I stared at posts No.90 & 91 from Joe Shearer in absolute amazement for the longest time.A little stunned & bewildered actually. I raise my difference with JS's earlier post & get a reply bordering on the rude & vituperative while attempting to mock me personally. Maybe JS is only considerate of civility when it pertains to Chinese members. Be that is it may, I will still endeavor to address only the points raised.
One basic issue which of course isn't big enough to raise Bang Galore's eyebrows is the existence of two hugely different language groups, with wholly dissimilar grammar, next to each other, each in its own continguous bloc, distributed among genetically identical people. But to Bang Galore, the existence of problems like this is not important. Rather like Sonia Gandhi; never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. With an issue like this in front of him, he would rather concentrate on the political character of the analysts dealing with the question, or the probable political character, or the possible political character. Whatever. An opportunity to miss out on the main issue, analysis of the facts available, not to be missed.
Quite typical of my dear friend. Although I haven't ever met him, and don't have much in common with him, he spends so much time in close proximity that he must either be a friend or otherwise attracted to me. As I am sixty and well past the age when my pheromones mattered, it must be friendship.
Ok, I did promise to address the point but I must confess I can't find any in the above except that according to JS, I am somewhat like Sonia Gandhi. (Considering that she is, in some opinions a de facto PM, I guess I can't complain). Yeah & something about languages was mentioned. Never disputed that. We are writing in English, no one is calling themselves as English or calling where we live England which is what the supposedly Dravidian population did according to JS when they called themselves Aryans & called their land Aryavarta.
There was never a school of leftists or those partial to the left, whatever that curiousity of a phrase might mean, proposing that the Dravidians had been driven to the South by the Aryans. I can only surmise that in Bang Galore's clouded mind, his various enemies and imagined enemies have got inextricably intermingled, and given rise to this nonsense. This was, if anything, a Brahminical myth in north and south, glanced at in passing by historians of all shades of political persuasion.
Apart from my supposedly clouded mind imagining leftist historians & some enemies, no point here either.
The big problem that completely upsets Bang Galore's Dungeons and Dragons view of history is that the Aryan race theory was overthrown some seventy-five years or so before the pioneering work of Cavalli-Sforza on race and genetics. To history analysts - for want of a better term: they will surely not want to be part of the impure left and be described even with a qualifying adjective as amateur historians - like Bang, if one may be informal with him, is that these minor gaps of nearly a century are easily bridged. Anne McCaffrey showed the way. Just close your eyes, enter the world of the past, and SUMMON the dragons. They will appear with a puff of smoke and a ravening appetite at your doorstep. I am ashamed to admit that I have not felt the need to replace historican analysis with this whizz-Bang school of getting results from contradictory facts, but there are those....many of those, one is tempted to say there are those Galore.
More of the same. I was also not aware the the JS theory is widely accepted & taught as fact. My mistake, I guess!
Various bands of tribes of mixed blood, speaking an Indo-Aryan language and separated from their kinsmen speaking Avestan Iranian, an eastern Indo-Iranian language, descended from the steppes around the Oxus and the Jaxartes down through the mountain slopes bordering Afghanistan and south Asia. They found opposition and dealt with it, according to their own self-serving accounts, militarily, apparently with great success, and in spite of internecine battles among themselves. While they were not so large in numbers as to affect the genetic structure of the population that they encountered, their use of iron, and the relative settled and peaceful nature of the settlements that they encountered enabled them to impose themselves and their language on the region in the Gangetic, the Indus and the Narmada Plains. The original inhabitants of the rest of south Asia, the Brahmaputra Plain, the Godavari Plain and the Kaveri Plain, remained more or less undisturbed, and continued to speak their original Dravidian languages.
So far this is the coventional Aryan invasion theory with the caveat that the numbers were so small as to leave no trace genetically.
For the exact same reason as the Aryan languages spreading over what became known as Aryavarta; a small number of steppe-dwelling tribals speaking these languages using iron and the horse conquered a much larger, peaceful settled population with a much lower level of military technology. The conquered or compromising original populations, thought to have spoken Dravidian-Kol languages, accepted the conquerors' languages, and abandoned their own, except in the forests and village fastnesses; even today, these languages are alive and well in the forests and villages in Aryavarta.
The original inhabitants who were numerically so large as to completely subsume the invaders genetically accepted their language without protest as also their culture & more importantly even decided that they were all Aryans since they seem to hold no record of believing otherwise. Surely this must rank as one of the most successful brainwashing experiments ever!
