(India Facts,
31 May 2016)
In 2006, the late Russian archaeologist Elena Kuzmina
wrote a hefty book on the Origin of the
Indo-Iranians (Brill, Leiden). It gives a very detailed history of the
Andronovo culture and its surroundings in time and space. The Andronovo culture
spanned most of Central Asia in the 2nd millennium BCE, from the Urals to
Bactria. At the same time, the book
contains a lot of speculation about links with the information given in the
Veda and the Avesta, generally convincing. While it has become a very
authoritative work on Andronovo, there remains a big question-mark over its
presumptuous title: was this culture indeed the cradle of the Indo-Iranians?
No one who is serious about deciding the Indo-European
Homeland question can afford to leave this book unread. It promises to give the
prehistory of the Aryan invasion, the preceding movements of the tribes
concerned, perhaps even the events that triggered their migration into India. No
one serious about arguing the case for an Indian Homeland can afford to leave
it unanswered. I have had it on my shelves for a few years, hoping to find time
to thoroughly review it. Realistically I still haven’t found that time, and I
have not yet co-operated with an archaeologist on this. But a review simply
cannot wait anymore.
The book ends with a discussion of the procedure for
establishing the chronology of Andronovo, and starts with a detailed
explanation about the archaeological method and the rules for ethnographic
reconstruction. Then follows an analysis of the typical Andronovo features that
allow her to define the spatial and temporal boundaries of the culture she
studies. Culturally important and archaeologically easily accessible are funeral
practices: “Cremation dominates in the Urals; in central and northern
Kazakhstan the cemeteries are bi-ritual; in eastern Kazakhstan and south
Siberia, inhumation prevails.”
And at once we notice something that will characterize
many passages: though convinced of the Aryan invasion, she furnishes data that
are compatible with, or even point to, an opposite Bactria-to-Urals migration.
In this case, the Indo-Europeans, historically known to practise both types of
disposal of the dead, but mainly cremation (though inhumation will be magnified
in the eyes of the archaeologists as it leaves so many more traces), brought
cremation with them along the Amu Darya to the Aral Lake area and on to the
Urals. The native practice was predominantly inhumation, and it was preserved
far from this trajectory, in areas where the Indo-Europeans didn’t come.
An
Indo-Iranian culture
While the observation has no evidential value in
itself, it deserves noting that the cultural identity of the Andronovo culture
has now virtually become a matter of consensus: the Andronovo culture was
Indo-Iranian. This book itself has greatly contributed to that consensus, for
before its publication, there was still some hesitation.
Thus, many sacrificial and burial
practices (and sati, the self-immolation
of widows) “characterize the burial practice of the majority of Indo-European
peoples: Hittites, Greeks, Germans, Balts, Slavs etc. It leads to the
undisputable statement that the Andronovans were Indo-Europeans. However, the
common Indo-European character of the whole burial complex does not, strictly
speaking, permit one to declare the Andronovans as Indo-Aryans.” (p.195) However, she finds that
«the variety of Andronovo funeral rites finds a complete and thorough
correlation in early indic texts ». (p.195)
What decides the question for her, is the wealth of
correspondences beween her material findings and references in Indian or
Iranian texts. Thus, she describes the typical fireplace and then the
corresponding reference in Vedic literature. These “hearths comprise a shallow
round or oval pit… often covered with flat stone slabs on the bottom…. This
hearth is described in ancient Indian texts as the domestic fire gārhapatya-, ‘fire of the master of the
house’… Such hearths were used for ritual purposes: a bride would go around it,
a widow would perform a ritual dance, people jumped over it during a feast.”
(p.45)
Another type of hearth “has a rectangular form… and
was made of closely adjusted rectangular stone slabs inserted into the ground
on their narrow ends. Such hearths were found in the centre of a house, kept
clean, and it is likely that they had a ritual function… This type of hearth
corresponded to the early Indian special cult hearth āhavanīya…” (p.45) As she notes, round and rectangular hearths had
different functions among the Indo-Europeans. Thus, in Rome, round hearths were
sacred to the goddess Vesta, rectangular (including square) ones to male
deities.
