohistan. Here the burial customs are very similar to those typical of the BMAC in southern Bactria, with inhumed bodies placed on their sides with the knees drawn up in a hocker position. (Stacul 1987: 64-65, 71-73, 122) Besides the greyburnished ware, the late Ghâlegay IV Period had black-on-red painted pottery related to the Cemetery H culture of the Punjab plains. The horse is depicted on several shards of this kind of ceramics at Bir-kot-ghwandai in Swât. (Stacul 1987: 123) Late Ghâlegay IV Period levels of this same settlement have produced bones of the domestic horse and donkey. (Stacul 1987: 123)
The BMAC parallels cited from northern Iran are dated to c 1800-1600 BC. This Gorgan Grey Ware is considered to be the source of the intrusive Early West Iranian Grey Ware that suddenly appears in great quantities all along the Elburz mountains, in Azerbaijan and around Lake Urmia c 1500 BC. The latter ceramic has plausibly been linked with the arrival of the Proto-Indo-Aryan speakers at the Mitanni kingdom in Syria (Young 1985; Parpola 2002a: 78). The presence of the post-Harappan Cemetery-H type ceramics in Swat on the other hand suggests that the carriers of the Gandhâra Grave culture at the Ghâlegay IV Period had close relationship with the Punjab plains and that part of them probably infiltrated to that region. The Cemetery H culture (c 1700-1300 BC) had introduced cremation as a new mode of disposal of the dead, contrasting with the Harappan practice of inhumation burial.
4.2. The phonological and morphological similarity of loanwords in Proto-Indo-Iranian and in Sanskrit has important consequences. First of all, it indicates that, to put it carefully, a substratum of Indo-Iranian and a substratum of Indo-Aryan represent the same language, or, at any rate, two dialects of the same language. In order to account for this fact, we are bound to assume that the language of the original population of the towns of Central Asia, where Indo-Iranians must have arrived in the second millennium BCE, on the one hand, and the language spoken in Punjab, the homeland of the Indo-Aryans, on the other, were intimately related. At the present stage, it is useless to speculate about the possible identity of these languages, but this does not affect the argument.
Another consequence is that the Indo-Iranians must still have formed a kind of unity during their stay in Central Asia, albeit perhaps dialectally diversified. Judging by the later spread of the Indo-Aryans to the south-west in the case of the Mitanni kingdom and to the south-east during their move to Punjab , they were situated to the south of the Iranians, forming the vanguard, so to peak, of the Indo-Iranian movement. Accordingly, the Indo-Aryans were presumably the first who came in contact with foreign tribes and sometimes passed on loanwords to the Iranians. In this way, we may account for the difference between Skt. sikat- and Iranian *sikat- `sand, gravel' or Skt. sc- and Iranian *s- `needle', which cannot reflect a single proto-form. At the stage when words with Skt. s- arrived at the Iranian territory, PIIr. *s had already become Iranian *h, and PIIr. *c had turned into PIr. *s, so that these words entered Iranian with PIr. *s-. This direction of borrowing (rather than from Iranian to Sanskrit, as is usually assumed) also explains the irregular correspondences within Iranian. For instance, the word for `sand, gravel' has no less than four different formations in Iranian, viz. *sik- (OPik-, Bel. six, Pashto əga), *sikaia- (Median Sikayauvati- `made of gravel', the name of a fortress, Munji səgya, Ik. seɣio, sigioh), *sikat- (Pahlavi sygd = sikat, Sogd. ykth, Khot. siyat
, *sikit- (Kurdish sigit `earth', Oss. sygyt/sigit `id.', etc.; the word for needle has two forms, viz. *sk- (LAv. sk-) and *sauania- (MiP sozan, Khot. saujsan~a-, Oss. sʒn/soʒn, etc.) (Abaev 1958-95 III: 164-165, 187-188).
5.2. Starting with the assumption that loanwords reflect changes in environment and way of life, we get the following picture about the new country of the Indo-Iranians. The landscape must have been quite similar to that of their original homeland, as there are no new terms for plants or landscape. The new animals like camel, donkey, and tortoise show that the new land was situated more to the south. There was irrigation (canals and dug wells) and elaborate architecture (permanent houses with walls of brick and gravel). Agriculture still did not play an important role in the life of Indo-Iranians: presumably, they did not change their life-style and only used the products (`bread'!) of the farmers, hardly tilling the land themselves. The paucity of terms for military technology (only *gad- f. `club') can be seen as an indication of Aryan military supremacy.
It seems further obvious to me that the Soma cult was borrowed by the Indo-Iranians. This picture, which is drawn on exclusively linguistic arguments, is a strong confirmation of the traditional theory that the Indo-Iranians come from the north. Most probably, the Indo-Iranians moved from the Eurasian steppes in the third millennium BCE (Pit-Grave culture, 3500-2500 BCE) in eastern direction, first to the region of the lower Volga (Potapovo, etc., 2500-1900 BCE) and then to Central Asia (Andronovo culture, from 2200 BCE onwards).