Secondly, it was never an extinct people; it was a people that merged with the local population but never lost their memory of having been a different people. Similar things have happened before, and after. If evidence is required, it can be supplied - in great profusion.
Genetically extinct. The theory is that they merged with the local population & forced them to remember themselves as Aryans? The genetic evidence would suggest that. The very mild people who were the original inhabitants of the land must have possessed along with their mildness, an absolutely blank brain since they only remember the history of their numerically inferior conquerors and not any of their own(and I must point out, numerically so inferior that they have left behind no genetic traces).
This is what happens when confused minds try to deal with evidence, with an at best imperfect grasp of the evidence. The Rg Veda was one of four Vedas, and these were clearly, from internal evidence as well as from linguistic developments very clearly visible to trained linguists, composed at different times and reduced to writing in the same order that they were composed.
Other than the usual(and by now tiresome) dig, no point here too. I referred specifically only to the Rg veda which was not composed on the gangetic plains & therefore that the movement of the "Aryan" population into the gangetic plains cannot be connected to the stories of the Rg veda since it happened at a much later date. (btw, I am not sure whether they had already merged into the local population by this time in the JS theory which would then bring into question of who they were in the first place because any merging happening after this stage would have had to run into the caste barriers which had become entrenched after the Rg veda was composed & certainly before the Mahabharata & the the other vedas.)
First, we need to correct your dates.
The Rg Veda covered events more or less within the period 1700 BC to 1100 BC, the others correspondingly later, down to 900 or 800 BC. 800 BC is the earliest ascribed date of the Mahabharata, and its final recensions may have been written as late as 600 or 800 AD.
If we are to watch for information regarding the spread of the tribals and their languages through Aryavarta, we are looking for information relating to the period 1700 BC to 600 BC, not later than that, so certainly the 1st millennium BC is a little later than we should be looking, although its beginning, 1000 BC to 600 BC, is fine. This is covered, if we observe, by the later Vedas, and the Puranas, and by the Mahabharata. This is what we should be looking at.
I have raised the point before that the Mahabharata which according to you was composed about 1000 years after the Rg veda relied on ethnic connections with the Iranian tribes, something that should have been a problem if they were being absorbed into a unrelated(for the Iranian tribes) indigenous culture. If the ethnic absorption had not yet occurred by this period when caste had truly struck strong roots, I find it a bit of a stretch to imagine they were ethnically absorbed later. In any case, as late as in the 6th century BCE, tribes were still referring to the purity of their aryan lineage(which was my point about the Buddha's clan). So when exactly did they get absorbed into the indigenous population because by this time the concept of Aryavarta had been around for centuries.
Ah, the man has a delicate imagination, and it should not have been rudely boggled. Fair enough. Let us look through our tomes and present him with some evidence.
Boring by now.
Sounds familiar, eh? Now, for the Dungeons and Dragons lot, the total number of Normans involved, then and subsequently, was 8,000. Digest that number, and then think of this:
Large numbers of English people, especially from the dispossessed former landowning class, ultimately found Norman domination unbearable and emigrated.
And yet we have no historical record of a members of a supposedly large indigenous population in N.India deciding that they would not accept the imposition of an alien culture on them & fleeing accordingly. In the points raised above, atleast some people bothered to note down the historical happenings as opposed to a non existent noting of such amazing changes happening in N.India.
This is getting boring. Last example:
3. A small number of Spaniards conquered the whole continent of South America. The number is estimated to be less than 2%.
Throughout the conquest, the numbers of people within the indigenous nations greatly exceeded the Spanish conquistadors; on average the Spanish population never exceeded 2% of the native population.
The imagination of the Incas must have boggled. However, South America became Spanish speaking for the most part (yes, Victoria, i can spell Brazil).
I agree with the boring bit because though conquered, the indigenous population retains some remnants of knowledge of their past & certainly haven't thought of themselves as Spanish or Portuguese. These are in any cases poor examples because while the indigenous population was larger than the number of invaders present at any given time, the invaders had continuous access to a larger mother country both for sustaining them in their fight & to draw resources from initially. The more important point is that the memory of the conquest & atrocities committed remain. Why would not at least some of the indigenous people who supposedly existed in N.India not move to the South where their kinsmen supposedly lived carrying with them tales of the invaders brutality or some other such stories. Why did the non invaded S.Indian "Dravidians" end up with the same social system as those in N.India?