This could be coincidence, for there are only that
many ways of making a fireplace, and it may have been by coincidence that
Indo-Iranians and Andronovans hit upon the same design. But let us assume a genealogical
relationship: either the Andronovan hearth became the Vedic one, as Kuzmina
assumes, or vice-versa. Then everything depends on the chronology. South-Asians
may have left their homes and taken the fireplace design with them to Central
Asia, where from 2000 BCE they participated in the Andronovo culture. This, of
course, presupposes that an “Aryan emigration from India” took place at the
very least 500 years before the AIT posits its own Aryan invasion of India. Indeed, this would fit what Shrikant Talageri
says in his The Rigveda and the Avesta, a
Final Analysis: the proto-Mitanni/Kassite Indo-Aryans left India ca. 2000
BCE (for West Asia, but some of them may have branched off to Central Asia),
the Iranians even earlier.
Indians
and Iranians
Though Indo-Aryan and Iranian, together with Dardic,
are usually reckoned as branches of a single linguistic group, there is evidence
for a conflicht between an Indo-Aryan and an Iranian population connected with
the Vedic c.q. Avestan tradition: “H. Oldenberg showed that in spite of the
genetic closeness of religious beliefs, the Vedas and Avesta differ
considerably, and that in the Avesta many of the heroes play opposite roles to
their counterparts in the Veda.” (p.183)
This starts at the level of the gods, where Indra is
glorified in the Vedas and demonized in the Avesta. Rjashva, the Vedic king in
the Varshagira battle, is glorified in the Rg-Veda but demonized in the Avesta.
And yet, except for Shrikant Talageri, no one has drawn the logical conclusion:
that Indians and Iranians waged a war against one another, in which one side’s
heroes were the other side’s villains.
They fought eventhough they were linguistically and
religiously very close. That is one thing most Western or Western-trained
scholars miss out on in their study of Vedic conflicts: the battles are not
between the very different cultures of an invader group and the natives, they
are between different groups of “Aryans”. Even in the Aryan Invasion paradigm,
where Indo-Aryans and Iranians are like colonizers of adjoining territories
after penetrating south of Bactria, this should have been thought of. Just
compare with the colonial wars: the English against the Spanish on the high
seas (pirates), the French against the English in Canada, the Dutch against the
Portuguese in Sri Lanka, the English against the Dutch Boers in South Africa:
after the initial conquest, subsequent conflicts were between different groups
of conquerors. So it didn’t even take the Out-of-India Theory to see that the
Vedic Aryans were not fighting the “black aboriginals” in the Battle of the Ten
Kings, but their own proto-Avestan cousins.
In mapping the connections between Indo-Aryans and
Iranians, her grasp of social and family relations and how these are different
between the two groups, is a bit hazy and ultimately incorrect: “Kinsmen marry
each other among modern Iranian peoples (…) This could be attributed to the
caste system in India when marriage was within a caste without taking into
account kinship affiliation.” (p.195) Good try, but this analysis from a
distance obscures the thorough difference between the Iranian and Indian family
structures.
She is definitely mistaken in linking cousin marriage
with the caste system. Iranian cousin marriage probably predated the caste
system. Even in the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), the invasion predated and
occasioned the genesis of the caste system, which took place in India, where
the Iranians never set foot. Indian sources too indicate that caste endogamy
(not even cousin marriage) was only gradually formed, and that initially caste
was passed on only in the paternal line, regardless of the mother’s provenance.
The Brahmin law books prohibited cousin marriage and enacted what the Catholic
Church was to call “forbidden degrees of consanguinity”. This prohibition
happens to make biological sense too, for a population with frequent cousin
marriages produces more handicapped or malformed children (as can be seen by a
comparison between native Britons and the worse-afflicted British-Pakistani
community, where cousin marriages often form the majority). So, Iranian cousin-marriage
can safely be disconnected from Indian caste engogamy.
That was just to illustrate how her knowledge of the
Indo-Iranian cultures she is dealing with, is not as good as her undoubtedly
first-class knowledge of Andronovo archaeology. That is not an argument in
itself, but it is good to keep in mind before accepting her correlation between
scripturally attested cultures and archaeology.