As we have seen above, there are reasons to believe that the Indo-Aryans formed the vanguard of the Indo-Iranian movement and were the first to come into contact with the original inhabitants of the Central Asian towns. Then, presumably under pressure of the Iranians, who were pushing from behind, the Indo-Aryans moved further to the south-east and south-west, whereas the Iranians remained in Central Asia and later spread over the Iranian plateau. The urban civilization of Central Asia has enriched the Indo-Iranian lexicon with building and irrigation terminology, with terms for clothing and hair-do, and for some artifacts. It is tempting to suggest that the word *gad- `club, mace' refers to the characteristic mace-heads of stone and bronze abundantly found in the towns of the so-called Bactria-Margian Archaeological Complex. Also *uc- `axe, pointed knife' may be identified with shaft-hole axes and axe-adzes of this culture.
6. Finally, I would like to shortly discuss the implications for the contacts between Indo-Iranian and Uralian speakers, which is the actual theme of this conference. As is well known, Uralic has heavily borrowed from Indo-Iranian, but I agree with those scholars who believe that many of the apparent early borrowings rather reflect an etymological relationship between Uralic and Indo-European, and I doubt that there are Proto-Uralic borrowings from Indo-European. At any rate, borrowings from Indo-Iranian start with the Finno-Ugrian period. It is remarkable that the oldest layer of borrowings often concerns words which are only attested in Sanskrit and not in Iranian (e.g. FU *ora- `awl' : Skt. r- `awl'; FV *resm `rope' : Skt. rasmi- m. `rein', rasmanm. `id.'; FV *onke `hook' : Skt. anka- `hook'; FP *antз `young grass' : Skt. andhas- `grass', etc.). This fact can be explained by the vanguard position of the Indo-Aryans, who were the first to come into contact with the Uralic population on their move to the east. The Iranians, who came slightly later, lived in the neighboorhood of the Uralians for a very long time and continuously contributed to the enrichment of the Uralian vocabulary.
Another problem is how to account for Indo-Iranian isolates which have been borrowed into Uralic. It is hard to believe that the new vocabulary, which was acquired by the Indo-Iranians in Central Asia, could reach the Uralians in time, so that we only have two options: either the Indo-Iranian isolates are of Indo-European origin, or the Uralians borrowed these words from an Iranian source at a later stage. To the first group may belong PIIr. *racm- `rope, rein' : FV *resm `rope' (the -m- is only attested in Sanskrit); PIIr. *mak- `fly, bee' : FU *meke `bee' (the fact that the word can be reconstructed for FU precludes a late date for borrowing); PIIr. *sur- `alcohol' : PP *sur `beer' (the PP word cannot be a late borrowing from Iranian because of its *s-) and PIIr. *dasiu- `foreigner' : Vog. tas `stranger' (the Uralic word cannot be due to late borrowing from Iranian because of the preserved *s-). On the other hand, I assume that FV *orase `(castrated) boar' was borrowed from Iranian (PIIr. *uarjha- `wild boar' can hardly be an IE word). The same probably holds for FP *suka `chaff, awn' because this form is only found in Iranian (LAv. sk- `needle') and further for PP vork `kidney' (PIIr. *urtka-), FP/FV *saka `goat' (PIIr. *scga-/scaga-), PP *nan `bread' (PIIr. *nagna-), PP *majk / majg `stake' (PIIr. *maikha-).
I also suggest referring to the 3 sources below. I did not have time to go through all of them, & some of the earlier sources I have mentioned on this post were read by me some time back.
The point is that I may have forgotten to include some necessary details because I do not remember all of the information contained in these documents.
Most of these sources aren't that old & are in fact fairly recent. That is important due to the constantly evolving & rapid flow of knowledge when it comes to research.
Ancient Indo-Europeans (Part 1)
Ancient Indo-Europeans (Part 2)
The Nasatyas, the Chariot and ProtoAryan Religion
Unfortunately, the first 2 sources (Ancient Indo-Europeans Part 1 & 2) might not be a 100% complete. Those are the only copies that I found.
I advise people to read about the Kurgan hypothesis & the Paelolithic Continuity theory. I have explained them earlier in previous posts. The point that needs to be repeated is that all members of the Indo-European family were not present in the Proto-Indo-European homeland because many of those groups had settled & resided in Europe since Paleolithic times. There were some migrations from Europe towards the Proto-Indo-European homeland that had branched out & vice versa. What that means is that Proto-Indo-European speakers migrated from Europe towards the East, & some members of that group as in the case of Croations migrated back. The others such as the Indo-Iranians & Scythians continued migrating towards the East. All Indo-European people are essentially related, the difference is the period of settlement & migration.
As far as languages are concerned, Uralic speakers & Indo-Iranian speakers were in constant contact with each other. As they migrated, the Indo-Aryans were the first to come across new regions, thus they transferred the words towards Indo-Iranians due to their ethnic ties with them. The Indo-Iranians who were still following the Indo-Aryans passed on those words to Uralic speakers. The point to note is that the migrations didn't occur in a day, but instead took a considerable amount of time. Some words of Indo-European origins in Uralic languages may also have been provided by the Scythians. That is the explanation provided by some of the sources above.
This along with the countless authentic researches that I have mentioned previously point towards one conclusion & that is the migration of Indo-Iranians of course. Recent archaeological, linguistic, genetic, & historical sources confirm this. It has already been mentioned previously in my previous post that languages & cultures did not travel in ancient times without the flow of people. After establishing themselves on the north western regions of the Sub-Continent, the cultural dominance of the Indo-Aryans further expanded their languages & there were obviously some albeit fewer migrations towards the east of the Sub-Continent as well.
I shall respond to some other posts where I was mentioned or quoted later when I get the time.