As mentioned before, this is what happens when rank amateurs pursue an academic discipline in which they have no grounding, just because of an impression that they can analyse everything from first principles. So this egregious mistake.
The term Dravida is not Sanskrit, alas. It is Dravidian, that is to say, Tamilian. Since we are dealing with a fallow mind, it is worth pointing out that etymologically Dravid = Dramil = Tamil. So much for this piece of non-evidence.
Never said anything about being anything other than a "rank amateur". Anyway a different view is presented below.
The English word Dravidian was first employed by Robert Caldwell in his book of comparative Dravidian grammar based on the usage of the Sanskrit word drāvida in the work Tantravārttika by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa (Zvelebil 1990:xx). Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" from the Sanskrit drāvida, which was used in an 8th-century text to refer to South India by Adi Shankara. The publication of the Dravidian etymological dictionary by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau was a landmark event in Dravidian linguistics.
As for the origin of the Sanskrit word drāviḍa, there have been various theories proposed. Basically the theories are about the direction of derivation between tamiẓ and drāviḍa. That is to say, while linguists such as Zvelebil assert that the direction is tamiẓ >drāviḍa (ibid. page xxi), others state that the name Dravida also forms the root of the word Tamil (Dravida -> Dramila -> Tamizha or Tamil).[who?]
The word Dravida may also have its origin from Sanskrit 'drava' - meaning "flowing" or "watery", which also appears as a Slavic, Celtic-derived, river name in Europe. The word Dravidian may have been used to identify people living in India close to the sea. Since southern India is surrounded by sea on three sides, the word may been used predominantly to identify the inhabitants of these areas.[1]
There is no definite philological and linguistic basis for asserting unilaterally that the name Dravida also forms the origin of the word Tamil (Dravida -> Dramila -> Tamizha or Tamil). Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila (in Daṇḍin's Sanskrit work Avanisundarīkathā
damiḷa (found in Ceylonese chronicle Mahavamsa) and then goes on to say (ibid. page xxi): "The forms damiḷa/damila almost certainly provide a connection of dr(a/āviḍa " and "... tamiḷ < tamiẓ ...whereby the further development might have been *tamiẓ > *damiḷ > damiḷa- / damila- and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) -r-, into dr(a/āviḍa. The -m-/-v- alternation is a common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology" (Zvelebil 1990:xxi) Zvelebil in his earlier treatise (Zvelebil 1975: p53) states: "It is obvious that the Sanskrit dr(a/āviḍa, Pali damila, damiḷo and Prakrit d(a/āviḍa are all etymologically connected with tamiẓ" and further remarks "The r in tamiẓ > dr(a/āviḍa is a hypercorrect insertion, cf. an analogical case of DED 1033 Ta. kamuku, Tu.kangu "areca nut": Skt. kramu(ka).". Further, another eminent Dravidian linguist Bhadriraju Krishnamurti in his book Dravidian Languages (Krishnamurti 2003:p2, footnote 2) states: "Joseph (1989: IJDL 18.2:134-42) gives extensive references for the use of the term draviḍa, dramila first as the name of a people, then of a country. Sinhala inscriptions BCE [Before Christian Era] cite dameḍa-, damela- denoting Tamil merchants. Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used damiḷa- to refer to a people of in south India (presumably Tamil); damilaraṭṭha- was a southern non-Aryan country; dramiḷa-, dramiḍa, and draviḍa- were used as variants to designate a country in the south (Bṛhatsamhita-, Kādambarī, Daśakumāracarita-, 4th to 7th centuries CE) (1989: 134-8). It appears that damiḷa- was older than draviḍa- which could be its Sanskritization."
My point stands. Wherever the word originally originated from,
Dravida is Sanskrit. As a rank amateur, I cannot be taking sides with which theory to prefer, something best left to experts like you.
Are we permitted to ask, or is it a cognisable offence? What other populations? There are so many ghosts and spirits wandering through the mind of dear ole Bang that one hesitates to assume anything. For all I know, he is referring to the ancient Assyrians, whom the leftist historians - for some reason, he seems to think that it is smart to refer to this category and it will get him an instant laugh - have not categorically excluded from living in south Asia.
Sigh! Was referring to the non Tamil people of S.India. For all I know, the Assyrians could have been present since they meet your most important criteria of being genetically absent. Maybe the S.Indian tribes refused to accept foreign culture which is why no traces of them remain.
and perhaps worthy visiting at your leisure time.