One difference is the Iranian predilection for sheep,
partly replacing the central place of cattle among the Vedic people: “An
ancient term for ‘cattle’ was recorded in the Avesta and was later attributed to ‘sheep’ in the Iranian
languages; Yima’s sacrifice of cattle (Yasna 32:8) was replaced by a sheep
sacrifice. These facts indicate that the rise of sheep-raising in Iranian
society occurred after the collapse of Indo-Iranian unity.” (p.158)
These facts, including their chronological order, are
not explained by any Central-Asian development, but fit Shrikant Talageri’s Out-of-India
scenario precisely. First Indo-Aryans and Iranians were neighbours in Northwest
India; they developed a conflict in which the Vedic people were victorious
while the Iranian regrouped in a territory where some of them had already
migrated: Afghanistan. In this mountainous territory, sheep flourished much
better than cattle, and therefore became the centre of the Iranian economy.
Indo-Aryan
Fedorovo culture
Within the Andronovo horizon, one culture stands out
as especially related to the Vedic culture of the Indo-Aryans: the Fedorovo
culture. While she finds plenty of Iranian toponyms, many probably stemming
from the later Scythian period (1st mill. BCE, as far west as Ukraine), yet
“part of the Andronovo toponyms can only be interpreted as Indo-Aryan”.
Moreover, ”the Indo-Iranian toponyms of the pre-Scythian period have been found
on the territory populated by the Fedorovo tribes”.
Let us assume, with the author, that the Fedorovo
culture is Indo-Aryan; though mixed in its classical habitat on the eastern
slopes of the Urals with Ugrian, the Uralic branch that was to spawn Hungarian.
It flourished around 1700 BC, just in time to reach India for an invasion ca.
1500. That looks neat and surely AIT believers will seize upon it as supporting
their invasion scenario.
But then, Kuzmina herself provides material reasons
for inverting this northwest-to-southeast scenario: “The hypothesis of an
origin of the Fedorovo type in the Urals has been disputed. The sources for Fedorovo
ceramic technology and triangular ornametation are found in the Eneolithic of
central and eastern Kazakhstan.” (p.201) Worse, even eastern Kazakhstand and
beyond: “Federovo monuments are
discovered not only in the Urals but also in the south of Central Asia and
Afghanistan, where Ugrians have never lived.” (p.201) Moreover, elsewhere she
designates central Kazakhstan as the Fedorovo heartland: “The further one moves
from central Kazakhstan, the frequency of the complex diminishes and substratum
elements increase”. (p.24)
It won’t take any special pleading to have the
Fedorovans migrate from Bactria to the Urals instead. At best we could agree
that at present, the distribution of Fedorovo findings across Central Asia can
be interpreted in more ways than just the Urals-to-Bactria scenario. Moreover,
any movement understood as going to Bactria, is never traced as going beyond
it, entering India. Here too, we notice a disappointment for those who expected
an underpinning for AIT-compliant migrations from the Andronovo data.
Aryan
invasion
When it comes to the AIT, we note that Elena Kuzmina
totally relies on an outdated and certainly wrong racial account: “In the
Rigveda light skin alongside language is the main feature of the Aryans,
differentiating them from the aboriginal Dāsa-Dasyu
population who were a dark-skinned, small people speaking another language and
who did not believe in the Vedic gods.” (p.172) This is strictly separate from
her archaeological findings, but it strongly colours her interpretation of
those findings in favour of a northwest-to-southeast migration. It is mostly
based on the usual reading of the Vedic references to the Battle of the Ten
Kings, which is in fact not against any dark aboriginals but against the
Iranians.
In her view, three stages are discernible in the
movement from Andronovo into India.
Stage 1 takes place in the 20th-17th century BCE.
Material culture including “a cult of the horse” moves from the eastern slopes
of the Urals to Central Asia, but: “There is no evidence that they reached
India.” (p.452) She naturally rejects whatever might still remain of a belief
in the invaders’ violent destruction of the Harappan cities.