The earliest accounts of the Tarim Basin depict a society whose linguistic and ethnic diversity rivals the type of complexity one might otherwise encounter in a modern transportation hub. The desert sands that did so much to preserve the mummies, their clothes, and other grave goods also preserved an enormous collection of documents, written on stone, wood, leather, oremploying that great Chinese inventionpaper. A German expedition to the Tarim Basin in the early 20th century returned with texts in 17 different languages. We can get some appreciation of the linguistic complexity if we put ourselves in the place of a traveling merchant working the Silk Road in the 8th century CE. A typical trader from the West may have spoken Sogdian at home. He may have visited Buddhist monasteries where the liturgical language would have been Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, but the day-to-day language was Tocharian. If his travels took him south to Khotan, he would have to deal in Khotanese Saka. Here, if he had been captured by a raider from the south, he would have had to talk his way out of this encounter in Tibetan or hoped for rescue from an army that spoke Chinese. He could even have bumped into a Jewish sheep merchant who spoke Modern Persian. And if he knew which way the wind was blowing, he would have his sons investing their time in learning Uyghur, the language of a major Turkish tribe who would descend on the Tarim Basin in the 9th century to form its next major ethno-linguistic group.
*****
Iranians
From a linguistic point of view, we need to explain how languages from two major Indo-European language groups managed to spread into the Tarim Basin, and evaluate as far as possible whether they were the languages spoken by those Bronze Age individuals whose remains were mummified. Purely from a geographical perspective, neither language is likely to have entered the Tarim Basin from either the east (where we find Chinese) or the south (Tibetan), thus limiting their approach to either the mountains to the west or the steppes to the north. We also know that the Saka were known to the ancient Greeks as Scythians, and were clearly a people of the northern steppes, famous as horse-riding nomads who periodically challenged the civilizations to their south. They are attested in historical and archaeological sources from about the 8th century BCE, and are identified with ancient regional cultures such as the Tagar of the Minusinsk Basin (8th to 1st century BCE), located to the north of the Tarim, or cemeteries to its west such as Shambabay/Xiangbaobao on the Chinese side of the Pamirs.
*****
The tall hats of the female mummies from Subeshi might also pass for a Saka trait, and so identification of some of the mummies with the Saka or Iranian speakers in the northeast Tarim is a serious possibility. But here we are dealing with people and languages which, if our archaeological identifications can be trusted, date only to the last half of the 1st millennium BCE. Can we determine an earlier date for Iranian speakers in the Tarim? The Bronze Age antecedent to the Iron Age Scythians/Saka is the Andronovo cultural complex, a series of related cultures that spanned the area between the Urals and the Yenisei from ca. 2000900 BCE. Its linguistic identification is somewhere within the general Indo-Iranian branch of languages and, at least within the steppeland regions, it is presumably Iranian before the 1st millennium BCE. The Andronovo cultural complex provides a broad umbrella of cultural traits which importantly include the use of tin bronze, an extensive series of characteristic metal implements and ornaments, the use of chariots, and distinctive horse-gear. Economically, the culture was versatile: in some regions, it was clearly semi-nomadic, while in others, it adopted irrigation agriculture.
Its presence is attested in the Jungghar/Zhungeer Basin at cemeteries at Sazicun and Adunqiaolu, where the ceramics are clearly related to the Andronovo complex. People associated with this cultural complex may have lived in the Tarim Basin, although the evidence is strongly circumstantial. We do not have clear examples of Andronovo settlements marked by its distinctive ceramic styles. While some of its burials share what may be generic elements with those found in the Tarimuse of timber chambers or stone ciststhe Andronovo type of east Kazakhstan, the Fedorovo culture, practiced cremation as well as inhumation. In short, direct evidence for Andronovo sites is so far absent from the Tarim Basin. It must be noted that Andronovo metalwork has been recovered from a number of sites, e.g. Xintala, Qizilchoqa, and Yanbulaq as well as the Agarshin hoard from Toquztar. In addition, the initial appearance of horses and wheeled vehicles in the Tarim, and the introduction of the chariot to China, are all attributed to Andronovo contacts. This evidence dates from ca. 1300 BCE onwards and advances considerably the potential presence of Iranian speakers in the Tarim, although it does not provide us with the settlements and burials that might better constitute a smoking gun.
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Tocharians
The one language group that is most clearly anchored in the Tarim, Tocharian, lacks any obvious external source. So the line of reasoning that might link linguistic evidence with the archaeological record becomes even more dubious. To render matters even more difficult, Iranian speakers from the Andronovo culture of the Iron Age could enter the Tarim Basin from both the north and the west, so this would seem, at first, to remove any potential homeland for the Tocharians since they should not have come from precisely where we derive another language group. There are two ways out of this problem. The first involves suggesting a long and untraceable trek across the Eurasian steppe to the Tarim Basin. As the Andronovo culture is sister to the Timber-grave culture of the European steppe also seen as the antecedent to Iranian speakersthis trek would have to start somewhere to the west of the Dnieper and would rival prehistoric journeys such as the migration of southern Athabascans from Canada to the American Southwest. Such an extraordinary historical event is rarely the type of solution that is likely to satisfy either archaeologists or linguists.The alternative approach is to select a staging area much closer to the Tarim Basin that predates any of the proposed Iranian-associated migrations. One culture that might fit the bill is the Afanasievo culture of the Altai and Minusinsk regions. This was an Early Bronze Age culture which may have appeared before 3000 BCE (the start date is a serious problem) and continued to ca. 2500 BCE.
The Afanasievo is known from settlements that practiced both cereal agriculture and the raising of domestic livestock; however, most evidence of this culture comes from about 50 cemeteries. The Afanasievo burials are in pits, either single or collective, surrounded by stone enclosures, both rectangular and circular. Grave goods include ceramics that are generally decorated over much of their body; shapes are large pointed base vessels and small footed vessels that have been interpreted as censers for burning either an aromatic or hallucinogenic substance. The Afanasievo culture is linguistically attractive because its own antecedents appear to lie in the European steppe, the same region that provides the point of departure for the Indo-Iranian expansion some thousand years later. This provides a convenient explanation for why the Tocharian languages are ultimately related to Indo-Iranian as members of the Indo-European language family, but also as to why they are very different, in that they separated from the rest of the Indo-Europeans at an early date. Admittedly, this still requires an enormous trek from the Volga-Ural region east to the Yenisei with very little evidence of intermediate stop-overs other than an Afanasievo cemetery near Karaganda.
The growth of farming economy in Europe became more active with the split of the proto-language and the dispersal of the Indo-Europeans. The astonishing scope and speed of that process were afforded by the use of the domesticated horse and wheeled vehicles. The Indo-Europeans did not have to be pioneers in this field, but they were probably skillful in spreading other peoples innovations. Recent work on the Botai culture of North Kazakhstan makes it possible to suppose a contribution of the Proto-Yeniseian people to the development of horse domestication. For approximately fifteen hundred years serious preparatory work on horse domestication and the use of wheeled vehicles had been going on in different parts of Eurasia.
Then, almost suddenly, the results are witnessed. On the border of the 3rd and 2nd mil. BC both of these important innovations appear together, usually in a context implying the presence of Indo-Europeans: traces of Near East-type chariots and the ritual use of the horse are clear in (probably Ancient Iranian) Margiana (Gonur), we see chariots on the Anatolian type of seals in Kanish; Hurrian sculptures and other symbols of horse abound in Urke as if foretelling the future Mespotamian-Aryan and Hurrian excellent training of horses in Mitanni (as later in Urartu). One of the first examples of the sacrificial horses used together with chariots in an archaic ritual was found in Sintashta; the following studies of the cities of the Transuralian Sintashta-Arkaim area made it clear that some Indo-European (and maybe Iranian as well) elements were at least partly present there. The movement of Indo-Europeans to the north of the Caspian Sea in the northeast direction documented in the Sintashta-Arkaim complex led them much farther to the Altai-Sayany area where recent genetic investigations found traces of a Caucasoid element.
Another Indo-European group moving in a parallel eastward direction using the South Silk Road caused the presence of a similar anthropological group among the population of Central Asia. It may be supposed that the Caucasoid anthropological type of the Iranian and/or Tocharian population of Eastern Turkestan, attested in the mummies recently found there as well as in the contemporary images of the native people, should be considered as the result of these migrations from the West to the East. The problem whether the boats played a role comparable to that of chariots at the time of early migrations is still to be decided by maritime archaeology. It seems that before the efficient use of chariots and horses, long-term mass movements were hardly possible. The first changes in the geographical position of separate dialects, e.g. when the Anatolians separated the Greeks from the rest of the East Indo-European group (that included the Armenians and Indo-Iranians), were caused by rather small-scale migrations close to the original homeland in the Near East.
Indo-Aryan Expansion South
The Andronovo (2000900 BC) were Indo-European speaking agro-pastoralists of the eastern steppes, who with the acquisition of the chariot expanded both east and south. In these wanderings, their language became sufficiently differentiated to form the Aryan branch of the Indo-European linguistic phylum. Their southern migrations toward India, following different routes, extended over a thousand years or more. Moving south from the Tobol-Ishim steppe, their first encounter with settled irrigation agriculturalists in Margiana was hostile. But subsequently across Margiana and Bactria there appears to have been social interaction between the two groups. At different oasis sites, evidence of hallucinogenic beverages, fire cults, and mortuary practices closely matched rituals known to characterize later Swat cultures of Pakistan and those of Vedic India. Over the centuries, repeated migrations of these Indo-Aryan speaking peoples traveling south toward India was evidenced in the archaeological record by chiefly tombs with models of battle chariots, flourishing metallurgy, and proliferation of weapons. At Pirak on the Kachi plain, terracotta figurines of mounted horsemen c. 1700 BC are indicative of regular travel on horseback. The Early Iron Age was signalled by the appearance of Yaz I culture (15001000 BC), as the smelting of iron daggers and arrowheads spread from the steppes across the Iranian plateau through Baluchistan to India. Along the Ganges, iron axes were used to clear vegetation and iron ploughs to till soil, earlier impervious to copper and bronze tools. And in the Deccan (800 BC), megalithic stone circles with burials have been found surrounding a central mound.