More to the northwest, on the Amu Darya near the Aral
Lake, “the newcomers were not numerous but they employed horses and chariots
and established elite dominance and adopted the culture of the BMAC.” (p.452,
Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex) So what she has actually found, is
BMAC cultural elements near the Aral Lake. This means the BMAC was expanding
northward, precisely what you would expect if you assume the Iranians first settled
in Bactria and then expanded into Kazakhstan and onwards to the Urals. We will
meet a later movement from Bactria to the west, but this movement took place
several times, including in ca. 2000 BCE.
Then she jumps to India without positing any causal
link with any Andronovo development, and quotes G. Possehl to the effect that
“the way of life essentially changed in India in this period” (453): urban
culture became village culture, luxuries and international trade disappeared,
but means of transport, types of pottery and procedures of house-building
continued. “So the opinion of the Indian scholars who emphasize the conservation
of the Harappan traditions in the culture of the subsequent periods is quite
correct.” (p.453)
Stage 2 is situated in the 16th-14th century BCE. All
kinds of movements take place north of (or at most, in the north of)
present-day Afghanistan, such as the Timber Grave culture mixing with the
Andronovo culture around Samarkand, far way from India. No sign, apparently, of
an invasion of Andronovans into India, confirming the non-discovery of
Andronovan elements by Indian archaeologists. Yet this is precisely the age of
the supposed Aryan invasion, that AIT believers go around declaring to have
been confirmed by Kuzmina’s research.
This is when the “Fedorovan tribes reached the Amu
Darya… And actively interacted with the bearers of the farming Bactria-Margiana
culture.” (453) We note “the penetration of the Andronovo population in the
BMAC and the probable subjugation of the indigenous population” (454), the
“synthesis of the Andronovo Fedorovo culture and BMAC” (454). Fine, but none of
that amounts to an invasion of India.
Stage 3 really comes too late for the Aryan invasion
of India: 13th-9th century BC. It was “caused by the cultural transformation of
the Eurasian steppes as a result of internal development and ecological
crises”. (p.454) That is richly vague, but it has no effect anymore on a
putative invasion of India around 1500 BCE.
A migration that is identified, however, is
east-to-west: “a part of of the Timber-grave tribes moved [from Uzbekistan or even the Amu Darya basin] to the North Caucasus
because of the crisis; they had already begun appearing and settling in the
Caucasus at an earlier time”. (p.454) This must be the Scythian migration,
which only added to the already existing Iranian presence near and beyond the Urals.
Intermittently, groups of Iranians must have moved from Bactria to the Urals
and even to Ukraine for more than a thousand years. (One of the later migrating
tribes were apparently the Hrvat, now known as the Croats. Before migrating
west and adopting the Slavic language of the Serbs, they belonged to the
Harahvaita tribe in Afghanistan mentioned as tribute-payers to the Persian
empire in an Achaemenid document.)
It is important that here we can recognize a
historically known migration, viz. from Bactria westwards. This means that
archaeology, though uncertain and vague, is nonetheless relevant for history.
That makes the archaeological silence on another supposed historical
development, viz. the Aryan invasion of India, all the more significant.
Conclusion
We have nothing to add to the wealth of archaeological
data on the Andronovo culture that Elena Kuzmina provides. Her interpretative
framework, however, is flawed and limited by the rather dated presuppositions
about the Homeland and the invasion of India. Moreover, a culture beginning in
2000 BCE comes a bit late to stage an Aryan invasion, especially given the many
indications that the concomitant chronology of ancient Indian literature is
late.
Things would be more challenging if we had been shown a
rootedness of the Andronovo culture in preceding cultures, thousands of years
older. In that case, it would be difficult to deduce those earlier cultures
from an emigration from India, and the case for an intrusion from a non-Indian
Homeland would be that much stronger. Perhaps this was not the object of her book,
and another archaeologist might be able to trace Andronovo to earlier cultures,
to the exclusion of Indian influences. There are many might-have-beens in the
Homeland debate, but this deeper non-Indian genealogy of cultures has at any
rate not been offered in this book. Nor, to our knowledge, anywhere else. If it
had been, it would be mustered by interested parties all the time.
While this is undoubtedly an important book, and as
far as I can judge a classic of Andronovo archaeology, it fails in its primary
mission: to show that this culture was the staging-ground for an Aryan invasion
of Iran and India. It only assumes that much but doesn’t demonstrate it.
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