In these graves lay sacrificed horses elaborately fitted with iron bits, copper ornaments and trappings, closely paralleling ancient funerary practices of the faraway steppes. Thus in the course of a thousand years, southward migrations of Indo-Aryan charioteers significantly impacted southern Asia. While the horse and chariot wrought military and political upheaval, efficient stockbreeding and the introduction of iron strengthened the economies of these lands. But changes were not only political and economic in nature. The invaders also brought with them from the steppes their religion, in which the horse and war chariot featured dramatically in the cosmic symbolism of myth and ritual. From the Rgveda, the ten sacred books of Sanskrit hymns, we learn that the horse-chariot was believed to control the sun. Martial symbol of world rule, the horse was carrier of the gods, the white horse drawing the chariot as the primeval force that moves as fast as light. Because of its antiquity, the Rgveda allows us to trace correspondences with mythical traditions of other Indo-European cultures migrating out of the steppesinto Anatolia, as we have seen, and west into Europe. The oldest of gods, Sanskrit Dyaus-pitr (Sky Father), appears in the early verses and has cognates in Greek Zeus-pater, Latin Ju-piter, and Germanic Tyr. Similarly, the adventures of the Vedic Asvin twins have western parallels in Greek Castor and Polydeuces, Roman Castor and Pollux, and Saxon Hengist and Horsa.
Iranians, Cavalry, and Achaemenids
During the first millennium BC, other Aryan speakers of the Srubnaya culture, a western counterpart of Andronovo, migrated south from the steppes along the shores of the Caspian toward Iran. Later in the millennium, these Iranian speakers would invade the Middle East. In the seventh century BC, Cimmerian cavalry attacked Urartu in Anatolia, then Assyria and Phrygia, while Scythian horsemen undertook devastating raids into Mesopotamia and Syria. Other Iranians, the Medes, had bred the famous Nisaean cavalry mount, the finest horse of antiquity. In 612 BC Medean cavalries sacked Assur and Nineveh. The Achaemenid Cyrus II later would storm Sardis; his cavalry dominating the battlefield. As successful in the east as in the west, Cyrus also consolidated Medean territories as far away as remote Gandhara.
Migration, Trade and Peoples PART 3: ARYANS AND NOMADS
THE HOMELAND OF THE EARLY ARYAN SPEAKERS - IN THE LIGHT OF LOANWORDS IN PROTO-FINNO-UGRIAN - ARCHAEOLOGICAL COUNTERPARTS OF THE COMMUNITIES - SPEAKING PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN AND PROTO-ARYAN
The vocabulary associated with wheeled vehicles that can be reconstructed for the Indo-European protolanguage dates the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European c 3500 BC: before this there were no wheeled vehicles anywhere. (Anthony 1995) This date and distribution of the earliest vehicle finds in turn give a good starting point for locating the archaeological culture where Proto-Indo-European was spoken. It should be a culture connected through a chain of genealogically related cultures with the often widely dispersed areas where the various branches of Indo-European were first attested. This and various other criteria have suggested the Srednij Stog culture (c 4500-3350 BC) of Ukraine as the most likely candidate. (Mallory 1989)
Important indications for the location of Proto-Indo-European and of Proto-Aryan (and its successors) are the numerous loanwords borrowed from these languages into Proto-Uralic or Proto-Finno-Ugrian (here taken as synonyms). In all likelihood, Proto-Finno-Ugrian was spoken in the successive Lyalovo (c 5000-3650 BC) and Volosovo (c 3650-1900 BC) cultures, which had their centre on the upper Volga. The Lyalovo culture (characterized by Pitted Ware) expanded around 3900 BC to Karelia, Finland and the Baltic (the ceramic developed into Combed Ware in these regions); in the southwest, on the upper Don, the Lyalovo culture was in contact with the Srednij Stog culture. Around 2300 BC, the southern part of the Volosovo culture was intruded by the Abashevo culture (c 2800-1900 BC), which was descended from the Srednij Stog culture via the intervening Pit Grave culture (c 3500-2800 BC). As a result of this development, several Proto-Finno-Ugrian speaking communities seem to have had a ProtoAryan speaking elite minority, whose later absorption into the majority left Aryan loanwords in early Finno-Ugrian. (Carpelan and Parpola 2001)
In the southern Urals, the Abashevo culture gave rise to the Sintashta-Arkaim culture (c 2200-1800 BC), the graves of which contain the earliest known horse-drawn chariots (c 2000 BC) The Sintashta-Arkaim culture in turn is the source of the Andronovo cultural complex, which spread widely in southern Siberia and Central Asia between 1800 and 1300 BC. (Epimachov and Korjakova 2004)
THE SOUTHWARD MIGRATION OF ARYAN SPEAKERS
AND THE BACTRIA-MARGIANA ARCHAEOLOGICAL COMPLEX
The homeland of the Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages thus was in the steppes of South Russia and northern Central Asia. Yet, as their latter name indicates, they have long been spoken predominantly in India and in Iran (India and Iran denoting here South Asia and Greater Iran in the sense of the Achaemenid Empire). This implies a southward movement from northern Central Asia through southern Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan) approximately in the course of the second millennium BCE. During this time, southern Central Asia was in the control of the agriculturally based Bactria and Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) (c 2500-1300 BC). The archaeological record shows that between 1800 and 1300 BC, the Andronovo tribes have been coming to southern Central Asia in increasing numbers, until eventually almost every BMAC settlement was surrounded by their campsites (cf. Gubaev et al 1998; Cattani 2004 [2005]; Hiebert 2001; 2002; Hiebert & Moore 2004 [2005]; Francfort 2005: 295-304).
Undoubtedly the BMAC originally was non-Indo-European in its language, as it owed its birth to forces coming from earlier cultures of southern Turkmenistan, Elam, Iran and Baluchistan (Francfort 2005: 258-261). But it seems that during the second millennium BC, the BMAC was linguistically Aryanized, because the Andronovo culture did spread from the north to the region of the BMAC, but not further to India and Iran and thus did not transport the IndoIranian languages there, while on the other hand the BMAC did spread both to Iran and South Asia. Also, an aristocratic grave that recently came to light at Zardcha Khalifa in Tajikistan has shown that the elite of the BMAC had adopted the horse-drawn chariot from the Sintashta-Arkaim culture (Bobomulloev 1997). The Vikings sailing from Scandinavia to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea through the rivers of Ukraine and Russia took over the rule in the local communities speaking Old Russian. In the Hurrian-speaking kingdom of Mitanni, the Proto-Indo-Aryan speaking rulers adopted in its entirety the local culture where they had seized the power, including the religion, the Hurrian language and the use of the cuneiform script. In these two parallels, the incoming minority language was eventually absorbed, but in the case of the BMAC, the number of Aryan speakers was replenished by successive waves of immigrants from the north.
THE GANDHÂRA GRAVE CULTURE, ITS BMAC BACKGROUND, AND THE HORSE
Situated in and around the Swât Valley in northern Pakistan, on the route that leads from Afghanistan to South Asia, the Gandhâra Grave culture (c 1600-600 BC) occupies a strategic location at one of the principal entrances from Central Asia. This entrance was undoubtedly used by the Rigvedic Aryans, as the Kabul River, the Swât River and other waterways of this region are mentioned in the Rigveda. The horse and the horse-drawn chariot occupy a position of central importance in the culture of the Rigveda. It is therefore very significant that the Gandhâra Grave culture has produced the earliest known evidence of the domesticated horse from this part of South Asia. (Around the same time, the domesticated horse appears at Pirak near the Bolan Pass that connects the highlands of Baluchistan with the plains of the southern Indus Valley.)
The Gandhâra Grave culture first appears during the late part of the Ghâlegay IV Period, between c 1600 and 1400 BC. At this phase it is represented by the black-grey, burnished ware widespread hroughout all the occupation phases of all the valleys settlements excavated so far, which is comparable to the BMAC ceramics at Dashly, Shah Tepe, Tepe Hissar and Tureng Tepe (Stacul 1987: 121f.). The hypothesis that its presence in the Swât Valley results from immigrations from the west is supported by the evidence of the only known late Ghâlegay IV Period graveyard at Kherai in Indus Kohistan. Here the burial customs are very similar to those typical of the BMAC in southern Bactria, with inhumed bodies placed on their sides with the knees drawn up in a hocker position. (Stacul 1987: 64-65, 71-73, 122) Besides the greyburnished ware, the late Ghâlegay IV Period had black-on-red painted pottery related to the Cemetery H culture of the Punjab plains. The horse is depicted on several shards of this kind of ceramics at Bir-kot-ghwandai in Swât. (Stacul 1987: 123) Late Ghâlegay IV Period levels of this same settlement have produced bones of the domestic horse and donkey. (Stacul 1987: 123)
The BMAC parallels cited from northern Iran are dated to c 1800-1600 BC. This Gorgan Grey Ware is considered to be the source of the intrusive Early West Iranian Grey Ware that suddenly appears in great quantities all along the Elburz mountains, in Azerbaijan and around Lake Urmia c 1500 BC. The latter ceramic has plausibly been linked with the arrival of the Proto-Indo-Aryan speakers at the Mitanni kingdom in Syria (Young 1985; Parpola 2002a: 78). The presence of the post-Harappan Cemetery-H type ceramics in Swat on the other hand suggests that the carriers of the Gandhâra Grave culture at the Ghâlegay IV Period had close relationship with the Punjab plains and that part of them probably infiltrated to that region. The Cemetery H culture (c 1700-1300 BC) had introduced cremation as a new mode of disposal of the dead, contrasting with the Harappan practice of inhumation burial.
(Please read the link below from the source directly because some characters aren't appearing on the browser.)
The Indo-Iranian substratum
The Indo-Iranian substratum
4.2. The phonological and morphological similarity of loanwords in Proto-Indo-Iranian and in Sanskrit has important consequences. First of all, it indicates that, to put it carefully, a substratum of Indo-Iranian and a substratum of Indo-Aryan represent the same language, or, at any rate, two dialects of the same language. In order to account for this fact, we are bound to assume that the language of the original population of the towns of Central Asia, where Indo-Iranians must have arrived in the second millennium BCE, on the one hand, and the language spoken in Punjab, the homeland of the Indo-Aryans, on the other, were intimately related. At the present stage, it is useless to speculate about the possible identity of these languages, but this does not affect the argument.
Another consequence is that the Indo-Iranians must still have formed a kind of unity during their stay in Central Asia, albeit perhaps dialectally diversified. Judging by the later spread of the Indo-Aryans to the south-west in the case of the Mitanni kingdom and to the south-east during their move to Punjab , they were situated to the south of the Iranians, forming the vanguard, so to peak, of the Indo-Iranian movement. Accordingly, the Indo-Aryans were presumably the first who came in contact with foreign tribes and sometimes passed on loanwords to the Iranians. In this way, we may account for the difference between Skt. sikat- and Iranian *sikat- `sand, gravel' or Skt. sc- and Iranian *s- `needle', which cannot reflect a single proto-form. At the stage when words with Skt. s- arrived at the Iranian territory, PIIr. *s had already become Iranian *h, and PIIr. *c had turned into PIr. *s, so that these words entered Iranian with PIr. *s-. This direction of borrowing (rather than from Iranian to Sanskrit, as is usually assumed) also explains the irregular correspondences within Iranian. For instance, the word for `sand, gravel' has no less than four different formations in Iranian, viz. *sik- (OPik-, Bel. six, Pashto əga), *sikaia- (Median Sikayauvati- `made of gravel', the name of a fortress, Munji səgya, Ik. seɣio, sigioh), *sikat- (Pahlavi sygd = sikat, Sogd. ykth, Khot. siyat
, *sikit- (Kurdish sigit `earth', Oss. sygyt/sigit `id.', etc.; the word for needle has two forms, viz. *sk- (LAv. sk-) and *sauania- (MiP sozan, Khot. saujsan~a-, Oss. sʒn/soʒn, etc.) (Abaev 1958-95 III: 164-165, 187-188).*****
5.2. Starting with the assumption that loanwords reflect changes in environment and way of life, we get the following picture about the new country of the Indo-Iranians. The landscape must have been quite similar to that of their original homeland, as there are no new terms for plants or landscape. The new animals like camel, donkey, and tortoise show that the new land was situated more to the south. There was irrigation (canals and dug wells) and elaborate architecture (permanent houses with walls of brick and gravel). Agriculture still did not play an important role in the life of Indo-Iranians: presumably, they did not change their life-style and only used the products (`bread'!) of the farmers, hardly tilling the land themselves. The paucity of terms for military technology (only *gad- f. `club') can be seen as an indication of Aryan military supremacy.
It seems further obvious to me that the Soma cult was borrowed by the Indo-Iranians. This picture, which is drawn on exclusively linguistic arguments, is a strong confirmation of the traditional theory that the Indo-Iranians come from the north. Most probably, the Indo-Iranians moved from the Eurasian steppes in the third millennium BCE (Pit-Grave culture, 3500-2500 BCE) in eastern direction, first to the region of the lower Volga (Potapovo, etc., 2500-1900 BCE) and then to Central Asia (Andronovo culture, from 2200 BCE onwards).
As we have seen above, there are reasons to believe that the Indo-Aryans formed the vanguard of the Indo-Iranian movement and were the first to come into contact with the original inhabitants of the Central Asian towns. Then, presumably under pressure of the Iranians, who were pushing from behind, the Indo-Aryans moved further to the south-east and south-west, whereas the Iranians remained in Central Asia and later spread over the Iranian plateau. The urban civilization of Central Asia has enriched the Indo-Iranian lexicon with building and irrigation terminology, with terms for clothing and hair-do, and for some artifacts. It is tempting to suggest that the word *gad- `club, mace' refers to the characteristic mace-heads of stone and bronze abundantly found in the towns of the so-called Bactria-Margian Archaeological Complex. Also *uc- `axe, pointed knife' may be identified with shaft-hole axes and axe-adzes of this culture.
6. Finally, I would like to shortly discuss the implications for the contacts between Indo-Iranian and Uralian speakers, which is the actual theme of this conference. As is well known, Uralic has heavily borrowed from Indo-Iranian, but I agree with those scholars who believe that many of the apparent early borrowings rather reflect an etymological relationship between Uralic and Indo-European, and I doubt that there are Proto-Uralic borrowings from Indo-European. At any rate, borrowings from Indo-Iranian start with the Finno-Ugrian period. It is remarkable that the oldest layer of borrowings often concerns words which are only attested in Sanskrit and not in Iranian (e.g. FU *ora- `awl' : Skt. r- `awl'; FV *resm `rope' : Skt. rasmi- m. `rein', rasmanm. `id.'; FV *onke `hook' : Skt. anka- `hook'; FP *antз `young grass' : Skt. andhas- `grass', etc.). This fact can be explained by the vanguard position of the Indo-Aryans, who were the first to come into contact with the Uralic population on their move to the east. The Iranians, who came slightly later, lived in the neighboorhood of the Uralians for a very long time and continuously contributed to the enrichment of the Uralian vocabulary.
Another problem is how to account for Indo-Iranian isolates which have been borrowed into Uralic. It is hard to believe that the new vocabulary, which was acquired by the Indo-Iranians in Central Asia, could reach the Uralians in time, so that we only have two options: either the Indo-Iranian isolates are of Indo-European origin, or the Uralians borrowed these words from an Iranian source at a later stage. To the first group may belong PIIr. *racm- `rope, rein' : FV *resm `rope' (the -m- is only attested in Sanskrit); PIIr. *mak- `fly, bee' : FU *meke `bee' (the fact that the word can be reconstructed for FU precludes a late date for borrowing); PIIr. *sur- `alcohol' : PP *sur `beer' (the PP word cannot be a late borrowing from Iranian because of its *s-) and PIIr. *dasiu- `foreigner' : Vog. tas `stranger' (the Uralic word cannot be due to late borrowing from Iranian because of the preserved *s-). On the other hand, I assume that FV *orase `(castrated) boar' was borrowed from Iranian (PIIr. *uarjha- `wild boar' can hardly be an IE word). The same probably holds for FP *suka `chaff, awn' because this form is only found in Iranian (LAv. sk- `needle') and further for PP vork `kidney' (PIIr. *urtka-), FP/FV *saka `goat' (PIIr. *scga-/scaga-), PP *nan `bread' (PIIr. *nagna-), PP *majk / majg `stake' (PIIr. *maikha-).
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I also suggest referring to the 3 sources below. I did not have time to go through all of them, & some of the earlier sources I have mentioned on this post were read by me some time back.
The point is that I may have forgotten to include some necessary details because I do not remember all of the information contained in these documents.
Most of these sources aren't that old & are in fact fairly recent. That is important due to the constantly evolving & rapid flow of knowledge when it comes to research.
Ancient Indo-Europeans (Part 1)
Ancient Indo-Europeans (Part 2)
The Nasatyas, the Chariot and ProtoAryan Religion
Unfortunately, the first 2 sources (Ancient Indo-Europeans Part 1 & 2) might not be a 100% complete. Those are the only copies that I found.
I advise people to read about the Kurgan hypothesis & the Paelolithic Continuity theory. I have explained them earlier in previous posts. The point that needs to be repeated is that all members of the Indo-European family were not present in the Proto-Indo-European homeland because many of those groups had settled & resided in Europe since Paleolithic times. There were some migrations from Europe towards the Proto-Indo-European homeland that had branched out & vice versa. What that means is that Proto-Indo-European speakers migrated from Europe towards the East, & some members of that group as in the case of Croations migrated back. The others such as the Indo-Iranians & Scythians continued migrating towards the East. All Indo-European people are essentially related, the difference is the period of settlement & migration.
As far as languages are concerned, Uralic speakers & Indo-Iranian speakers were in constant contact with each other. As they migrated, the Indo-Aryans were the first to come across new regions, thus they transferred the words towards Indo-Iranians due to their ethnic ties with them. The Indo-Iranians who were still following the Indo-Aryans passed on those words to Uralic speakers. The point to note is that the migrations didn't occur in a day, but instead took a considerable amount of time. Some words of Indo-European origins in Uralic languages may also have been provided by the Scythians. That is the explanation provided by some of the sources above.
This along with the countless authentic researches that I have mentioned previously point towards one conclusion & that is the migration of Indo-Iranians of course. Recent archaeological, linguistic, genetic, & historical sources confirm this. It has already been mentioned previously in my previous post that languages & cultures did not travel in ancient times without the flow of people. After establishing themselves on the north western regions of the Sub-Continent, the cultural dominance of the Indo-Aryans further expanded their languages & there were obviously some albeit fewer migrations towards the east of the Sub-Continent as well.
I shall respond to some other posts where I was mentioned or quoted later when I get the time.
Shinigami
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its amazing how the term "indo european" stuck. when its obviously bulls*it. no major population migration took place from europe to india, although they might have branched from the same tree. one went east, the other went west
p(-)0ENiX
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Your last post was obviously addressed to me because it refers to Pakistanis & Muslims that have accused you of being biased & questioned your neutrality over the subject of the Indo-Iranian migration. Go and read your previous post that I replied to again, it does not mention me or even quote me, but you are essentially referring to other members on this thread & I am among the few that you had a discussion with. I do not believe or imagine that all of your posts are addressed to me so stop coming up with ridiculous ideas.
Before complaining about other people's attitudes or rudeness, note that it's in fact you that started with the insults as such you better hold your own behavior in contempt.
Who is "some here" referring to if not those that you had a discussion with? That is the point that I was trying to make about you addressing people without mentioning them. Modern day research points to a migration, you may continue to believe whatever you want though. In any case, that is the end of our discussion.
Wholegrain
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Lalashersingh
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I didn't read the thread, but indians are not aryans, they are 90% dravidians, you just have to look at them to tell that, at least places likes northern pakistan, afghanistan, Iran etc... have some connection to aryans
Indianpatriot1
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Usual bulls@it repackaged.
p(-)0ENiX
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At this point, I doubt anyone knows about Burushaski's origins. What we know for a fact is that Indo-Iranian languages have influenced Burushaski, but due to the isolation of the region it's spoken in, the language retains its grammatical structure. Some have postulated that the language has roots in the Phrygian tongue that could have arrived through Anatolia along with Alexander's army. The Burusho people do have some stories regarding origins from a village founded by remnants of Alexander's army. However, as per genetic studies, they do not descend from Macedonians or any other Hellenic group. That means that even if the hypothesis for Burushaski's origin from Phrygian, & the Burusho people's story of origin from a specific village was true, all it would indicate is that a bunch of Indo-Iranian locals in ancient times adopted that language as their own.
The link below discusses the possibility of Burushaski having Indo-European origins, but it also contains a link to an article critical of the supposed Indo-European link.
Is Burushaski Indo-European?
People speaking language isolates isn't really unheard of, the Elamite language for instance is also considered an isolate, but Israelite traditions maintain that Elamites are Semitic people.
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Shabaz Sharif
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98% dravidians, only kashmiris & punjabis are non dravidian there.
Wholegrain
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Ice age civilization? What history book are you reading?
Shabaz Sharif
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RSS (extremist hindu organization) mandir issue books and they have changed history books of schools all over India. Ice age is very recent, Indian civilization is million of years old.
NASA Images Find 1,750,000 Year Old Man-Made Bridge
Lalashersingh
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even among punjabis, I find many people who look tamil. The truth is there is no such thing as aryan, most south asians are dravdian mostly, yes only some kashmiries, northern pakistani groups, some afghan and central asian groups are probably somewhat aryan
Ayush
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